The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (62 page)

If I am right, then the future of art is as mind-boggling as the future of every other kind of knowledge: art of the future can create unlimited increases in beauty. I can only speculate, but we can presumably expect new kinds of unification too. When we understand better what elegance really is, perhaps we shall find new and better ways to seek truth using elegance or beauty. I guess that we shall also be able to design new senses, and design new qualia, that can encompass beauty of new kinds literally inconceivable to us now. ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ is a famous question asked by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. (More precisely, what would it be like for a person to have the echo-location senses of a bat?) Perhaps the full answer is that in future it will be not so much be the task of philosophy to discover what that is like, but the task of technological art to give us the experience itself.

Aesthetics
   The philosophy of beauty.

Elegance
   The beauty in explanations, mathematical formulae and so on.

Explicit
   Expressed in words or symbols.

Inexplicit
   Not explicit.

Implicit
   Implied or otherwise contained in other information.

– The fact that elegance is a heuristic guide to truth.

– The need to create objective knowledge in order to allow different people to communicate.

There are objective truths in aesthetics. The standard argument that there cannot be is a relic of empiricism. Aesthetic truths are linked to factual ones by explanations, and also because artistic problems can emerge from physical facts and situations. The fact that flowers reliably seem beautiful to humans when their designs evolved for an apparently unrelated purpose is evidence that beauty is objective. Those convergent criteria of beauty solve the problem of creating hard-to-forge signals where prior shared knowledge is insufficient to provide them.

A
culture
is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behaviour. Thus the shared values of a nation, the ability to communicate in a particular language, the shared knowledge of an academic discipline and the appreciation of a given musical style are all, in this sense, ‘sets of ideas’ that define cultures. Many of them are inexplicit; in fact all ideas have some inexplicit component, since even our knowledge of the meanings of words is held largely inexplicitly in our minds. Physical skills, such as the ability to ride a bicycle, have an especially high inexplicit content, as do philosophical concepts such as freedom and knowledge. The distinction between explicit and inexplicit is not always sharp. For instance, a poem or a satire may be explicitly about one subject, while the audience in a particular culture will reliably, and without being told, interpret it as being about a different one.

The world’s major cultures – including nations, languages, philosophical and artistic movements, social traditions and religions – have been created incrementally over hundreds or even thousands of years. Most of the ideas that define them, including the inexplicit ones, have a long history of being passed from one person to another. That makes these ideas
memes
– ideas that are replicators.

Nevertheless, cultures change. People modify cultural ideas in their minds, and sometimes they pass on the modified versions. Inevitably, there are unintentional modifications as well, partly because of straightforward error, and partly because inexplicit ideas are hard to convey accurately: there is no way to download them directly from one brain
to another like computer programs. Even native speakers of a language will not give identical definitions of every word. So it can be only rarely, if ever, that two people hold precisely the same cultural idea in their minds. That is why, when the founder of a political or philosophical movement or a religion dies, or even before, schisms typically happen. The movement’s most devoted followers are often shocked to discover that they disagree about what its doctrines ‘really’ are. It is not much different when the religion has a holy book in which the doctrines are stated explicitly: then there are disputes about the meanings of the words and the interpretation of the sentences.

Thus a culture is in practice defined not by a set of strictly identical memes, but by a set of variants that cause slightly different characteristic behaviours. Some variants tend to have the effect that their holders are eager to enact or talk about them, others less so. Some are easier than others for potential recipients to replicate in their own minds. These factors and others affect how likely each variant of a meme is to be passed on faithfully. A few exceptional variants, once they appear in one mind, tend to spread throughout the culture with very little change in meaning (as expressed in the behaviours that they cause). Such memes are familiar to us because long-lived cultures are composed of them; but, nevertheless, in another sense they are a very unusual type of idea, for most ideas are short-lived. A human mind considers many ideas for every one that it ever acts upon, and only a small proportion of those cause behaviour that anyone else notices – and, of those, only a small proportion are ever replicated by anyone else. So the overwhelming majority of ideas disappear within a lifetime or less. The behaviour of people in a long-lived culture is therefore determined partly by recent ideas that will soon become extinct, and partly by
long-lived memes
: exceptional ideas that have been accurately replicated many times in succession.

A fundamental question in the study of cultures is: what is it about a long-lived meme that gives it this exceptional ability to resist change throughout many replications? Another – central to the theme of this book – is: when such memes do change, what are the conditions under which they can change for the better?

The idea that cultures evolve is at least as old as that of evolution in biology. But most attempts to understand how they evolve have been
based on misunderstandings of evolution. For example, the communist thinker Karl Marx believed that his theory of history was evolutionary because it spoke of a progression through historical stages determined by economic ‘laws of motion’. But the real theory of evolution has nothing to do with predicting the attributes of organisms from those of their ancestors. Marx also thought that Darwin’s theory of evolution ‘provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle’. He was comparing his idea of inherent conflict between socio-economic classes with the supposed competition between biological species. Fascist ideologies such as Nazism likewise used garbled or inaccurate evolutionary ideas, such as ‘the survival of the fittest’, to justify violence. But in fact the competition in biological evolution is not between different species, but between
variants of genes within a species
– which does not resemble the supposed ‘class struggle’ at all. It
can
give rise to violence or other competition between species, but it can also produce cooperation (such as the symbiosis between flowers and insects) and all sorts of intricate combinations of the two.

Although Marx and the fascists assumed false theories of biological evolution, it is no accident that analogies between society and the biosphere are often associated with grim visions of society: the biosphere is a grim place. It is rife with plunder, deceit, conquest, enslavement, starvation and extermination. Hence those who think that cultural evolution is like that end up either opposing it (advocating a static society) or condoning that kind of immoral behaviour as necessary or inevitable.

