Cooper and Shepard flashed thousands of slides, each showing a single letter of the alphabet, to their long-suffering student volunteers. Sometimes the letter was upright, but sometimes it was tilted or mirror-reversed or both. […] The subjects were asked to press one button if the letter was normal (that is, like one of the letters in the top row of the diagram), another if it was a mirror image (like one of the letters in the bottom row). To do the task, the subjects had to compare the letter in the slide against some memory record of what the normal version of the letter looks like right-side up. Obviously, the right-side-up slide (0 degrees) is the quickest, because it matches the letter in memory exactly, but for the other orientations, some mental transformation to the upright is necessary first. Many subjects reported that they […] “mentally rotated” an image of the letter to the upright. By looking at the reaction times, Shepard and Cooper showed that this introspection was accurate. The upright letters were fastest, followed by the 45 degree letters, the 90 degree letters, and the 135 degree letters, with the 180 degree (upside-down) letters the slowest. In other words, the farther the subjects had to mentally rotate the letter, the longer they took. From the data, Cooper and Shepard estimated that letters revolve in the mind at a rate of 56 RPM.

I finally got around to going through this talk a few times over the last few weeks, and have transcribed parts that I think are particularly significant (which ended up being pretty much much all of it). I’ve also added some notes and musings of my own.

Ironically, progress was much impeded by my contracting a couple of plain old biological viruses

***

Dennett opens by describing an ant parasite which affects its host’s brain, causing the ant to behave in a way which increases its chances of being eaten by a predator. Why? Because the next stage of the parasite’s life cycle takes place in the predator’s gut.

03:00

Well, does anything like that happen with human beings? This is all on behalf of a cause other than one’s own genetic fitness, of course.

03:26

It’s ideas, not worms, that hijack our brains

03:30

Now, am I saying that a sizeable minority of the world’s population has had their brain hijacked by parastic ideas? No, it’s worse than that: most people have!

03:52

There are a lot of ideas to die for. Freedom […], justice, truth, Communism? Many people have laid down their lives for Communism, and many have laid down their lives for Capitalism. And many for Catholicism, and many for Islam.

04:15

These are just a few of the ideas that are to die for. They’re infectious.

04:32

Most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant, new, out-of-the-box thinking, it’s infectious repetitis, and we might as well have a theory of what’s going on when that happens, so that we can understand the conditions of infection.

04:52

Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others.

05:30

One set of ideas or another have simply replaced our biological imperatives.

05:40

The subordination of genetic interest to other interests. No other species does anything at all like it.

06:52

We’re all responsible for not just the intended effects of our ideas, but their likely misuses.

07:57

Memes are like viruses.

08:13

What’s a virus? A virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude. That is, there’s something about it that tends to make it replicate better than the competition does. And that’s what a meme is. It’s an information packet with attitude.

08:30

What’s a meme made of? They’re made of information, can be carried in any physical medium.

08:54

Words are memes that can be pronounced. Then there’s all the other memes that can’t be pronounced, there’s different species of memes.

09:07

Remember the Shakers?

Dennett describes how the Shaker creed included celibacy, and how this makes it unsurprising the faith died out. But, in fact, this isn’t how they disappeared! The Shakers existed at a time when the social safety nets we have today didn’t, and there was a “ready supply” of “widows and orphans” for the sect to convert. Thus, the religion “could have continued forever with perfect celibacy on the part of the hosts, the idea passed on through proselytising instead of through the gene line.”

10:22

A meme can flourish in spite having a negative impact on genetic fitness. After all, the meme for Shakerdom was essentially a sterilising parasite.

11:10

It was germs, more than guns or steel that conquered the new hemisphere.

11:21

When European conquerors and explorers and travellers spread out, they brought with them the germs that they had become essentially immune to. […] These pathogens just wiped out the native people who had no immunity to them at all. And we’re doing it again. We’re doing it this time with toxic ideas.

12:56

These memes are spreading around the world, and they are wiping out whole cultures. They are wiping out languages, they are wiping out traditions and practices. And it’s not our fault, any more than it’s our fault when our germs lay waste to people who haven’t developed the immunity.

13.21

We have an immunity to all of the junk that lies around the edges of our culture. We’re a free society, so we let pornography and all these things, y’know, we shrug them off, they’re like a mild cold, they’re not a big deal for us. But we should recognise that for many people in the world, they are a big deal.

13.47

As we spread our education and our technology, one of the things that we are doing is, we are the vectors of memes that are correctly viewed by the hosts of many other memes as a dire threat to their favourite memes, the memes that they are prepared to die for.

