Meme Selection

What kind of selection applies to memes? According to my scheme, there are two kinds of selection: intentional and nomological.[1]  Suppose the meme is a jingle: if it takes up residence in your mind, is that an intentional act? Not generally, since jingles usually repeat themselves against your will. You don’t choose to have a jingle running through your head all day. Maybe someone intended to put it there, but its ability to stick around is not a result of the recipient’s intentions. So, the selection must be of the nomological type—the jingle must gain a foothold in virtue of laws of nature (plus initial conditions). What are these laws? They are not physical laws, presumably, so they must be psychological laws. The relevant law might be this: catchy tunes tend to be remembered and rehearsed. The jingle acquires meme status in virtue of that law. Other laws of meme propagation might be more complex (consider fashions). There are psychological laws governing gene propagation and these are the selective agents in bestowing meme status (meme “survival”). Thus, meme selection is a case of nomological selection. This is a form of “natural” selection. So, meme selection belongs with body selection, as conceived by Darwin. This seems like a nice result. Stars, organisms, and memes all exist because of nomological selection—unlike selective breeding, works of art, machines, political systems, etc. Intentions and laws cover the whole field.[2]

[1] See my “The Selective Universe”.

[2] We now have a useful structure for the subject of selection science (including philosophy). This is the general theory as opposed to the special theory represented by animal breeding and Darwinian natural selection.

Double Death

You might think there is nothing more to say about death. You might think death has been done to death. But I am here to report, from the depths of death studies, that death has a new wrinkle—it has a surprise up its sleeve. It turns out that every death is a double death. When a person dies two things die, not one. Both these things have value; we would like both to go on. But the death of one entails the death of the other—not necessarily, but contingently. Death has always been double, but it need not be; the two deaths are in principle detachable. This is good (but not very good).

What (on earth) am I talking about? The thought occurred to me while I was taking a massage, so that I was focused on my body. The two things are the self and the body. The thought I had was that it would be nice if my body went on when I died. We are familiar with the thought that the self could survive the body—say, by transferring the brain to a new body. That would certainly be good; it would take most of the sting out of death, especially if the new body was a splendid specimen. The old body would die, but the old self would live on. But what about the converse? What if the self died but the body lived on? In particular, the skills of the old body were preserved, especially the cool useful skills. Suppose you are a ballet dancer and your brain is in bad shape—it’s not going to make it. But you are told that the surgeons can keep your body alive along with your dancing skills, with a new brain installed in it. It will be up on stage again exercising the skills you have instilled in it. Realistically, this will require keeping alive and well your motor cortex and associated brain structures—but not you (not your frontal cortex etc.). Suppose, indeed, that they can preserve all your motor capacities, though not (alas) the person that is you—musical, athletic, balletic. It took years to acquire those capacities, and it is possible to retain them in your healthy body (pity about the dying self-brain). Wouldn’t this be better than the usual double death? Isn’t it some kind of compensation? We might describe it as the survival of the bodily self, if not the mental self. Instead of two deaths, there is only one. True, you might prefer things the other way round, because your mental self is more precious to you, but it would at least be something if your bodily self survived. Offered the choice, you would opt for the single death over the double death. This might be called half-death.[1]

Can we extend this idea to the mind? Suppose my mental abilities are located in a part of my brain separate from the part that houses my self: could we preserve the former part while losing the latter part? It doesn’t seem impossible. Then we could preserve Beethoven’s musical genius while not preserving him. Surely, that would be better than losing both. It would be possible for Beethoven to lose his musical genius because of brain deterioration while not losing his self, because they are separately located. Equally, it should be possible for the converse to happen; a new self could be conjoined with the old genius. If I were Beethoven, I would prefer this to losing both things. Could the same be done with memories—keep the memories, lose the self? That seems pushing it, because of the close connection between the self and memory; but maybe some kinds of memory could be retained in the absence of the old self, in which case a lot that is valuable could be preserved without survival of the self. This never happens as things are, but in principle it could. Double death leaves open the possibility of partial survival. Survival of the self is not the only thing that matters. Death is more discriminating (in principle) than we thought. Death need not always be total death. Death may come in degrees and types.[2]

[1] I can see a Ridley Scott sci-fi movie: Half-Death.

[2] When do we start dying? Is it when we reach adulthood? We don’t begin to die when we stop growing, do we? We start losing capacities quite early on, whittled away by the years. We are certainly beginning the dying process when we reach sixty normally—the journey to death has already begun. We become less and less young. We gradually start to fade away, sometimes passing through dementia and physical collapse. We don’t suddenly grow old. Maybe we die many deaths before the Big Death.

