Daniel C. Dennett.  From Bacteria to Bach and Back:

 The Evolution of Minds (2017)

In a paragraph

Minds evolved and created thinking tools that eventually enabled minds to know how minds evolved. Darwin and Turing showed there can be competence without comprehension. Cultural evolution through memes expands the affordances of our manifest image.

Key points

• Minds evolved and created thinking tools that eventually enabled minds to know how minds evolved.

• The Cartesian Wound severed mind from body at the birth of modern science. It is hard to escape Cartesian Gravity.

• The alliteration of “Bacteria to Bach” proved irresistible.

• Human culture itself is a more fecund generator of brilliant innovations than any troupe of geniuses, of either gender. This it achieves by a process of cultural evolution that is as much “the author” of our finest achievements as any individual thinker is.

• The reasons tracked by evolution I have called “free-floating rationales,” Reasons existed long before there were reasoners. The termite castle and Gaudí’s La Sagrada Familia are very similar in shape but utterly different in genesis and construction. There are reasons for the structures and shapes of the termite castle, but they are not represented by any of the termites who constructed it.

• Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning – competence without comprehension. Turing’s strange inversion of reasoning – computation 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.  Mind is the effect not the cause.  It is not a mind-first universe.

• Four kinds of creatures. Darwinian creatures, with their competences pre-designed and fixed. Skinnerian creatures, who can adjust their behavior in reaction to “reinforcement”. Popperian creatures, who pre-test hypothetical behaviors offline. Gregorian creatures, named in honor of Richard Gregory, the psychologist who emphasized the role of thinking tools.

• Semantic information is ‘a distinction that makes a difference.’ Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of information. Affordances.

• Composed of billions of idiosyncratic neurons that evolved to fend for themselves, the brain’s functional architecture is more like a free market than a “politburo” hierarchy where all tasks are assigned from on high. The fundamental architecture of animal brains (including human brains) is probably composed of Bayesian networks that are highly competent expectation-generators that don’t have to comprehend what they are doing. Comprehension — our kind of comprehension — is only made possible by the arrival on the scene quite recently of a new kind of evolutionary replicator — culturally transmitted informational entities: memes.

• Words are affordances that our brains are designed (by evolutionary processes) to pick up. They are memes that can be pronounced. They are digitized to allow correction to the norm.

• Chief among the insights that Dawkins’s memes contribute to the study of cultural evolution are three conceptions: Competence without comprehension, The fitness of memes, Memes are informational things.

• Evolutionary theory, not being able to predict the once-in-a-billion events that in due course get amplified into new species, new genes, new adaptations, can’t predict the future.

• The evolutionary perspective in general, and the memetic perspective with regard to culture, transform many of the apparently eternal puzzles of life, that is, meaning and consciousness, in ways inaccessible to those who never look beyond the manifest image that they grew up with and the disciplines they are trained in.

• We inhabit a cultural niche, a platform of competences on which comprehension can grow, rather than Pinker’s ‘cognitive niche.’ The explanations and justifications of our storehouse of general knowledge are a kind of Whig history, written by the victors, triumphantly explaining the discoveries and passing over the costly mistakes and misguided searches.

• Memes are Apps being installed in our heads. You can’t do much carpentry with your bare hands, and you can’t do much thinking with your bare brain.

• Human culture started out profoundly Darwinian, with uncomprehending competences generating various valuable structures in roughly the way termites build their castles. Over the next few hundred thousand years, cultural exploration of Design Space gradually de-Darwinized, as it developed cranes that could be used to build further cranes that lifted still more cranes into operation, becoming a process composed of ever more comprehension.

• Sellars’s distinctions between the manifest image and the scientific image, and also the (more primitive) original image. Our manifest image grows with memes providing new affordances and new ways of thinking.

• It is like something to be you because you have been enabled to tell us — or refrain from telling us — what it’s like to be you! System of user-illusions that rendered versions of our cognitive processes — otherwise as imperceptible as our metabolic processes — accessible to us for purposes of communication.

• If joint attention to a shared topic is required, there have to be things — affordances — that both the first and the second person can attend to, and this is what makes our manifest image manifest to us.

