00:00:16.000 Hello and welcome to episode 35. This is part two of the evolution of culture which is chapter 15
00:00:24.080 of the beginning of infinity. Today I'll be going through selfish means and
00:00:29.680 static societies and we'll be distinguishing between static societies and dynamic societies.
00:00:35.760 But I'll leave dynamic societies until next episode. A crucial question we'll be considering
00:00:40.880 in this chapter is why it is that human creativity can express itself in such different ways
00:00:47.280 in different societies in a sort of reliable way. So in certain kinds of societies which we
00:00:53.680 call dynamic societies, this creativity is used to cause progress and change but in a static society,
00:01:02.080 something else is going on. We've got the same kind of creativity but it's being used
00:01:07.440 not for progress, it's being used to maintain the status quo. I think David Deutsch gives
00:01:13.920 a unique creative answer himself and this is a question that has civilizational consequences.
00:01:20.800 After all we want to tend towards being a dynamic society, a society that continues to solve
00:01:27.040 problems at a rapid rate. In fact we need to be able to continue to solve problems at a rate more
00:01:32.720 rapid than the rate at which we encounter them because eventually the civilizational destroying
00:01:38.560 problem might arise and if we aren't able to create knowledge in time, if we are too slow to react,
00:01:44.640 then that'll be the end of this. Now a static society isn't making progress hardly at all.
00:01:49.680 It's not really creating knowledge. There are very few perfectly dynamic societies and perfectly
00:01:56.160 static societies. Historically we might be able to look at examples of near-perfect static societies
00:02:02.000 although nothing comes quite perfect. Nothing is quite perfectly static but the lesson is that societies
00:02:08.560 these days contend in one direction or the other and we always want to tend in the direction
00:02:14.480 of dynamism, of fast progress, of being able to change in a direction that allows us to improve.
00:02:20.640 Now before we get to the main discussion about static societies and the causes of static societies,
00:02:27.600 we need to go back to the idea of means and David's up to the point where he talks about
00:02:33.040 the selfish mean, obviously a play on, the selfish gene from Richard Dawkins. So I'll begin
00:02:39.120 reading and for anyone following along I happen to be up to page 377. The selfish mean,
00:02:46.560 if the gene is in a genome at all then when suitable circumstances arise it will definitely be expressed
00:02:53.360 as an enzyme as I described in chapter 6 and will then cause its characteristic effects.
00:02:58.880 Nor can it be left behind if the rest of its genome is successfully replicated but merely being
00:03:04.080 present in a mind does not automatically get a meme expressed as behaviour. The meme has to compete
00:03:10.800 for that privilege with other ideas, memes and non-memes about all sorts of subjects in the same
00:03:16.320 mind and merely being expressed as behaviour does not automatically get the same meme copied
00:03:21.760 into a recipient along with other memes. It has to compete for the recipient's attention
00:03:26.800 and acceptance with all sorts of behaviours by other people and with the recipient's own ideas.
00:03:32.320 All that is in addition to the analogue of the type of selection that genes face.
00:03:36.320 Each meme competing with rival versions of itself across the population,
00:03:40.560 perhaps by containing the knowledge for some useful function, memes are subject to all sorts
00:03:45.280 of random and intentional variation in addition to that selection and so they evolve.
00:03:51.600 So to this extent the same logic holds as for genes, memes are selfish, they do not necessarily
00:03:57.440 evolve to benefit their holders or their society or again even themselves except in the sense
00:04:02.800 of replicating better than other memes. Though now most other memes are their rivals,
00:04:07.600 not just variants of themselves. The successful meme variant is the one that changes the behaviour
00:04:12.640 of its holders in such a way as to make itself best at displacing other memes from the population.
00:04:18.720 This variant may well benefit its holders or their culture or the species as a whole,
00:04:23.680 but if it harms them or destroys them, it will spread anyway. Memes that harm society are a
00:04:28.800 familiar phenomenon. You need only consider the harm done by adherence of political views or
00:04:32.880 religions that you are especially a bore. Societies have been destroyed because some of the
00:04:37.200 memes that were best at spreading through the population were bad for a society. I should
00:04:42.000 discuss one example in Chapter 17 and countless individuals have been harmed or killed by adopting
00:04:47.280 memes that were bad for them, such as irrational political ideologies or dangerous fads.