Autism and Philosophy

Does philosophy cause autism? Does that question elicit a jolt of recognition? I don’t believe the matter has ever been investigated scientifically, but there is anecdotal evidence to support it. That the two are correlated is prima facie plausible, but does philosophy cause autism? Not florid cases of it, to be sure, but does philosophy edge its practitioners into the spectrum? Does it produce low-grade autism? From my own personal experience, I noticed a marked difference between psychologists and philosophers: I didn’t see signs of autism in psychologists (though other pathologies might be present), but when I began to interact with philosophers, I observed a significant divergence. It comes down to what we nowadays call social skills: awkward behavior, inept friendships, emotional blindness, blank stares, solipsistic tendencies, a lack of warmth. It is probably true that philosophy attracts people already like this, but does it exacerbate the precondition? Does it encourage self-absorption, turning into a shut-in, not quite getting what other people are all about? Don’t you think Wittgenstein was like this? His fraught relationships, his solitariness, his oddity—he wasn’t socially normal. Russell, too, despite his need for love and company, was not entirely adept in his social behavior: he was comfortable with mathematics and philosophy, but in human relations he could be cold and remote, ill at ease. Would anyone regard Saul Kripke and David Lewis as socially completely ordinary? I don’t think Michael Dummett and Richard Hare were quite there inter-personally. Was Quine, or Davidson, or Rawls? I didn’t know them well personally, but from a distance they struck me as not exactly smooth socially. Derek Parfit? Hardly your convivial man-about-town. Surely, immersion in philosophy had something to do with this—it deepened the nascent autism. Not that this is all bad—it may even have been necessary—but it put these individuals into a distinct class of human beings. It made them autistically inclined. It forced them inwards.

What about me? Am I exempt? I’m afraid not. I think I changed when I became a fulltime philosopher at age twenty-two. I was always pretty intellectual, a “walking dictionary” as people used to say; but philosophy made me more like that—more cut off from other people, more solitary. It is true that I always had another side to me, expressed in sports and music, but I have the distinct impression that my mind (my brain) was altered by the study of philosophy. My mind feels like a secret place that I can retreat to, especially when other people irritate me. My extreme rationality makes me impatient with stupidity—people seem more annoying to me than before. It’s hard for me to interact with people who just don’t get it. It makes me want to avoid them. I admit to having an excessive fondness for animals. I hate Christmas. I would not describe myself as socially normal, oh no. I tend to go my own way. I believe that philosophy has played a part in this. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing (my autistic self despises normality), but it does seem like a reality, a psychological syndrome of sorts. I’m not intending to condemn (or celebrate); I am doing objective science. Philosophical friends of mine tend to have the same kind of personality—somewhat aloof, non-participatory, inward-looking. I think Bernard Williams was well aware of this syndrome and tried to overcome it—but he too had a dose of it (perhaps this is why he tried so hard to overcome it). Similarly, for Richard Wollheim (willfully eccentric) and Peter Strawson (strangely shy)—though both delightful men to talk to. I think that recognizing this tendency in philosophers could be helpful to people surrounded by it. It’s not our fault—philosophy made us this way! Philosophy becomes a place of retreat, a place to hide away; and God knows there is plenty to hide away from. Other people may not be hell (a useful Sartrean exaggeration, this) but they aren’t heaven either. They aren’t even a pleasant afternoon (see Jane Austen). Philosophy provides a kind of arid alternative to messy humanity; and we can’t be doing with messy humanity. Hence, the distant look in the eye, the robotic speech, the preoccupation with detail and exact formulation. Hence also, perhaps, with the weird morality, the lack of spontaneous reaction, the desire for a moral calculus.

What is to be done about it? Nothing. Nothing can be done. It’s the nature of the beast. Perhaps it can be mitigated to some degree by forcing oneself to take holidays from philosophy, or hanging around non-philosophical people. But the autism cuts deep; it affects everything. I don’t mean clinical-level disabling autism; I just mean a certain remoteness, abstractedness, preoccupation, inflexibility, obsessiveness, eccentricity. You know it when you see it. Go to the average philosophy conference and you can feel it all around you—a general social unease. Are philosophers ever easygoing? Do they ever just switch it off? Are they ever just ordinary people who happen to have a certain occupation? They are locked into their low-level autism. It is manifested in their style of writing. I find it hard to think of an exception. And the women are not that different from the men—they too suffer from mild autism (I could name some prime examples). Mathematicians and physicists might share the syndrome to some degree (I don’t know enough of them to say), but in philosophers it is very pronounced. Some areas of the subject might be more prone to producing it than others—not so much ethics and aesthetics, perhaps. The more abstract and abstruse the more autistic. I wonder how autistic Socrates was, with his insistent gauche questioning, his obliviousness to the impact of his words on his interlocutors. He certainly doesn’t seem like a socially gracious human being (again, no criticism intended). For all I know, philosophical autism may be the best way to be—though somehow I doubt it.[1]

[1] Terms like “autism” are often overused and overgeneralized (compare “psychopath” and “narcissist”); I am using the term somewhat loosely to include a family of kinds of mental makeup. Being “weird” or “nerdy” might be vernacular equivalents. Still, I think the term is apt in the present connection: a distinctive, stable, recognizable personality type—though it can vary from case to case in degree and mode. It might be contrasted with the bubbly outgoing communicative type. You don’t tend to come across many philosophers like that. There is probably a genetic basis for both types.