Arguments by analogy are fallacies. Almost any analogy between any two things contains some grain of truth, but one cannot tell what that is until one has an independent explanation for what is analogous to what, and why. The main danger in the biosphere–culture analogy is that it encourages one to conceive of the human condition in a reductionist way that obliterates the high-level distinctions that are essential for understanding it – such as those between mindless and creative, determinism and choice, right and wrong. Such distinctions are meaningless at the level of biology. Indeed, the analogy is often drawn for the very purpose of debunking the common-sense idea of human beings as causal agents with the ability to make moral choices and to create new knowledge for themselves.

As I shall explain, although biological and cultural evolution are described by the same underlying theory, the mechanisms of transmission, variation and selection are all very different. That makes the resulting ‘natural histories’ different too. There is no close cultural analogue of a species, or of an organism, or a cell, or of sexual or asexual reproduction. Genes and memes are about as different as can be at the level of mechanisms, and of outcomes; they are similar only at the lowest level of explanation, where they are both
replicators
that embody
knowledge
and are therefore conditioned by the same fundamental principles that determine the conditions under which knowledge can or cannot be preserved, can or cannot improve.

In the classic 1956 science-fiction story ‘Jokester’, by Isaac Asimov, the main character is a scientist studying jokes. He finds that, although most people do sometimes make witty remarks that are original, they never invent what he considers to be a fully fledged joke: a story with a plot and a punchline that causes listeners to laugh. Whenever they tell such a joke, they are merely repeating one that they have heard from someone else. So, where do jokes come from originally? Who creates them? The fictional answer given in ‘Jokester’ is far-fetched and need not concern us here. But the premise of the story is not so absurd: it really is plausible that some jokes were not created by anyone – that they evolved.

People tell each other amusing stories – some fictional, some factual. They are not jokes, but some become memes: they are interesting enough for the listeners to retell them to other people, and some of those people retell them in turn. But they rarely recite them word for word; nor do they preserve every detail of the content. Hence an often-retold story will come to exist in different versions. Some of those versions will be retold more often than others – in some cases because people find them amusing. When that is the main reason for retelling them, successive versions that remain in circulation will tend to be ever more amusing. So the conditions are there for evolution: repeated cycles of imperfect copying of information, alternating with selection. Eventually the story becomes amusing enough to make people laugh, and a fully fledged joke has evolved.

It is conceivable that a joke could evolve through variations that were not intended to improve upon the funniness. For example, people who hear a story can mishear or misunderstand aspects of it, or change it for pragmatic reasons, and in a small proportion of cases, by sheer luck, that will produce a funnier version of the story, which will then propagate better. If a joke has evolved in that way from a non-joke, it truly has no author. Another possibility is that most of the people who altered the amusing story on its way to becoming a joke
designed
their contributions, using creativity to make it funnier intentionally. In such cases, although the joke was indeed created by variation and selection, its funniness was the result of human creativity. In that case it would be misleading to say that ‘no one created it.’ It had many co-authors, each of whom contributed creative thought to the outcome. But it may still be that literally no one understands why the joke is as funny as it is, and hence that no one could create another joke of similar quality at will.

Although we do not know exactly how creativity works, we do know that it is itself an evolutionary process within individual brains. For it depends on conjecture (which is variation) and criticism (for the purpose of selecting ideas). So, somewhere inside brains, blind variations and selections are adding up to creative thought at a higher level of emergence.

The idea of memes has come in for a great deal of radical, and in my view mistaken, criticism to the effect that it is vague and pointless, or else tendentious. For example, when the ancient Greek religion was suppressed, but the stories of its gods continued to be told, though now only as fiction, were those stories still the same memes despite now causing new behaviours? When Newton’s laws were translated into English from the original Latin, they caused different words to be spoken and written. Were they the same memes? But in fact such questions cast no doubt on the existence of memes, nor on the usefulness of the concept. It is like the controversy about which objects in the solar system should be called ‘planets’. Is Pluto a ‘real’ planet even though it is smaller than some of the moons in our solar system? Is Jupiter really not a planet but an un-ignited star? It is not important. What is important is what is really there. And memes are really there, regardless of what we call them or how we classify them. Just as the
basic theory of genes was developed long before the discovery of DNA, so today, without knowing
how
ideas are stored in brains, we do know that some ideas can be passed from one person to another and affect people’s behaviour. Memes are those ideas.

Another line of criticism is that memes, unlike genes, are not stored in identical physical forms in every holder. But, as I shall explain, that does not necessarily make it impossible for memes to be transmitted ‘faithfully’ in the sense that matters for evolution. It is indeed meaningful to think of memes as retaining their identity as they pass from one holder to the next.

Just as genes often work together in groups to achieve what we might think of as a single adaptation, so there are memeplexes consisting of several ideas which can, alternatively, be thought of as a single more complex idea, such as quantum theory or neo-Darwinism. So it does not matter if we refer to a memeplex as a meme, just as it does not matter if we refer to quantum theory as a single theory or a group of theories. However, ideas, including memes, cannot be indefinitely analysed into sub-memes, because there comes a point where replacing a meme by part of itself would result in its not being copied. So, for instance, ‘2 + 3 = 5’ is not a meme, because it does not have what it takes to cause itself reliably to be copied, except under circumstances which would also copy some theory of arithmetic with universal reach, which itself could not be transmitted without also transmitting the knowledge that 2 + 3 = 5.