00:04:51.680 Fortunately, in the case of memes that is not the whole story, to understand the rest of the
00:04:56.800 story, we have to consider the basic strategies by which memes cause themselves to be faithfully
00:05:01.680 replicated. Okay, pausing there just my brief reflection on this. This is reminiscent in some
00:05:08.800 sense to what in biology is called the naturalistic fallacy, which I've talked about before.
00:05:15.120 The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that if something is natural, then therefore it's good.
00:05:19.680 I think of new age types or people who believe and only living a paleo diet. Think of people who
00:05:27.440 regard chemicals as altogether bad and only things which appear biologically natural are good.
00:05:34.320 But of course, all that style of thinking is refuted by funnel-web spider venom or snake venom.
00:05:41.040 It's a thing that occurs naturally, but it's certainly not good for you and you want the artificial
00:05:46.320 anti-venom if it can be got if you happen to get bitten by one of these things. Lots of natural
00:05:51.360 things like rape or eating your children happen to exist out there in nature among
00:05:58.400 low-off animal forms. But of course, just because it's natural doesn't make it good.
00:06:03.840 So when it comes to humans, what is natural for us is typically what is unnatural for everything
00:06:10.080 else and often what is good, what is unnatural is what is quite good. Creating knowledge is natural
00:06:16.240 for us. Creating technology is natural for us. Sometimes the technologies have side effects which
00:06:21.280 themselves cause certain problems. That's all a natural part of being human. So in a way,
00:06:27.600 the distinction between the natural and the artificial for us is nonsensical. Everything we do
00:06:34.400 is a natural outworking of our creative capacity which we happen to have. But if you're going to say
00:06:39.440 that everything we do is unnatural and therefore bad in some way, then you're caught in this bind of
00:06:45.920 assuming that we should be replicating or repeating or trying to emulate what's going on out there
00:06:52.240 in nature. But you really don't want to emulate the behavior of I don't know. A lion, you know,
00:06:58.640 lions typically eat the children of their competitors. So it's not an ideal society to emulate.
00:07:07.360 Not everything that is natural is good. We already know this. This is straightforward.
00:07:11.920 Related to this kind of naturalistic fallacy, which I think many rational, clear thinking people
00:07:18.480 typically reject this idea of natural is good, is the idea that anything that has evolved in biology
00:07:27.120 is therefore useful or beneficial or even works to some extent. This idea that biological structures
00:07:34.720 exist only if they work well sometimes, but not all ways. The only thing that's being replicated,
00:07:41.440 the only thing that works as the gene, the structure that actually arises, including the whole
00:07:45.520 organism itself, isn't necessarily benefited by the evolutionary process that has led to it.
00:07:52.960 Let's sharpen this up a bit. If you have appendicitis, someone telling you that the existence of the
00:08:00.320 gene that causes your eventual appendicitis that could be a genetic thing, it's small comfort to
00:08:05.440 think that well, in some way, that was natural in some way it has worked. That's why it's there in
00:08:10.320 your body. Well, it's not working for you. It's also not working for you if you happen to have
00:08:14.160 genes as most human beings do for the eventual decay of the discs between the vertebrae and their spine.
00:08:19.360 People get bad backs as they get older. In fact, something as simple as the genes that eventually
00:08:23.920 lead to death, the genes that eventually lead to disease of any kinds. I don't know too much about
00:08:28.880 sharks, but I have read that sharks apparently don't suffer from cancer. So they have good genes
00:08:34.400 that we lack. Our genes apparently allow for the possibility of cancer. If we had different genes,
00:08:40.160 then perhaps we wouldn't. Perhaps we wouldn't have disease of any kind if our genes were slightly
00:08:43.920 different. Perhaps we would live forever if our genes were of a certain kind. That solution
00:08:48.800 must be out there in abstract biological space. People living longer. People living for
00:08:53.440 instead of 80 years, 160 years, perhaps a thousand years. Those genes must be out there somewhere.
00:08:59.280 So the genes that we do have aren't necessarily of great benefit to us necessarily. They can be
00:09:05.040 of some benefit. They can kind of work. They aren't perfect, and there would be better variants
00:09:09.920 out there. And all of these problems that are there within our genes, all these non-ideal structures
00:09:16.560 and features of our lives that we happen to inherit from our genes, we will change gradually
00:09:22.400 with our ideas as we come up with better ways of genetically engineering ourselves, of curing
00:09:27.760 disease, of trying to fix cancer, and so on and so forth, of trying to combat age. Well,
00:09:34.480 that will be memes that will be causing the big changes in us. Not the genes. So genes don't exist
00:09:41.360 because they're necessarily beneficial to the organisms which they give rise to.