Axons, Dendrites, and Consciousness

You may have heard the saying, “When you get down to brass tacks, these are the facts: birth, copulation, and death”. The sentiment is that these are the basic facts of human (and animal) life—the poles around which everything else revolves. I could paraphrase this in application to the brain as follows: “When you get down to brass tacks, these are the facts: axons, dendrites, and the cell body”. Any textbook of neurophysiology will introduce you to this trinity—with diagrams, technical terms, and history of discovery. That is what the brain basically is—an assemblage of these things. The dendrites and axons extend from the cell body (soma) and conduct electricity. The dendrites have a tree-like structure and are short; the axons are longer, sometimes very long, with a fixed radius. They can change over the course of the brain’s life (“plasticity”). There are auxiliary structures associated with them. You may be reminded of a spider’s web. They are certainly distinctive. The structure is not much like the structure of an atom, though both have a nucleus: the axons and dendrites don’t revolve around the nucleus but are stuck to it. They were discovered a little over a century ago. People got Nobel Prizes. The neuron is not an opaque entity any more—we know its anatomy in detail. We know what constitutes the brain—axons, dendrites, and the cell body. These are the brain’s brass tacks.

There are two things we very much want to say about this structure. First, it must be relevant to higher-order properties of the brain, its form and functioning. The structure of the atom is obviously highly relevant to the form and functioning of things composed of atoms; likewise, the structure of the neuron must be highly relevant to the form and functioning of what neurons compose. You couldn’t change these structures and leave the higher-order properties intact. Indeed, they must play an explanatory role vis-à-vis the brain as a whole (or its larger parts). The axonal-dendritic structure must be deployed in and by the brain; it can’t be accidental and dispensable. That’s the first thing we want to say—need to say. The second thing we want to say is that we have no idea how axons and dendrites act to form the conscious mind—how they explain seeing red, for example. One fact seems to have nothing to do with the other fact. It isn’t as if introspection reveals a threadlike arboreal inner structure to seeing red. Nor is there anything reddish about axons and dendrites. There seems to be no connection at all. Nor does anyone ever try to forge a connection—it seems like a hopeless enterprise, an obvious non-starter. There is no axon-dendrite theory of consciousness. People try to formulate causal role theories, or informational theories, or panpsychist theories, or even electro-chemical stimulation theories—but no one tries to construct an axon-dendrite theory. What have such branching tendrils got to do with consciousness? Why, nothing, of course. And yet, they must have something to do with it, because they are the brass tacks of the brain, its formative constituents. One wants to say that there must be a theory that links the axon-dendrite structure to consciousness—to seeing red, etc. Yet not the slightest glimmer of such a theory enters our puzzled head. That is the basic form of the mind-body problem, so called: the necessity of the connection combined with its impossibility. Let’s not talk vaguely of “the brain” and conjure magical mechanisms and paranormal processes (“holistic meta-programs of information integration” etc.). Let’s gaze steadily at the brass tacks of the brain, accept that they must play a determinative role, and then consider our options: either declare them irrelevant (dualism), boldly claim they are all there is (materialism), or try to find a middle way between these two extremes (a long list here). This is why the mysterian thinks as he does—he can’t see a way to close the gap, but he thinks the gap must be objectively closed. The point I want to make here is that axons and dendrites are the things to look at if you want to take the measure of the problem. They must be part of the solution, and yet it is impossible to see how they can be. No other cellular (or atomic and molecular) structure poses a comparable problem. Consciousness seems like a fact that is more than the facts.[1]

[1] I remember that when I first saw a diagram of the neuron (circa 1968), depicting the axon and dendrites, I thought: “Really—is that it? That’s what’s happening inside my brain when I see and think—surely there must be some mistake!” Talk of “excitation” of these structures didn’t help much. It’s easy to get lost in jargon and gibberish; we need to recover our initial sense of amazement. What has a tiny tree got to do with me and my mind? How can a microscopic cable constitute seeing? How can a synaptic gap lead to a feeling? And yet, apparently, they do. Numbly, I turned the page.