Fac, ergo sum

I make, therefore I am.

A solitary human out on the African Savanna is mostly some other animal’s lunch; we aren’t particularly strong or fast. But we are crafty, and when we get together in groups we become formidable. So it is not surprising that we are social animals, and that we receive significant neurochemical rewards for social behavior.

Dunbar’s Number, 150, has now been found just about everywhere we look for the size of human communities, be they in Meatspace or Cyberspace. I suspect that the minimum number of human individuals required to make a functional, self-sustaining, durable collective is not surprisingly Dunbar’s Number. I would go so far as to suggest that we should redefine One Human as being made up of 150 individuals; any less or more than this is not sustainable. If this hypothesis has any merit we should find significant evidence for it, in the neurological rewards systems in the human brain, and the number of individuals we are hardwired to keep track of. We most certainly find it in data associated with the size of human communities.

Humans are also tool makers. And probably the greatest tool they have made is teaching other humans how to make tools. Civilization could be thought of as nothing more than a evolutionary framework for propagating the knowledge of how to make specific tools through spacetime. Given the massive evolutionary advantage that this ability has given us, one would imagine that we have evolved specific neurological mechanisms that would incentivize us to make tools and to teach others how to do so. It is highly likely that Making (which inherently includes the didactic component), is a natural and powerful antidepressant, which gives Makers a durable sense of purpose, meaning and accomplishment.

Given how beneficial Making is to our species, this also introduces the possibility that the primary purpose  for human clumping, other than staying off the menu, is to maximize the opportunity for making tools and directly passing that knowledge on to others, while minimizing the caloric cost (cognition is SUPER expensive after all) of keeping track of the other constituents of one’s Human.

Given their utility, are tools not the most durable of memes?

Regardless of the validity of the above hypothesis, nobody can argue that Making, and then teaching others how to Make, is one of the most consistent sources of satisfaction and meaning. Certainly I have found being a Maker, along with investing in making other peoples’ lives better, to be the best anti-Nihilism I have come across.

Built-In Obsolesce

Here’s another of those thoughts that has nothing to do with software but that I think is interesting enough that I want to post it.

I am a huge fan of science fiction, and I just got done reading a brilliant book by one of my favourite authors, China Miéville, called “Embassytown”. Miéville does not disappoint with his latest work; mashing up New Weird and Space Opera to create a most thoroughly enjoyable yarn. I highly recommend it!

This story got me thinking about the cultural evolution of sentient species. The one concrete example I have leads me to believe that the same sentiency that allows these species to dominate their worlds, also all but guarantees that they will all eventually self-destruct in the rare case that they are not made extinct by some environmental catastrophe. Though their demise will probably be brought about by technology-accelerated runaway consumption (as my subject species is demonstrating), I suspect that there is a more subtle reason why their demise is inevitable: the species-wide nihilism that I assert is inevitable as the species unravels the mysteries of its own existence and the Universe.

As the human species begins (and I do assert that we are only in the paddling pool of self-discovery) to unravel the nature of their own existence and the Universe of which they are a infinitesimal part, one by one the things that they imagine are vitally important will become meaningless. For example, how can the significance of any individual’s hopes, dreams, aspirations, desires and beliefs, stand firm in the face of an understanding of the biological evolutionary process. I would assert that they cannot.

George Bernard Shaw wrote the following about Darwinism in the preface to Back to Methuselah:

“But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration, to such casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in a mountain landscape, or a railway accident in a human figure.”

Note: Shaw wrote this as a criticism of Natural Selection; he was a Lamarckist.

Though there are still many who do not even believe in Evolution, let alone understand it well enough to come to this miserable and inevitable conclusion, it is an unstoppable meme; inevitably all of humanity will come to understand it, assuming we don’t self-immolate first of course. And when the entire species succumbs to this meme it will simply expire from collective nihilism. Perhaps this is why there has been, and continues to be such resistance to this so-obviously correct idea; on some level our genes “know” that this level of species-wide self-awareness is fatally dangerous. And Evolution is not the only dangerous idea that undermines the human condition.

I am a self-confessed Nihilist and Atheist so maybe I am just projecting, or this might just be my attempt to understand the Conservative and “Anti-science” worldview.

It should be kept in mind that I had a smile on my face the entire time I was writing this. I don’t take myself too seriously and neither should you.

Replicator Wars | Consciousness as War Machine

On occasion I have ideas that have nothing to do with Software Development, but that I think still merit being written down. This morning while riding the train reading “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins I had just such an idea.

 

I was reading the final chapter of the original version, which introduces the “Meme” meme. This got me thinking about the tension between genes and memes. This tension exists because an individual can be “infected” by a meme that entirely subverts gene-driven behaviour, e.g. celibacy. A meme can ostensibly override a gene or gene-complex that has been millions of years in the making. This begs the question; if memes are potentially such a significant threat to genes then why have genes not evolved one or multiple defenses against them?

 

And then I had an idea; perhaps Consciousness itself arose as a genetic evolutionary response to the infectious, self-replicating and potentially destructive nature of memes.

 

I would assume that a brain able to replicate memes arose by random mutation, or for some other evolutionary purpose, but as soon as memes were able to replicate from individual to individual with some degree of fidelity, the game was afoot. And possibly this happened before consciousness evolved. A meme is after all just a tool, and there are species besides Homo Sapiens that are tool makers and users. Once memes became a reality the possibility existed that memes could override gene-driven behaviour. And one would have to imagine that, through simple Darwinian evolutionary processes, those same genes would then start to evolve countermeasures to those memes, since the genes of an individual infected with a given “toxic” meme would not survive into subsequent generations. So perhaps instead of evolving specialised adaptations to specific memes, they evolved a handful of generalised ones. And perhaps Consciousness was one of those adaptations.

 

But surely consciousness actually increases our susceptibility to meme infection? I would assert not. The ability to pass ideas from one individual to another does not seem to require consciousness; meme’s do not seem to need self-awareness to replicate, as is demonstrated by other species who pass epigenetic “knowledge” from generation to generation.

 

I assert that Consciousness actually helps prevent meme infection because it gives an individual the ability to filter and analyse memes, and then if necessary immunize themselves against that and similar memes. It also gives the individual the ability to root out destructive memes which they have already been infected by, and similarly immunize themselves against future infections. This would mean that there are genes that are evolving to make us more self-aware, and generally smarter.

 

Perhaps the development of Consciousness was not the only response to the potentially destructive nature of memes; one would assume that genes would also evolve that hinder the ability to process and transfer memes. Perhaps there are also retrograde genes in us that are evolving to turn us back into wild beasts, incapable of self-reflection, poetry, art, science, philosophy and Sudoku.

 

So there may be two genetic responses to the Meme Threat in the human gene pool; one that is making us smarter and one that is turning us into soulless meat puppets. 

 

I think I finally understand the difference between Democrats and Republicans. I kid, the Republicans!