00:09:46.160 The same two for memes, just because a meme happens to have survived over and again,
00:09:53.520 does not necessarily mean that it's good for that organism. Or as David says, the society in
00:09:59.040 which it finds itself being replicated. Genes do not have our best interests at heart.
00:10:04.080 Memes do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. So just because a meme is
00:10:08.880 popular does not mean that it's good. In fact, sometimes the opposite. Many memes are very, very harmful.
00:10:17.760 They are, after all, as David has said, selfish. They're all about themselves. To this extent,
00:10:22.720 they do survive. Some do so at our expense. Not all of them, but this is where rational analysis
00:10:29.760 comes in. The meme that says, killing yourself and other innocent people in order to secure a place
00:10:35.520 and eternal paradise is one that does attract people and new adherence every single year. Hopefully
00:10:41.680 less and less every single year as we learn more and as rational dynamic societies spread
00:10:48.720 throughout the world. Nevertheless, this idea of doing harm to yourself and harm to other people
00:10:54.400 in order to appease nasty God in the eternal paradise is something that has persisted over time.
00:11:03.440 It's a meme that gets itself replicated and it resists correction. Often because it's
00:11:08.800 conjoined with other memes that tell you that thinking that that particular meme as false
00:11:14.640 is a reason for you not getting into paradise or a reason that you are deficient in some way.
00:11:19.760 So this is an anti-rational kind of meme. It's a meme that causes itself not to be criticized.
00:11:25.280 It resists criticism. It resists error correction. So therefore it gets replicated in its existing form.
00:11:32.560 Well, not therefore, it exists in its existing form and it is attractive for some reason to
00:11:37.600 the society or to the adherence of the meme. Okay, back to the book and David has just finished
00:11:44.000 the section there that I read by saying I'll repeat it. To understand the rest of the story,
00:11:48.720 we have to consider the basic strategies by which memes cause themselves to be faithfully replicated.
00:11:56.000 And the next section is subtitled static societies and he writes,
00:12:00.320 as I have explained a human brain, quite unlike a genome, is itself an arena of intense
00:12:06.320 variation selection and competition. Most ideas within a brain are created by it for the very purpose
00:12:13.040 of trying them out in imagination, criticizing them and varying them until they meet the person's
00:12:18.640 preferences. In other words, meme replication itself involves evolution within individual brains.
00:12:26.160 In some cases, there can be thousands of cycles of variation and selection before any of the
00:12:30.880 variants is ever enacted. Then, even after a meme has been copied into a new holder,
00:12:35.920 it has not yet completed its life cycle. It still has to survive a further selection process,
00:12:41.200 namely the oldest choice of weather to enact it or not. Pause their just my reflection again.
00:12:47.680 Remember in the last episode, if you heard that there were four kinds of ideas,
00:12:53.360 not all of which are memes. In fact, the first three kinds are not memes.
00:12:57.360 So the four kinds are like this. The first is an idea you simply have,
00:13:02.800 and it causes no behavior in you whatsoever. I might be sitting here and thinking,
00:13:07.200 I wouldn't mind getting a cup of tea. But if I don't act on it, well, it hasn't caused any
00:13:11.920 behavior and I've just thought about it and maybe I've criticized it and I've thought to myself,
00:13:16.560 no, we've already had two cups of tea a day. I don't want another one. Okay, that's an idea of the
00:13:20.720 first type. The idea of the second type is, I wouldn't mind having a cup of tea and actually
00:13:25.600 get up, go over to the kettle and the tea pile and go through the process of making the tea
00:13:29.920 and then drinking the tea. But if there's no one else here in my house and no one ever sees me
00:13:34.720 having that cup of tea, there's no possibility that anyone could ever copy it.
00:13:38.000 And so although it's an idea, it's an idea that's caused a behavior in me. There's no possibility
00:13:42.240 of it being replicated. So that's the second type. So an idea of the third type would be,
00:13:46.720 everything I just did, then in the second type, have the idea of a cup of tea actually going through
00:13:51.440 the process of making the cup tea and someone actually sees me having the cup of tea and drinking
00:13:56.160 the cup of tea. But if they decide not to copy that, well, it's not a meme at all. Okay, it's just
00:14:02.080 an idea that's caused a behavior that they happen to have observed. Now in the fourth type,
00:14:08.400 this is where we have the idea and it causes a behavior in me and I go and have my cup of tea and I
00:14:14.080 drink it here out of my University of Oxford Cup and I put it onto a podcast like this and people
00:14:20.400 who are watching see it and then for whatever reason, lots of people go out and buy University of Oxford
00:14:25.440 Cups and decide to start, I don't know, drinking cups of tea on video. That would be a meme.