14:20

Memetics is morally neutral. And so it should be. This is not the place for hate and anger.

14:30

If you’ve had a friend who’s died of AIDS, then you hate the HIV virus, but the way to deal with that is to do science and understand how it spreads and why, in a morally neutral perspective. Get the facts, work out the implications. There’s plenty of room for moral passion, once we’ve got the facts and can figure out the best thing to do.

15:00

And, as with germs, the trick is not to try to annihilate them. You will never annihilate the germs. What you can do, however, is foster public health measures and the like that will encourage the evolution of avirulence. That will encourage the spread of relatively benign mutations of the most toxic varieties.

15:30

That’s all the time I have, so thank you very much for your attention.

***

For me, there’s a couple of interesting points to come out of this talk besides the main explicit themes.

The first is a question of how vectors of memetic infection work. Dennett touches on it, when he talks about the drive to spread memes and their existence as a “packet of information with attitude” which can be spread in “any physical medium” [emphasis mine]. Most of the memetic theory I’ve seen so far takes it for granted that memes hop from brain from brain to brain and has a lot to say about what they do once they get there, but doesn’t examine the nature of those vectors; by this token, a meme could travel equally effectively by being encoded into written words and emailed as it could by being spoken in a radio broadcast or painted on a canvas. Anyone with a basic understanding of information theory (and mine is a basic as it gets) could tell you that this is wrong: any channel of information transmission is susceptible to noise, and different types of information are suited to different methods of transmission (and vulnerable to different types of noise). I think this could prove an interesting area of study, and one I very much intend to follow, once I’ve got my basic knowledge up to scratch. Who knows, maybe there’s already a vast body of theory in this area I have yet to discover.

The second point is to do with our responsibility to control the spread of our toxic ideas; putting aside the worryingly Colonial feel to the proposition for the moment (”Look at the poor natives with their inferior set of memes!”), what is it that makes Western memes so much more rapacious, so much better at replicating than those in a poor beleaguered victim meme-system? Is this even true?

If it is true, I’d like to suggest that it’s for the same reason that Russian prisons are such an infamously fertile breeding ground for drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis. As an undergraduate, I did a bit of study on signs and semiotics and, as I remember, some of the theory there stated that we live in an age where we’re so bombarded by signs and symbols that the ‘real’ world has ceased to have any meaning. Whilst a sign and a meme aren’t equivalent units (I’d say, possibly, that a sign refers to a meme), I don’t think it’s a huge leap to say that a society swimming in signs is also one equally suffused with memes (of course, memetics says that society is composed of memes, but there’s probably a question of volume here), and therefore an ideal breeding ground for increasingly voracious memes.

Time to revisit my degree notes; I think trying to reconcile semiotics and memetics could prove another interesting area of study. Unless, of course, there’s another huge body of theory I’m ignorant of there, too.

There’s a counter-argument here, too: why in the world would memes good at surviving in one meme-system be any good at surviving in a completely different memetic environment?

***

It occurs to me that I haven’t really defined a meme so far on this blog, despite having picked up a reasonable definition from various bit of reading. So, I think my next post will be about the definition of a meme, so I can be sure to be working from a solid base.

p68: It would seem that, as with genetic evolution, the most effective behavioural strategies are reached in systems which contain a certain amount of randomness (which you would expect, it is, after all, the same system in macrocosm).

p78: A lot of the simple “conditional strategies” discussed here (”If you are the resident, attack; if you are the intruder, retreat”) look a lot like simple if…then…else statements. How far does the computer / brain analogy stretch, especially when we’re talking about simple, early brains which would appear to be simple decision-making machines?

This is exactly the point where I got a bit bogged down in this book, and left it to one side for a while. Terribly lightweight and academically lazy of me, I know, but it seemed to me that I was starting to drift away from the point of my study which, at this point, is to learn about memes, not the intricacies of biological evolution. I think by now I’ve learned enough about the abstract concepts of replicators and their evolution to understand how memes are analogous, and (as we shall find out), even Blackmore states in The Meme Machine (1999, p17) that:

“[both] genes and memes are replicators and must obey the general principles of evolutionary theory and in that sense are the same. Beyond that they may be, and indeed are, very different - they are related only by analogy”

***

Something just occured to me: if we think of a replicator as a packet of information, or collection of rules, which creates seeming complexity by its iteration, can we say that (for example) the rule-sets of cellular automata, fractals and the algorithms governing emergent systems are similar (albeit lesser) kinds of information? I suppose the ability to evolve through competition and mutation is the key difference here.