• Hume’s inversion. The impression of causation we experience comes from inside, not outside – the mind’s “great propensity to spread itself on external objects”. We need to push Hume’s inversion a little harder and show that the icons of the user-illusion of our minds don’t need to be rendered on a screen.

• You are tempted to lapse into Humean misattribution: you misinterpret your sense that you’re seeing a red stripe as arising from a subjective property (a quale, in the jargon of philosophy) that is the source of your judgment, when in fact, that is just about backward. It is your ability to describe “the red stripe,” your judgment, your willingness to make the assertions you just made, and your emotional reactions to “the red stripe” that is the source of your conviction that there is a subjective red stripe. When you seem to see a red stripe when there is no red stripe in the world as its source, there need be no other thing (made of red figment) that is the “real seeming” you take yourself to be experiencing.

• The traditional view of free will, as a personal power somehow isolated from physical causation, is both incoherent and unnecessary as a ground for moral responsibility and meaning. The scientists and philosophers who declare free will a fiction or illusion are right; it is part of the user-illusion of the manifest image. That puts it in the same category with colours, opportunities, dollars, promises, and love (to take a few valuable examples from a large set of affordances). If free will is an illusion, then so are they, and for the same reason. This is not an illusion we should want to dismantle or erase; it’s where we live.

Comments

Dennett gives a fine telling of the story of how evolution created life and then human minds.  He concentrates on types of information, with evolution creating uncomprehending competence, which only recently, through the evolution of cultural memes, has led to some intelligent design.  The book touches on many philosophical ideas along the way, such as the nature of knowledge and the importance of the manifest image.  The book reflects a lifetime of learning, is warm and full of fine phrases, if perhaps somewhat verbose.

I strongly agree with Dennett’s main ideas.  These reflect the thinking in three of my favourite books – the nature of evolution and the significance of memes from Richard Dawkins’s ‘The Selfish Gene’, the central role of knowledge from David Deutsch’s ‘The Beginning of Infinity’ and humanity as a cultural species from Joseph Henrich’s ‘The Secret of our Success.’ I am less sure about Dennett’s dismissal of the problem of consciousness, but this is a smaller part of the book, which overall is an excellent presentation of a naturalistic view of the nature of life and minds.  

Links

Book at Amazon UK

Dennett lecture on the book

My notes on David Deutsch: The Beginning of Infinity

My notes on Joseph Henrich: The Secret of our Success

EXTRACTS

Preface

I started trying to think seriously about the evolution of the human mind when I was a graduate student in philosophy in Oxford in 1963 and knew almost nothing about either evolution or the human mind.  A philosopher who asked good questions about what they were doing (instead of telling them why, in principle, their projects were impossible) was apparently such a refreshing novelty that a sterling cadre of pioneering researchers took me in.  They are professionals, and I am still an amateur, but by now a well-informed amateur, who gets invited to give lectures and participate in workshops and visit labs all over the world, where I continue my education, having more fun than I ever imagined an academic life could provide.

This is what I think I’ve learned — a lot of it is still very conjectural, philosophical, out on a limb. I claim that it is the sketch, the backbone, of the best scientific theory to date of how our minds came into existence, how our brains work all their wonders, and, especially, how to think about minds and brains without falling into alluring philosophical traps.

Part I: TURNING OUR WORLD UPSIDE DOWN

1: Introduction

How come there are minds? And how is it possible for minds to ask and answer this question? The short answer is that minds evolved and created thinking tools that eventually enabled minds to know how minds evolved,

It takes thinking tools to understand what bacteria are, and we’re the only species (so far) endowed with an elaborate kit of thinking tools.

I have found a path that takes us all the way to a satisfactory — and satisfying — account of how the “magic” of our minds is accomplished without any magic.

Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning. Reasons without reasoners. Competence without comprehension. Turing’s strange inversion oeasoning. Information as design worth stealing. Darwinism about Darwinism. Feral neurons. Words striving to reproduce.  The evolution of the evolution of culture. Hume’s strange inversion of reasoning. Consciousness as a user-illusion.  The age of post-intelligent design.  Turning our world upside down, following Darwin and Turing; then evolving evolution into intelligent design; and finally turning our minds inside out.

Evolution is a process that depends on amplifying things that almost never happen.