00:14:31.760 That is where we've got an idea that has caused behavior that's being replicated. Now that's a
00:14:36.720 silly idea. Most other memes are far more useful and they tend to get replicated because they're
00:14:41.440 solving some kind of problem or they're achieving other some other kind of aim. Although there are
00:14:46.080 memes out there that are just as silly or trivial as that and tend to get replicated. They might
00:14:52.160 not have a long lifespan though. But whatever the case, this is how the broad category of things that
00:14:57.440 we call ideas can be distinguished from memes, the ideas that tend to get replicated and that tend
00:15:03.840 to persist over time, especially across many generations. Not always, maybe they'll only exist for
00:15:10.160 some days or weeks or years. We know this definitely on the internet that there are certain memes
00:15:14.400 that seem to arise and then decline again very quickly. But broadly speaking, memes are things that
00:15:21.520 do persist over many generations and the longest live memes tend to cause cultural changes as well.
00:15:28.800 Now we might consider, I have a couple of volumes up here of Feynman's lectures on physics.
00:15:34.320 Well, they came from a certain history of memes, the history of memes that began with Galileo and Kepler
00:15:41.840 and then Newton, who came up with Newtonian classical physics and those memes were passed on through
00:15:50.080 many generations due to people delivering lectures, convening classes, writing books about them,
00:15:57.520 eventually leading to Feynman himself delivering lectures, which were published in a book which
00:16:03.440 included aspects of Newtonian physics. So that meme has persisted over time and has been refined
00:16:09.920 even and its rate of propagation has increased throughout the world. And in fact, some of the
00:16:16.480 refinements to those original memes tend to improve them and cause them to be replicated
00:16:23.200 in even better ways or to be or to persist even more robustly or to be promoted throughout the
00:16:29.360 world even more than what they otherwise would have been. Feynman himself was very, very good at this.
00:16:34.080 Let's take, for example, something like specific heat capacity. Specific heat capacity is a part
00:16:41.680 of physics, it describes, well, specific heat capacity is defined as the amount of energy required
00:16:50.480 to raise the temperature of one unit mass of a substance, a unit mass is usually regarded in
00:16:55.920 physics as a kilogram by one Kelvin or one degree Celsius. So just to say that again, specific
00:17:01.920 heat capacity, the amount of energy it takes to raise a substance of one kilogram by one degree
00:17:08.240 Celsius. Now, there's all sorts of ways to try and understand and explain this. Feynman had
00:17:14.000 his own way of explaining and understanding this and he taught his students that it's analogous
00:17:20.320 to wetness, that you could describe something that is able to absorb water as having a certain
00:17:28.080 degree of wetness and it can absorb a certain amount of water before it becomes entirely saturated.
00:17:34.720 Some things can hold a lot of water, let's say a big bath towel, and some things can not hold
00:17:40.160 much water at all, let's say a tissue. What's it's got to do with specific heat capacity?
00:17:46.160 Well, people have an idea in their mind, they already have common sense understanding that
00:17:50.720 the tissue cannot hold much water before it becomes saturated, but the bath towel can hold quite
00:17:56.000 a bit of water before it becomes completely saturated. Now, if we extend this analogy to specific
00:18:01.360 heat capacity, the idea here is that some substances like iron cannot hold much heat before their
00:18:07.920 temperature increases. So if you take an iron pot, stainless steel pot and stick it on the stove,
00:18:14.160 then after a few seconds, the temperature will rise very quickly.
00:18:18.080 In order to raise one kilogram of iron by one degree Celsius, it takes very little energy.
00:18:23.840 In comparison to something like water, if you fill that pot with water, what you will notice is
00:18:29.040 it takes a lot of energy, a lot of time, in order to cause the temperature of that water to
00:18:34.160 increase. And the reason is, specific heat capacity, there is this quality of substances
00:18:40.640 that determines how much energy is absorbed to cause the temperature to rise.