I think you can follow this stuff to the nth degree without getting anywhere useful. The bottom line is we bloody well are conscious, my subjective experience of the world is probably pretty similar to yours and we might as well just live with it and get on with the much more interesting business of how it works.

Or, to put it another way: I could probably form an ironclad academic argument that “feet” are an illusion and that every other being in my life has an entirely alien experience of the world and an entirely different notion of what “legs” are; it wouldn’t stop me borrowing socks from my housemates when I forget to do the laundry.

p59: Imagination as a threat-prediction mechanism. This is an interesting, and plausible idea. Once early brains could map their environment, the ability to pre-empt the movements of predators in that environment would be a useful mutation. From there it’s not a great stretch to imagine (ha!) how that ability could complexify into imagination as we know it.

p65: Communication & lying: indivisible? When a system of communication develops, those who abuse it can potentially gain an advantage. The example given here is a bird call which warns of a nearby predator. If a flock of birds is feeding and one of them makes this call, the flock flies away to safety. However, if there is no predator and an individual makes this call, it is free to eat as much food as it likes - its flock of competition has taken the call seriously and flown away. Interesting idea.

Overall Notes:Dawkins paints a picture of early brains being simple devices to fire off a sequence of muscular contractions on response to simple input - say, the sound of a nearby predator. Jacquard looms for nerve firing sequences. Is there a link to Straw Dogs and the Libet experiments here: the idea that most human behaviour being blind, unconscious reaction?

***

I can’t help but feel here that there’s a possible argument for conscious life being the inevitable upshot of replicators, maybe even complex chemistry itself.

If I understand the argument correctly, single-celled organisms are the result of the same mindless replication/mutation/accretion of useful traits that brought about complex replicators in the first place. Therefore, complex organisms are a product of the same process (pp46-47).

A similar process could be said to have been at work in the rise of consciousness. A central controller of muscle contraction gains sensory response and memory, which evolves into spatial awareness and threat prediction and consciousness arrives at the point where a being factors itself into that spatial map of its environment (pp58-59). This all follows in the same mindless, logically inevitable track.

So, chemistry gives rise to replication, replication gives rise to organisms which gain an evolutionary edge through locomotion and its control, locomotive control is made more useful by memory and sensory awareness, consciousness happens as spatial awareness arises and becomes more complex.

I’m reminded of a podcast I listened a while ago with Rudy Rucker, who was channeling the ideas of Stephen Wolfram. Specifically, the idea of evolution as a self-organising process, rather than a fizzing battle of mutation. More here (skip to the paragraph entitled “An Abundance of Insights”).

I’m simplifying slightly here because it’s late and I’m tired, but I’m pretty sure the base argument is sound. Of course, there’s no reason to assume the resultant consciousness would be anything like ours.

It’s the morning now, I’ve had some sleep, and all this looks a lot more shaky. However, I’m leaving it here becuase I think it’s got some merit, just probably shouldn’t be taken totally seriously…

***

There’s also links here to Ramachandaran’s qualia, which I’ve blogged about previously: the different stages of the evolution of consciousness could be likened to the different stages of qualia.

Finally, Dawkins makes an interesting suggestion in the chapter endnotes that serial, narrative consciousness as we know it is an illusion, produced as a side-effect of that consciousness arising through this “world+me” model of awareness. He makes the argument that the underlying processes of the brain are much more “parallel” in nature (a number of stimulus/responses operating simultaneously), and the linear way we experience the world is an abstraction, designed to make all that input managaeable.

p28: The structure of a cistron, with its beginning and end markers, will be familiar to anyone who’s studied prehistoric computing theory: files were often stored on magnetic tape in this way, one after another with beginning and end delimiters. Not that I think this observation is any more relevant than that; there’s a limited number of ways you can store information in a 2d array. Interesting parallel though.

p29: If the whole purpose of an organism is to preserve the genetic units held within it, why do we see a selection for sexual reproduction, complete with the crossing over that potentially breaks up and corrupts those genetic units?

p45: If the only purpose of DNA is to survive, then surely the ‘large fraction [which] is never translated into protein’ (and therefore useless to its host organism), is simply explained by its own existence?

Overall notes:

• Genes which give their host a survival advantage are more likely to survive themselves.

Conversely

• Genes which give their host a disadvantage are more likely to die out with their host

At least, those which manifest before reproduction.

• Tendency when we die when we do caused by accumulation in the gene pool of genes which cause us to die at around 80? What if we only reproduced after (say) 60?