This Eukaryotic Revolution paved the way for another great transition, the Cambrian “Explosion” more than half a billion years ago. The MacCready Explosion occurred in only about 10,000 years,

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.

Our so-called native intelligence depends on both our technology and our numbers.

This love of mystery is just one of the potent imagination-blockers standing in our way.

Douglas Hofstadter’s book, I Am a Strange Loop (2007).

I coined the terms romantic and killjoy to refer to the sides of this intense duel over animal minds.

The Cartesian wound. René Descartes, the seventeenth – century French scientist and philosopher, was very impressed with his own mind, for good reason. He called it his res cogitans, or thinking thing, and it struck him, on reflection, as a thing of miraculous competence. If anybody had the right to be in awe of his own mind, Descartes did. The doctrine that each of us has an immaterial (and immortal) soul that resides in and controls the material body long passed for shared knowledge, thanks to the instruction of the Church. But it was Descartes who distilled this default assumption into a positive “theory.”

Terrence Deacon has called “the Cartesian wound that severed mind from body at the birth of modern science”. Cartesian gravity.

Cast evolutionary processes as design processes (processes of research and development, or R & D) and this adaptationist or reverse-engineering perspective has long lived under an undeserved cloud of suspicion.

2: Before Bacteria and Bach

The alliteration of “Bacteria to Bach” proved irresistible.

Human culture itself is a more fecund generator of brilliant innovations than any troupe of geniuses, of either gender. This it achieves by a process of cultural evolution that is as much “the author” of our finest achievements as any individual thinker is.

Throughout this book I will exploit the perspective of reverse engineering, taking on the premise that every living thing is a product of nonmysterious physical processes that gradually brought all the elements together, refining them along the way, and eventually arrived at the working system we observe.

“Evolution is cleverer than you are.”

Here I hope to forestall premature dismissal of my project by any who has been persuaded, directly or by hearsay, that Gould and Lewontin’s propaganda against adaptationism was fatal. Contrary to the opinion widely engendered by their famous essay, adaptationism is alive and well; reverse engineering, when conducted with due attention to the risks and obligations, is still the royal road to discovery in biology and the only path to discovery in the demanding world of prebiotic chemistry of the origin of life.

3: On the Origin of Reasons

Aristotle identified four questions we might want to ask about anything: What is it made of, or its material cause? What is its structure, or its formal cause? How did it get started, or what is its efficient cause? What is its purpose, or its final, or telic, cause?

Do we want to try to convince lay people that they don’t really see the design that is stunningly obvious at every scale in biology, or would we rather try to persuade them that what Darwin has shown is that there can be design — real design, as real as it gets — without an Intelligent Designer?

The biosphere is utterly saturated with design, with purpose, with reasons. What I call the “design stance” predicts and explains features throughout the living world.

There are three different but closely related strategies or stances we can adopt when trying to understand, explain, and predict phenomena: the physical stance, the design stance, and the intentional stance.

Dawkins’s title, The Blind Watchmaker (1986), nicely evokes the apparently paradoxical nature of these processes: on the one hand they are blind, mindless, without goals, and on the other hand they produce designed entities galore, many of which become competent artificers (nest-builders, web-spinners, and so forth) and a few become intelligent designers and builders: us.

Evolutionary processes brought purposes and reasons into existence the same way they brought colour vision (and hence colours) into existence: gradually.

The different meanings of “why.” The English word is equivocal, and the main ambiguity is marked by a familiar pair of substitute phrases: “what for?” and “how come?”  The how come question asks for a process narrative that explains. Evolution by natural selection starts with how come and arrives at what for.

The reasons tracked by evolution I have called “free-floating rationales,” Reasons existed long before there were reasoners.

The termite castle and Gaudí’s La Sagrada Familia are very similar in shape but utterly different in genesis and construction. There are reasons for the structures and shapes of the termite castle, but they are not represented by any of the termites who constructed it. There is no Architect Termite who planned the structure, nor do any individual termites have the slightest clue about why they build the way they do. This is competence without comprehension.