00:18:46.080 And what has got to do with means? Well, Feynman's way of explaining this
00:18:51.120 has been regarded by some people involved in physics education as being particularly useful
00:18:56.000 analogy. And so it helps the mean to spread because it makes it easier for some people to learn
00:19:01.040 this concept, to understand this concept of specific heat capacity. So Feynman not only promoted
00:19:07.120 the meme of specific heat capacity, the idea that got replicated over time, but found ways of
00:19:12.000 causing it to be replicated with ever increasing fidelity or certainly to cause it to be spread
00:19:18.480 more widely than it might otherwise would have been. After all, if you're trying to teach someone
00:19:23.360 and not using analogies and not trying to explain things in terms they might already understand,
00:19:30.000 then they may not very well understand it and they won't therefore have behaviors like being able
00:19:35.520 to explain it to someone else later on, causing the meme to otherwise be replicated.
00:19:40.400 So this is what I mean about, there are memes themselves like the meme of trying to
00:19:45.680 analogize something or trying to use a metaphor in order to explain something that themselves can
00:19:50.080 cause other memes like specific heat capacity to be replicated better. Okay, so let's go back to
00:19:55.840 the book and David writes, some of the criteria that a mind uses to make such choices
00:20:01.040 are themselves memes, some are ideas that it has created for itself by altering memes or otherwise
00:20:06.800 and which will never exist in any other mind. Such ideas are potentially highly
00:20:11.680 variable between different people, yet they can decisively affect whether any given meme does
00:20:16.880 or does not survive a given person. Since a person can enact and transmiting memes soon after
00:20:23.200 receiving it, a meme generation can be much shorter than a human generation, and many cycles of
00:20:28.560 variation and selection can take place inside the mind's concern to even during one meme generation.
00:20:34.240 Also, memes can be passed to people other than the holder's biological descendants.
00:20:38.880 Those factors make meme evolution enormously faster than gene evolution which partly explains how
00:20:44.480 memes can contain so much knowledge. Hence, the frequently cited metaphor of the history of life
00:20:51.120 on earth in which human civilization occupies only the final second of the day during which life
00:20:57.040 has so far existed is misleading. In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet
00:21:03.520 to date has occurred in human brains and it has barely begun. The whole of biological evolution
00:21:10.160 was but a preface to the main story of evolution. The evolution of memes, now that bears repeating.
00:21:18.160 You see this in biology textbooks, you see this in geology textbooks. If you regard the
00:21:23.200 beginning of life on earth as being January 1st, then by the time you get to December 31st of
00:21:31.600 that same year, human beings only appear in the final second if you were to spread out evolution
00:21:37.680 that long or geological time anyway that long. So it appears as if we haven't been that
00:21:44.880 profound. We're not very profound compared to all other life on earth, but that's a strange
00:21:50.960 measure of profundity, of the profundity of evolution in the universe. Because really,
00:21:56.880 although there has been a vast amount of evolution biologically speaking, if we consider all forms of
00:22:03.360 evolution, all forms of change that have ever happened, then the evolution of ideas that has
00:22:09.200 happened over time, far outstrips what goes on in biology and will continue to. The
00:22:14.960 rate of change of ideas in human civilization is far, far greater and far faster than anything
00:22:21.760 that's going on in the biological realm. Fast though that may be, it is completely outstripped.
00:22:26.800 So again, as David says, in reality a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date
00:22:32.800 has occurred in human brains and it has barely begun. The whole of biological evolution
00:22:38.880 was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes. If anyone out there
00:22:45.280 listen, ever listens to the podcaster, Joe Rogan. Joe speaks in terms like this now and again
00:22:52.560 when he's in particular moods, he will talk about precisely that actually, how it seems as though
00:22:59.440 his understanding of human beings is that we are giving birth to something that he's not sure
00:23:05.680 of what it is, but it's something technological, something beyond biology, it's something post governed
00:23:12.560 by natural evolutionary laws, or natural biological evolutionary laws. We're moving beyond that.
00:23:20.640 And his common sense understanding of that that he's come to is quite right and in line with
00:23:26.400 this idea that biological evolution is merely a preface to whatever is coming next, this evolution
00:23:32.160 of ideas which might allow us to fly free completely of our biology. At the moment we're not there,
00:23:39.040 at the moment we are very much subject to the biology, but if one day we can have bodies that are
00:23:44.960 more robust and not made out of this meat, we're not packets of meat, but our brains are able to be
00:23:53.600 put into something far more resilient, something like silicon, then evolution will not have a
00:24:00.320 bearing on us. We won't have brains that are determined by genes, we'll have brains instead
00:24:06.480 that run minds that are completely independent of our bodies, and therefore we'll not be subject
00:24:12.480 to the biological necessities that we have, like eating and drinking and so on and so forth, etc.