Note on review: Doesn’t reproduction as it stands now seem a very inefficient way of propagating a gene line? Especially in humans: it takes years to get to sexual maturity, then a period of fertility followed by a longish period of comparatively low reproductive value, especially when you factor in the menopause. Am I missing something here?

However! I’m back again, and this time I’m not going to do anything stupid like taking on any more work outside of the day job. In addition to the todo list I outlined previously, I’ve been making some good headway with The Meme Machine, which is a much easier read than The Selfish Gene.

First things first though, onward with the notes backlog…

The phi phenomenon [seems] to say something important about the relationship of real time to perceived time. If you show two flashing lights of different colours in order to induce the phi phenomenon, you still get an effect of apparent motion. For some people, the light appears to change from the first colour to the second as it moves from the first spot to the second spot.

Now, the thing about this is - how did your brain know what colour the light was going to change to? It seems as if what you “saw” (the light changing colour) was influenced by something you were about to see. Various theories have been put forward to explain this, either about the revision of our perceptions by what comes after or about the revision of our memories. Philosopher Daniel Dennet says that both of these types of theory are misleading because they both imply that conscious experience travels forward in time along a single, one-step-forward-at-a-time-and-no-steps-back track.

Instead, he suggests, there are multiple drafts of what is going on being continuously updated and revised. Within an editorial window (of, some have suggested, about 200 milliseconds of real time), any of these drafts can out-compete the others to become what we experience.

and

There’s that number again: 100-200 ms! It occurs all over this book, and I think this may be the root of it; the commonly found window for conscious experience may be this size because of the uncertainty introduced by the delay between our senses and reactions. So this is the range over which our brain has developed the ability to predict, by simulation, the outcome of our actions.

I’m off on holiday for a week now, more when I get back.

Coming attractions:

• Write up of the Daniel Dennett video that’s been languishing in the linklog for a while.
• More of the Selfish Gene notes & musings. I’ve been getting a bit bogged down in the actual reading of it though, so once I’ve cleared the backlog of notes, I might start skimming through for interesting bits in a thoroughly slapdash and cavalier way.
• More writers. A few of the people I’ve talked to recently have interesting and relevant takes on the kinds of things I cover (or intend to cover) here, so I’m hoping to get them to contribute.
• The Meme Machine. I’ve bought a copy of this book from the ‘zon, and it’s in my pile to attack after I’ve seen off the Selfish Gene.

Watch this space!

[I should probably start by saying that I started making these notes a good few months ago and I’m catching up on the backlog, so in some cases I’m as baffled as the next person by what I meant at the time and will be indulging in some editing. That said, let’s press on…]

pp12-14: Re: tendency of atoms to fall into stable patterns, “survival of the stable”: I’m sure this runs counter to a lot of stuff I’ve heard about a general tendency in nature towards the exact opposite, that the natural order of things is to diffuse into chaos. I’m hesitating to use the word entropy here, because I’ve been led to understand that it’s a much-misused term and has a very specific thermodynamic definition, but it’s certainly the concept that’s looming large here. Why is there a tendency towards stable forms?

Note on review: The fact that I’m sat here, embodied in a system of highly organised atoms and molecules, typing on a plastic (dig those polymers) keyboard, surrounded by an environment built from manufactured materials and a larger ecosystem would seem to provide ample proof of the viability of stable forms…

p15: Replicators as described here would be familiar to anyone who’s fiddled around with Conway’s Life. I probably shouldn’t read too much into that though.

Note on review: Perhaps the parallel shouldn’t be dismissed totally; after all, we’re talking about very primitive biochemical reactions here, certainly (I would imagine) closer to the simple rules of Life than the complex organic reactions that occur in nature today.

p16: Signs here of the chip on Dawkin’s shoulder that’s come into such sharp relief in recent years as he’s become a Celebrity Atheist, as he gives this example of “faulty copying”:

I suppose the scholars of the Septuagint could at least be said to have started something big when they mistranslated the Hebrew word for ‘young woman’ into the Greek word for ‘virgin’

Overall notes: Where are these primitive molecules now? When did the oceans stop brewing up all these possible chemistries? If there is this tendency towards stability, why is there such a variety of survival machines today? Why didn’t one stable form occur and quickly become the norm? Is biology an inevitable upshot of chemistry?

Note on review: I suppose, by defintion, the successful replicators built themselves whales and kelp and monkeys and the rest to keep them around, and the unsucessful ones “died out,” or, more properly failed to continue to replicate. I’m not sure this explains why we don’t observe simple molecules binding themselves together whenever they get half the chance though.