4: Two Strange Inversions of Reasoning

The world before Darwin was held together not by science but by tradition. All things in the universe, from the most exalted (“man”) to the humblest (the ant, the pebble, the raindrop) were the creations of a still more exalted thing, God, an omnipotent and omniscient intelligent creator — who bore a striking resemblance to the second-most exalted thing. Call this the trickle-down theory of creation. Darwin replaced it with the bubble-up theory of creation.

“Mr. Darwin ….by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance is fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.”

And time and again, these skeptics have discovered not a miraculous skyhook but a wonderful crane, a nonmiraculous innovation in Design Space.

Here is Turing’s strange inversion, put in language borrowed from Beverley: A perfect computing machine does not need to know what arithmetic is.

Competence without comprehension. This is indeed a strange inversion, overthrowing the pre-Darwinian mind-first vision of Creation with a mind-last vision of the eventual evolution of us, intelligent designers at long last.

This common ontology was usefully named the manifest image by Wilfrid Sellars (1962).

The scientific image is something you have to learn about in school,

The finished working elevator has some interesting similarities to living things yet also a profound difference.

Good old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence – GOFAI – can be seen in retrospect to have been an exercise in creating something rather Cartesian, a rationalistic expert with myriads of propositions stored in its memory,

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.

5: The Evolution of Understanding

A process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers.

Affordances are the relevant opportunities in the environment of any organism.

Supernormal stimuli is a design glitch found in many organisms.

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.

A rather different free-floating rationale governs the injury-feigning, ground-nesting bird, such as a piping plover, that lures a predator away from her nest.

One of the key contributions of language to our species’ intelligence: the capacity to transmit, faithfully, information we only sorta understand!

We human beings are the champion comprehenders on the planet, and when we try to understand other species, we tend to model their comprehension on our experience, imaginatively filling animals’ heads with wise reflections as if the animals were strangely shaped people in fur coats. The Beatrix Potter syndrome, as I have called it.

Darwinian creatures, with their competences pre-designed and fixed.

Skinnerian creatures, who have, in addition to their hard-wired dispositions, the key disposition to adjust their behavior in reaction to “reinforcement”. B. F. Skinner, the arch – behaviourist, noted its echo of Darwinian evolution, with the generation and testing occurring in the individual during its lifetime but requiring no more comprehension (mentalism – fie!) than natural selection itself.

Popperian creatures, who extract information about the cruel world and keep it handy, so they can use it to pre-test hypothetical behaviors offline, letting “their hypotheses die in their stead”.

Gregorian creatures, named in honor of Richard Gregory, the psychologist who emphasized the role of thinking tools.

Part II: FROM EVOLUTION TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN

6: What Is Information?

Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of information (Shannon 1948). Shannon’s information theory is a great advance for civilization because semantic information is so important to us.

The Jesus unit, defined as the amount of (scientific) information known during the lifetime of Jesus. By 1964 there were 64 Jesus.

Having a poker face isn’t just for playing poker, and too much transparency is quite literally death.

Economic information as whatever is worth some work. Defining semantic information as design worth getting.  Semantic information, then, is “a distinction that makes a difference.”

Most of what anybody knows is “adaptively inert. But that does not matter, since it is cheap to store, and the bits that do matter, really matter.”

This concept of useful information is a descendant of J. J. Gibson’s concept of affordances.

Evolution by natural selection is astonishingly good at finding needles in haystacks, almost invisible patterns that, when adventitiously responded to, yield a benefit to the responder.

Having bright foliage is already an adaptation in the trees of northern New England, if not yet measurable directly.

We can often see that there is semantic information in the world that is intensely relevant to the welfare of creatures who are just unequipped to detect it. The information is indeed in the light but not for them.

My claims, so far, are these: Semantic information is valuable — misinformation and disinformation are either pathologies or parasitic perversions of the default cases. The value of semantic information is receiver-relative and not measurable in any nonarbitrary way but can be confirmed by empirical testing. The amount of semantic information carried or contained in any delimited episode or item is also not usefully measurable in units but roughly comparable in local circumstances. Semantic information need not be encoded to be transmitted or saved.

7: Darwinian Spaces: An Interlude

Peter Godfrey-Smith’s (2007) trio: Evolution by natural selection is change in a population due to (i) variation in the characteristics of members of the population, (ii) which causes different rates of reproduction, and (iii) which is heritable.