00:24:20.320 It's just too much to think about. Yeah, but we have to. I know we do have to. One of the things
00:24:25.760 that's always been amusing to me is that we seem to have this insatiable desire to prove things,
00:24:34.880 and I've always wondered why. But is that maybe because this is what human beings are here for?
00:24:41.360 Yeah. It's what we do. It's who we are. But this is a product, it's just us being intelligent,
00:24:47.680 trying to survive against nature and predators and weather and all the different issues that we
00:24:53.040 came up that we evolved growing up and dealing with, and then now we just want things to be better.
00:25:00.080 We just want things to be more convenient, faster, but more data and whatever the case is.
00:25:06.560 This process of meme replication is not controlled by the genes. Now, there are analogous in
00:25:15.600 the sense that both of them evolve, but genes evolve over time and names evolve over time.
00:25:21.760 But the memes are not in the genes, and this is where evolutionary psychology gets things so
00:25:30.720 seriously wrong at times to think that all of our memes, our ideas are in some way, if not determined
00:25:37.760 by, then certainly shaped by biological determinism, that there's genes that cause us to have
00:25:45.040 certain thoughts. Now, that might be true, but that would be the tiniest fraction of thoughts we
00:25:49.920 ever have, ones in which there's some biological antecedent in which you could trace some sort of
00:25:56.480 idea to a gene. That would be a rare exception to the rule. The evolution of memes, also,
00:26:02.080 unlike genes, evolution of memes can be a highly intelligently designed process, because
00:26:10.960 not always, of course, but we are intelligent, and so we can design certain ideas.
00:26:16.240 If we have an idea for a certain kind of architecture, then that's most certainly intelligently designed,
00:26:22.480 and that meme can spread throughout the world and cause certain styles of buildings to be
00:26:28.480 built all over the world, and so that's a certain kind of meme that can spread, it can be replicated,
00:26:32.960 and it's intelligently designed. Now, not, it's not always the case that memes are intelligently
00:26:38.560 designed. Some are not. We would presume that memes that actively tend to destroy the lives of
00:26:46.400 human beings haven't been intelligently designed. They have had reason for non-intelligent reasons,
00:26:52.080 and they persist over time, and they anti-rational in many, many ways. But broadly speaking,
00:26:57.920 many of the memes that we're interested in are these ones that people subject to criticism,
00:27:05.120 that they refine over time, and that propagate because someone wants them to propagate,
00:27:12.160 but not all meme evolution is blind in that sense. Some is, much is not, and that's another
00:27:18.880 key difference with gene evolution. Okay, so I'm going to skip a little here. They have
00:27:24.160 talked about how meme replication is less reliable than gene replication, clearly because people have
00:27:33.520 these creative minds, and so they're constantly changing their ideas, and so that can cause memes to
00:27:40.000 themselves be criticized, destroyed, and therefore not be replicated at all. And he mentions the term
00:27:47.440 intentional variation with respect to memes. This intelligent designing that I was talking,
00:27:52.880 speaking of, I guess my terms a little bit more louder than my David's is,
00:27:57.840 intentional variation, unlike random variation which goes on with the gene. So the intentional
00:28:03.680 variation of a meme can itself cause it to be criticized or varied in such a way that it's not
00:28:10.240 going to be replicated. It's not going to be passed on to the next generation or to another person.
00:28:16.720 In fact, it might be criticized in such a way as it causes no further behavior, even if it's
00:28:21.840 been causing behavior prior to that. People want to improve their ideas, and so therefore,
00:28:29.840 some of the ideas that might have been causing behavior for many, many generations might cease
00:28:34.720 to cause any further behavior. I think of all the ridiculous medical practices that used to go on.
00:28:41.200 Blood letting, for example, you were sick and so the doctor would cut you and release some of your
00:28:46.400 blood because it had the bad stuff in you. Well, that was certainly a meme that went around for a long
00:28:51.200 time. Eventually, someone figured out that was ridiculous and so it ceased to be propagated.
