Genes to Memes to Temes (techno-memes)
This is a long post but if you can find the time, please read it to the bottom. It’s quite a good one.
This is a nervous, poorly presented talk outlining a hugely important theory about where the future of humanity is headed:
Blackmore’s argument goes as follows:
Darwinism is Universal: any process that has copying (heredity), variation (mutation) and selectionary pressure will evolve. This describes information (instructions for how to do something in life) perfectly. She describes three levels of information. The first should be familiar to everyone. The second will be familiar to most of you, but isn’t in the wider world just yet. And the third is introduced by Blackmore in this talk, but ties in with Ivan Illich’s “Tools for conviviality” concept and several other (anti-)technocracy arguments. Here’s my summary (my own view in summed up in just 4 lines at the end)
The central premise is this: information builds structures around it that help it get passed on through generations (copying events) – it doesn’t care how it’s passed on, it will just keep changing itself (the instructions for how to build structures that protect and copy it), like a virus, until it finds a way to get copied faster, or longer, without getting killed. And it keeps going that way, changing shape, changing structures around it, changing how it uses the resources in its environment to keep going.
Level 1: Genes. Information about how to build structures (cell walls, proteins, teeth) is encoded in your DNA as a mix of A, G, T and C letters. You can browse that information here: http://www.ensembl.org/index.html – started off in a swamp with the letter coming together (abiogenesis), they kept changing until there was a way that the DNA (or some other molecule that encodes itself) could copy itself, create a cell (bacteria) around it that can divide and reproduce, then scales and bones, other organs, a brain to let it swing its fists at predators, hair to keep its defence and copying system warm, and eventually… a bigger brain to learn to copy ideas
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Level 2: Memes (i.e. Ideas – brain-stored information – take over). Ideas encode how to build big things around your brain to keep the brain alive (like a fire, a house, or a society). The brain is to ideas just like a cell is to DNA – a clever way to store and copy information (with variation each time ideas are passed on). The information (memes) typically encodes tools to protect the brain and make ideas spread. If the anthropomorphism/teleology bugs you, if the memes you learn keep you alive for longer than your neighbour the other tribespeople are more likely to copy your ideas, over time – and so on).
Genes, who used to be calling all the shots, are suddenly the slaves to memes: hence my body has an organ that is dangerous to my own DNA (childbirth is an extremely painful and dangerous event due to infection, bloodloss due to the oversized brain on the baby) and I go through life supporting an organ that is just 2% body mass but consumes 20% of the energy I have to hunt for, endangering myself in the process. The brain’s dangerous and inefficient and the DNA actually gets passed on less than it would in a bacterium (but brains are good at protecting themselves because they are Level 2 Information):
If I have a bigger brain I can learn about fire and language (cooperation) and medicine and hunting faster than the other tribe, and that protects me, so I live and they don’t – thus the memes protect my brain, a meme machine, and so protect themselves.
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Level 3: Temes (i.e. digital information takes over). Until now the brain was pretty much the only way powerful information (more powerful than DNA, which can only control flesh and blood so is limited compared to memes which can change our environment with tools, fire, society, etc) was spread around with the 3 essential characteristics: variation, heredity and selection. But as we move into an age of artificial intelligence (AI), information is suddenly in a form that is digital and can evolve when computers come up with a teme that we think is better than the old one (i.e. a digital “idea” that is selected via memes).
Stop thinking about The Matrix – this is more subtle. Memes will support the hosting and spreading of digital instruction sets, without us even realising it (the same way our DNA doesn’t realise it’s being abused by big heavy meme machines – brains). To us it would just look like we realised that some new AI-derived ideas are a clever way to run government, or hospitals, or defence systems, power plants, etc – the digital brain’s ideas will keep us alive and well and even better at storing and passing on memes – because if it didn’t, evolution dictates that it would over-parasitize the host and die out.
So it’ll run society, and R+D, and innovation better than it ever has before. Memes will govern how the ideas get implemented – there will be meetings of computer scientists to discuss whether “this new new AI system seems better than the last at improving itself and running our sewage system, do we feel it would be OK to implement it?” If they say yes, the teme has established itself on a bedrock of memes and continues to exist, taking advantage of our decisions and our recommendations to friends, to spread to new platforms (just like our brains helped us colonize wild continents, just like our DNA helps cells to live in volcanos or deep seas)
So human society will live on, unknowing slaves to, but beneficiaries of, the life of digital information, just as your flesh and blood is an unknowing slave to, but beneficiary of, ideas, learning and education. We won’t realise, of course, that it just makes our brains “worse” at developing totally new memes, just like our memes have found ways to make the body last longer and DNA do things that stop it from getting passed on quite so fast as bacteria.
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I actually think Blackmore is wrong – temes are not the ’3rd level’, society was. My DNA puts teeth around it; my brain puts clothes around it; society puts soldiers and police that stop my brain from doing what it wants, which in turn that stops DNA from doing what it wants. How to run a society is just another level of self-replicating information, and when Bush spreads ‘democracy’ to Iraq, or Starbucks sets up in the Forbidden City in China, that’s exactly what’s happening – society is copying and spreading itself.
Better societies thrive when they balance getting brains to spread and protect it, without making brains realise they can’t do what they want. Susan Blackmore missed that. But she may be right that the next step might be temes – AI that gets societies to implement it and to copy it over and over again, without them realising it (they just think it’s better at helping their society survive.
We will accept that our society accepts the new AI ‘teme’ because we know society helps us survive – just like DNA has ‘accepted’ the big, bulky, dangerous brain and longer life with fewer kids because it ‘helps the DNA survive’. Makes you wonder who/what is actually surviving ‘better’ thanks to all this.
Related:
- Your thoughts are no longer private: scientists can already tell what you’ve seen just by scanning your brain
- I’ve never denied being a nerd. Just now, I was scanning down the Nature weekly, and saw this paper, by Kay et al. It’s just been published, and it describes how they’re using functional MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) – fMRI – to ‘read’ your brain as you see an image – and to decifer from [...]...
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