One of Darwin’s most important contributions to thought was his denial of essentialism,

Smith reminds us that “evolutionary processes are themselves evolutionary products”.

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 comprehending, ever more capable of top-down organization, 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.

All the real cultural phenomena occupy the middle ground, involving imperfect comprehension, imperfect search, and much middling collaboration.

8: Brains Made of Brains

Hierarchical systematicity is found throughout Nature.

Brains, moreover, are not like digital computers in several ways. Brains are analog; Brains are parallel; Brains are carbon based. Most importantly: brains are alive.

The ultimate moving parts of a computer have no individuality, no idiosyncrasies at all. Neurons, in contrast, are all different; they come in a variety of quite clearly defined structural types — pyramidal, basket, spindle, and so on — but even within types, no two neurons are exactly alike. How can such a diverse population get organized to accomplish anything? Not by bureaucratic hierarchies, but by bottom-up coalition-formation, with lots of competition.

Eventually in our decomposition cascade we arrive at elements whose tasks are so rigid and routinized that they “can be replaced by a machine,” just like Turing’s diligent human computer. The simplest moving parts within neurons, the motor proteins and microtubules and the like, really are motiveless automata, like the marching broomsticks in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but neurons themselves, in their billions, play more enterprising and idiosyncratic roles than the obedient clerks I was imagining them to be,

Brains are more like termite colonies than intelligently designed corporations or armies.

In a Bayesian network silence counts as confirmation. Whatever the higher levels guess counts as reality by default in the absence of disconfirmation. Another virtue of Bayesian models from our vantage point is that an organism can be blessed by natural selection with a high-powered statistical analysis engine without having to install a mathematician-homunculus in a special office in the bureaucracy.

But reasons are things for us. They are the very tools and objects of top-down intelligent design. Where do they come from? How do they get installed in our brains? They come, I am now at last ready to argue in some detail, via cultural evolution, a whole new process of R & D — less than a million years old — that designs, disseminates, and installs thinking tools by the thousands in our brains (and only our brains), turning them into minds — not “minds” or sorta minds but proper minds. Enculturated minds full of thinking tools.

Feral neurons? The von Economou neuron, or spindle cell, is found only in animals with very large brains and complex social lives:

Composed of billions of idiosyncratic neurons that evolved to fend for themselves, the brain’s functional architecture is more like a free market than a “politburo” hierarchy where all tasks are assigned from on high. The fundamental architecture of animal brains (including human brains) is probably composed of Bayesian networks that are highly competent expectation-generators that don’t have to comprehend what they are doing. Comprehension — our kind of comprehension — is only made possible by the arrival on the scene quite recently of a new kind of evolutionary replicator — culturally transmitted informational entities: memes.

9: The Role of Words in Cultural Evolution

The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection. — Charles Darwin, Descent of Man

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

The Baldwin Effect. Options become obligatory. Most mammal species can synthesize their own vitamin C, but primates can’t, their growing reliance on fruit in their diet over the millennia led to the loss of the innate ability to make vitamin C — use it or lose it. Natural born Xers.

Etymologies (descent lineages) for words are more secure than the descent of the languages in which they are found, because of horizontal word transfer between languages.

A useful bit of philosophical jargon first formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce in 1906 is the type/token distinction.

The problem with introspection is that it acquiesces in the illusion that there is an inner eye that sees and an inner ear that hears. There is no Cartesian Theater; there just seems to be a Cartesian Theater. Tokens can vary widely in physical properties while still being of the same type.

Words are affordances that our brains are designed (by evolutionary processes) to pick up.

10: The Meme’s-Eye Point of View

Memes are ways: ways of doing something, or making something, but not instincts.

The contributions Dawkins’s concept makes to our understanding of cultural evolution far outweigh any unfortunate connotations the term has acquired.

Chief among the insights that Dawkins’s memes contribute to the study of cultural evolution are three conceptions: Competence without comprehension, The fitness of memes, Memes are informational things.

Durkheimian functionalism. Another shortcoming of much traditional thinking about culture is the tendency to concentrate on the good stuff and ignore the junk.