00:28:56.160 And so this is the reason why we can have intentional variation of memes. We can have
00:29:02.720 this intentional variation of memes and therefore, the replication isn't reliable in the sense that
00:29:09.200 you don't get this persistence necessarily. And it's not just for reasons of fitness.
00:29:16.320 We can deliberately stop the replication of memes. We can deliberately stop the replication of certain
00:29:22.720 genes in ourselves as well. But out there in biology, of course, the genes will get replicated
00:29:27.280 as long as their fifth. That's all that is needed. And David goes through a little bit about what
00:29:32.880 dynamic societies are, which I'll talk about in the next episode because I really want to spend
00:29:36.720 most of the time here talking about static societies. But basically, the concept here is that
00:29:42.720 but only post enlightenment societies are dynamic ones. And by dynamic, dynamic, we mean
00:29:50.800 stable under change over time. That's one measure. Making rapid progress, rapid meaning,
00:29:59.120 progress that is noticeable on the time scale of individual human lives. And even today,
00:30:04.400 we'd want something even more rapid than that within a year, we noticed a certain amount of progress.
00:30:09.520 A new smart phones come out every single year. If a year went by where a new kind of car
00:30:16.800 did not come out, then we'd think it a bit strange. Sure, a new piece of software didn't come out.
00:30:20.960 The rate of progress is increasing. The rate of change is increasing. So we notice that year-on-year,
00:30:27.040 this is the feature of a dynamic society. But then what are the features of a static society?
00:30:32.400 Well, let's turn to the book and David writes. For a society to be static, all its memes must be
00:30:38.400 unchanging, or changing too slowly to be noticed. From the perspective of our rapidly changing
00:30:44.000 society, such a state of affairs is hard to even imagine. For instance, consider an isolated,
00:30:49.840 primitive society that has, whatever reason, remained almost unchanged for many generations.
00:30:55.600 Why? Quite possibly, no one in the society wants it to change, because they can conceive of no
00:31:02.000 other way of life. Nevertheless, its members are not immune from pain, hunger, grief, fear, or other
00:31:08.560 forms of physical and mental suffering. They try to think of ideas to alleviate some of that suffering.
00:31:13.600 Some of those ideas are original, and occasionally, one of them would actually help. It
00:31:18.640 need only be a small, tentative improvement, a way of hunting or growing food, but slightly less
00:31:23.120 effort, or of making slightly better tools, a better way of recording debt or laws, a subtle
00:31:27.840 change in the relationship between husband and wife, or between parent and child, are slightly
00:31:31.920 different attitude towards a society's rulers or gods. What will happen next?
00:31:37.360 The person with the idea may well want to tell other people. Those who believe the idea
00:31:43.040 will see that it could make life a little less nasty, brutish, and short. They will tell their
00:31:48.160 families and friends, and they theirs. This idea will be competing in people's minds with other
00:31:53.680 ideas about how to make life better. Most of them, presumably, false. But suppose for the sake
00:31:59.280 of argument that this particular true idea happens to be believed, and spreads through the society.
00:32:05.440 Then the society will have been changed. It may not have changed very much, but this was merely
00:32:11.040 the change caused by a single person thinking of a single idea. So multiply all that by the
00:32:16.960 number of thinking minds in the society, and by the lifetimes worth of thought in each of them,
00:32:22.160 and let this continue for only a few generations, and the result is an exponentially increasing,
00:32:26.880 revolutionary force transforming every aspect of society. And quote, and pause there.
00:32:33.440 Now, this mirror doesn't at all the way back to chapter one of the beginning of infinity.
00:32:40.480 People want to be less hungry, suffer less. They want to improve their lives. They want to be
00:32:46.320 less disease. They want to grow more food, etc. They have problems. And what do they want to do?
00:32:52.800 Well, they want to explain the world around them. So the quest for good explanations
00:32:59.440 is what causes the society to change over time.
00:33:03.680 What normally preoccupied them also involved, yearning to know, they wish they knew
00:33:10.320 how to prevent their food supply from sometimes failing, and how they could rest when they were
00:33:17.680 tired without risking starvation. Be warmer, cooler, safer, in less pain. I bet those prehistoric
00:33:29.760 cave artists would have loved to know how to draw better.
00:33:34.560 Because the quest for good explanations is a problem-solving enterprise. And where we find solutions
00:33:44.240 to the problems that we have, then those solutions, if they're effective, can become memes
00:33:49.440 that transmit themselves throughout society. And a special case of memes would be good explanations,
00:33:56.080 hard to vary explanations. And so when you've got a hard to vary explanation, a good explanation
00:34:02.160 of a particularly pressing problem that society has, then you have a beginning of infinity.
