From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning” and Turing’s equally revolutionary inversion were aspects of a single discovery: competence without comprehension. Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other. These twin ideas have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but they still provoke dismay and disbelief in some quarters, which I have tried to dispel in this chapter. Creationists are not going to find commented code in the inner workings of organisms, and Cartesians are not going to find an immaterial res cogitans “where all the understanding happens".

That's a rhetorical question, and trying to answer rhetorical questions instead of being cowed by them is a good habit to cultivate.

Don’t be afraid of a little metaphor; it won’t bite you, but you should always make sure you know how to cash it in for unvarnished fact when you feel the urge.

Asked by a student for an example of infectious cultural junk that is hard to eradicate, I replied, "Well, it's like, when, like, you use a phrase which, like, isn't really, like, doing any serious work, but, like you go on, like, using it." To which the student replied, "I, like, understand the point, but I wanted, like, an example.

Perhaps we are just apes with brains being manipulated by memes in much the way we are manipulated by the cold virus. Instead of looking only at the prerequisite competences our ancestors needed to have in order for language to get under way, perhaps we should also consider unusual vulnerabilities that might make our ancestors the ideal hosts for infectious but nonvirulent habits (memes) that allowed us to live and stay mobile long enough for them to replicate through our populations.

We Homo sapiens are the only species (so far) with richly cumulative culture, and the key ingredient of culture that makes this possible is language.

If I burst into a house and yell to all assembled, “Put on the kettle!” I have uttered an imperative English sentence, but some will probably infer that I would like to have a cup of tea or other hot beverage, while another may further surmise that I feel myself at home here, and may in fact be the occupant of this house. Yet another person present, a monoglot Hungarian, may infer only that I speak English, and so does whomever I am addressing (well, it sounds like English to her), while somebody really in the know will be instantly informed that I have decided after all to steam open that sealed envelope and surreptitiously read the letter inside in spite of the fact that it isn’t addressed to me; a crime is about to be committed. What semantic information can be gleaned from the event depends on what information the gleaner already has accumulated. Learning that somebody speaks English can be a valuable update to your world knowledge, a design improvement that may someday pay big dividends.

The politicians, the judges, the bankers, the industrialists, the journalists, the professors—the leaders of our society, in short—are much more like the average motorist than you might like to think: doing their local bit to steer their part of the whole contraption, while blissfully ignorant of the complexities on which the whole system depends.

The Absolute Ignorance of evolution by natural selection is indeed capable of creating not just daisies and fish but also human beings who in turn have the competence to build cities and theories and poems and airplanes, and computers, which in turn could in principle achieve Artificial Intelligence with even higher levels of creative skill than their human creators.

As I have often noted, a wagon with spoked wheels doesn’t just carry grain or freight from place to place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels. The

Competence without comprehension is the way of life of the vast majority of living things on the planet and should be the default presumption until we can demonstrate that some individual organisms really do, in one sense or another, understand what they are doing.

The real danger, I think, is not that machines more intelligent than we are will usurp our role as captains of our destinies, but that we will over-estimate the comprehension of our latest thinking tools, prematurely ceding authority to them far beyond their competence.

Words, I will argue, are the best example of memes, culturally transmitted items that evolve by differential replication—that is, by natural selection.

Over billions of years, on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life—complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly we humans … have grown in population, technology, and intelligence to a position of terrible power: we now wield the paintbrush.

Evolution is all about turning "bugs" into "features," turning "noise" into "signal," and the fuzzy boundaries between these categories are not optional; the opportunistic open-endedness of natural selection depends on them.

Evolution is all about turning "bugs" into "features", turning "noise" into "signal", and the fuzzy boundaries between these categories are not optional; the opportunistic open-endedness of natural selection depends on them.

We applaud intelligent design in all arenas, and aspire from infancy to achieve recognition for our creations. Among artifacts we have created is the concept of God, the Intelligent Designer, in our own image. That's how much we value the intelligent designers in our societies.

The manifest image that has been cobbled together by genetic evolutionary processes over billions of years, and by cultural evolutionary processes over thousands of years, is an extremely sophisticated system of helpful metaphorical renderings of the underlying reality uncovered in the scientific image. It is a user-illusion that we are so adept at using that we take it to be unvarnished reality, when in fact it has many coats of intervening interpretive varnish on it.

Quantity isnt to be equated with quality, but success in propagation is, in the end, as necessary for memes (however excellent) as it is for organisms. Most organisms leave no issue, and most published books have readerships in the dozens, not thousands, before going out of print for good. Even the greatest works of genius must still pass the test of differential replication.

There is a general generous tendency to credit innovators with more prior comprehension than they actually deserve, and this helps perpetuate the myth of the Godlike powers of our famous geniuses, and by extension, to all of us.

The claim that I defend is that human culture started out profoundly Darwinian, with uncomprehending competences yielding various valuable structures in roughly the way termites build their castles, and then gradually de-Darwinized, becoming ever more efficient in its ways of searching Design Space. In short, as human culture evolved, it fed on the fruits of its own evolution, increasing its design powers by utilizing information in ever more powerful ways.

Comprehension is not the source of competence or the active ingredient in competence; comprehension is composed of competences.

What Darwin and Turing did was envisage the most extreme version of this point: all the brilliance and comprehension in the world arises ultimately out of uncomprehending competences compounded over time into ever more competent—and thus comprehending—systems.

It’s just that it would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.

IN ORDER TO BE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL COMPUTING MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW WHAT ARITHMETIC IS.

does require anyone who makes the trip to abandon some precious intuitions, but I think that I have at last found ways of making the act of jettisoning these “obvious truths” not just bearable but even delightful: it turns your head inside out, in a way, yielding some striking new perspectives on what is going on.