We, in contrast, don’t just do things for reasons; we often have reasons for what we do,

11: What’s Wrong with Memes? Objections and Replies

Dollars are real; they just aren’t what you may think they are. Consciousness exists, but just isn’t what some folks think it is; and free will exists, but it is also not what many think it must be. I have learned, however, that some people are so sure that they know what consciousness or free will would have to be to be real that they dismiss my claims as disingenuous.

Words are memes that can be pronounced.

Tonal music is a good example of a digitized alphabet that allows correction to the norm.

Evolutionary theory, not being able to predict the once-in-a-billion events that in due course get amplified into new species, new genes, new adaptations, can’t predict the future.

My overarching claim in this book is that the evolutionary perspective in general and the memetic perspective with regard to culture transform many of the apparently eternal puzzles of life, that is, meaning and consciousness, in ways inaccessible to those who never look beyond the manifest image that they grew up with and the disciplines they are trained in.

12: The Origins of Language

Digitality. The ability, as we have seen, of language receivers/transmitters to “correct to the norms.”

Displaced Reference. The power of language to refer to things do not present in the environment of the communicators, out of sight, in the past, imaginary, or hypothetical.

Perhaps we are just apes with brains being manipulated by memes in much the way we are manipulated by the cold virus.

Steven Pinker (2003, 2010) calls our world the “cognitive niche,” stressing that it is a product of human comprehension. Boyd, Richardson, and Henrich (2011) disagree with Pinker, proposing that it would better be called the “cultural niche,” a platform of competences on which comprehension can grow.

Children learn on average seven words a day for the first six years of their lives,

These problems are exposed as artifacts of misplaced essentialism.

13: The Evolution of Cultural Evolution

You can’t do much carpentry with your bare hands, and you can’t do much thinking with your bare brain. — Bo Dahl Bom

Human culture started out profoundly Darwinian, with uncomprehending competences generating various valuable structures in roughly the way termites build their castles. Over the next few hundred thousand years, cultural exploration of Design Space gradually de-Darwinized, as it developed cranes that could be used to build further cranes that lifted still more cranes into operation, becoming a process composed of ever more comprehension.

The distinction Sellars made between the manifest image and the (more primitive) original image.

I have been suggesting that the acquisition of a language — and of memes more generally — is very much like the installation of a predesigned software app of considerable power, like Adobe Photoshop, a tool for professionals with many layers that most amateur users never encounter.

Grice can be seen to have worked it out, seen the “order which is there”.

The air of paradox vanishes as soon as we recognize that we may “know things” in one part of our brain that cannot be accessed by other parts of the brain when needed. The practice of talking to yourself creates new channels of communication.

The ability to treat whatever topic is under consideration as itself a thing to be examined, analysed, inventoried, thanks to our capacity to represent it explicitly via words, diagrams, and other tools of self-stimulation. You can’t do much thinking with your bare brain, but armed with these simple tools, an explosion of thoughtful exploration becomes available.

Philosophy has been the chief academic home of meta-representation for several thousand years. “Anything you can do I can do meta.” It doesn’t always yield insight, and sometimes threatens to lose the participants in a hall of mirrors with no clear anchoring in the real world, but such are the excesses of a meme (a meta-meme) of tremendous power.

From Aristotle’s day to the present, the explanations and justifications of our storehouse of general knowledge are a kind of Whig history, written by the victors, triumphantly explaining the discoveries and passing over the costly mistakes and misguided searches.

The heroic age of intelligent design is beginning to wane just when its would-be heroines are finally getting to prove their powers.

The manifest image became populated with more and more affordances,

One of the most valuable innovations was the practice of putting marks in the environment to take a load off personal memory, one of the first forays of “the extended mind” (Clark and Chalmers 1998). Marks then evolved into number systems and written languages, which enhanced the power of discursive teaching.

Merely Skinnerian and Popperian creatures couldn’t keep up with Gregorian creatures, their minds overflowing with new tools for making ever swifter and more accurate assessments of the complex environment confronting them.

Part III: TURNING OUR MINDS INSIDE OUT

14: Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion

Of course, other animals are conscious even if we can’t say what that means. That is, at best, the expression of confidence in the eventual triumph of the manifest image over the scientific image, in the face of a long history of defeats.

Communication requires an organism to self-monitor its own control system. What must evolve to prevent this exposure is a private, proprietary communication-control buffer that creates opportunities for guided deception — and, coincidentally, opportunities for self – deception. it is like something to be you because you have been enabled to tell us — or refrain from telling us — what it’s like to be you!  System of user-illusions that rendered versions of our cognitive processes — otherwise as imperceptible as our metabolic processes — accessible to us for purposes of communication.

If joint attention to a shared topic is required, there have to be things — affordances — that both the first and the second person can attend to, and this is what makes our manifest image manifest to us.

We don’t see, or hear, or feel, the complicated neural machinery churning away in our brains but have to settle for an interpreted, digested version, a user-illusion that is so familiar to us that we take it not just for reality but also for the most indubitable and intimately known reality of all. We have to rely on the rather narrow and heavily edited channel that responds to our incessant curiosity with user-friendly deliverances, only one step closer to the real me than the access to the real me that is enjoyed by my family and friends.

Collaborating with other investigators on the study of your own consciousness (adopting, if you like, the “second-person point of view”) is the way to take consciousness, as a phenomenon, as seriously as it can be taken.

All we ever directly experience, Hume insists, is sequence: A followed by B, not A causing B. The impression of causation we experience comes from inside, not outside – the mind’s “great propensity to spread itself on external objects”. What is special about properties like sweetness and cuteness is that their perception depends on particularities of the nervous systems that have evolved to make much of them.  We need to push Hume’s inversion a little harder and show that the icons of the user-illusion of our minds, unlike the user – illusion of our computers, don’t need to be rendered on a screen.

You are tempted to lapse into Humean misattribution: you misinterpret your sense (judgment, conviction, belief, inclination) that you’re seeing a red stripe as arising from a subjective property (a quale, in the jargon of philosophy) that is the source of your judgment, when in fact, that is just about backward. It is your ability to describe “the red stripe,” your judgment, your willingness to make the assertions you just made, and your emotional reactions (if any) to “the red stripe” that is the source of your conviction that there is a subjective red stripe. When you seem to see a red stripe when there is no red stripe in the world as its source, there need be no other thing (made of red figment) that is the “real seeming” you take yourself to be experiencing.

The traditional view of free will, as a personal power somehow isolated from physical causation, is both incoherent and unnecessary as a ground for moral responsibility and meaning. The scientists and philosophers who declare free will a fiction or illusion are right; it is part of the user-illusion of the manifest image. That puts it in the same category with colours, opportunities, dollars, promises, and love (to take a few valuable examples from a large set of affordances). If free will is an illusion, then so are they, and for the same reason. This is not an illusion we should want to dismantle or erase; it’s where we live,

People tend to treat belief in the supernatural as not only excusable but also morally praiseworthy.

15: The Age of Post-Intelligent Design

My claim, then, is that deep learning (so far) discriminates but doesn’t notice. Watson is deeply Darwinian: neither Watson nor natural selection depend on foresight or imagination because they are driven by processes that relentlessly and without comprehension extract information — statistical patterns that can guide design improvements — from what has already happened.

A conscious human mind is not a miracle, not a violation of the principles of natural selection, but a novel extension of them, a new crane.

We find ourselves indirectly making things that we only partially understand, and they in turn may create things we don’t understand at all.

I myself have been unable to concoct a persuasive argument for the alluring conclusion that comprehension is “intrinsically” valuable — though I find comprehension to be one of life’s greatest thrills — but I think a good case can be made for preserving and enhancing human comprehension and for protecting it from the artefactual varieties of comprehension now under development in deep learning, for deeply practical reasons.

Regions seldom traveled by philosophers, and other regions beset by philosophers and typically shunned by scientists.

Notes

Sellars distinguished a “pre-scientific, uncritical, naïve conception of man-in-the-world … [ which] might be called the ‘original’ image” (1962, p. 6ff) from what he called the manifest image, a “refinement or sophistication” of that original image. What he was mainly getting at in this distinction is that philosophers have been reflecting critically on the naïve conception for millennia, so the manifest image was not just folk metaphysics.

The useful term Whig history refers to interpreting history as a story of progress, typically justifying the chain of events leading to the interpreter’s privileged vantage point.