00:34:09.040 Because then you have the capacity to incrementally, over time, improve your ideas, and continue to
00:34:17.520 solve that particular problem and related problems. And more interesting problems as well, back to the
00:34:22.160 book. They have rights. But in a static society, that beginning of infinity never happens.
00:34:29.120 Despite the fact that I have assumed nothing other than that people try to improve their lives,
00:34:34.880 and that they cannot transmit their ideas perfectly, and that information subject to variation
00:34:40.080 and selection of roles, I have entirely failed to imagine a static society in this story,
00:34:46.560 because they're my reflection. So that's interesting. So he tried to imagine what a static society
00:34:53.040 was by assuming that nothing more than that people wanted to improve their lives.
00:35:03.840 This has caused him to actually imagine a dynamic society, a society which causes problems to be
00:35:08.800 solved at the time. He's imagined a dynamic society. And so he goes on to write, David goes on to write,
00:35:15.280 quote, for a society to be static, something else must be happening as well. One thing my
00:35:21.680 story did not take into account is that static societies have customs and laws to booze that prevent
00:35:28.160 their memes from changing. They enforced the enactment of existing memes, forbid the enactment
00:35:33.920 of variants and suppressed criticism of the status quo. However, that alone could not suppress
00:35:39.360 change. First, no enactment of a meme is completely identical to that of the previous generation.
00:35:45.360 It is infeasible to specify every aspect of acceptable behavior with perfect precision. Second,
00:35:50.320 it is impossible to tell in advance, which small deviations from traditional behavior
00:35:55.200 would initiate further changes. Third, once a variant idea has begun to spread to even one more
00:36:01.840 person, which means that people are preferring it. Preventing it from being transmitted further
00:36:06.160 is extremely difficult. Therefore, no society could remain static solely by suppressing new
00:36:11.680 ideas once they have been created. That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only
00:36:17.440 a very secondary method of preventing change, a mopping up operation. The primary method is
00:36:23.360 always and only can be to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity.
00:36:32.160 Let's pause there. Let's just read that again because I think this is so profound
00:36:39.600 and poorly understood out there, especially among people who are otherwise very interested in this
00:36:46.560 question about why do some societies make progress slower than others? Is it that these
00:36:54.400 fast dynamic wealthy societies are oppressing these other societies? And some people will come
00:37:01.200 with the answer and say, no, it's not our fault. It's not the fault of the West, the enlightenment
00:37:07.280 societies, that some other societies aren't quite as wealthy. The problem is that in those societies,
00:37:13.360 there's a form of tyranny or enforcement of the status quo. Well, that's part of the answer. But
00:37:20.880 as David says there and let's just reread it, he says, quote, the enforcement of the status quo
00:37:28.640 is only every secondary method of preventing change, a mopping up operation. The primary method
00:37:36.160 is always and can only be to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So,
00:37:43.840 static societies always have traditions of bring up children in ways that disable their creativity
00:37:50.080 and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable
00:37:55.840 of changing the society, I never thought of in the first place, pausing there again.
00:38:01.040 Okay, so it's worse than merely having a government let's say, which is oppressive and tyrannical.
00:38:10.000 Something else is going on at a much deeper level where the culture is such that children and
00:38:19.280 others never have the idea in the first place to improve the society because there are other
00:38:25.520 ideas in their mind, means causing them to be afraid, fearful, or simply unable to have new ideas.
00:38:35.040 Because as soon as the genesis of the idea begins to make itself known to the thinker,
00:38:41.280 these means clamp down on that, prevent it from reaching fruition. They undermine
00:38:49.440 disabled human creativity, which is a remarkable thing. And so let's read what I think is a
00:38:59.120 discovery by David Deutsch with respect to mean theory. I haven't read it anywhere else. I've
00:39:05.360 read a few books on mean theory, but this is the first time I've read this solution to that problem
00:39:14.560 of why people might not be able to be in a position necessarily to criticize the ideas that cause
00:39:23.280 their society to be static and not make progress and solve problems in the way that other societies
00:39:29.840 might be better at. David writes, how is this done? The details are variable not relevant here,
00:39:35.040 but the sort of thing that happens is that people are growing up in such a society,
00:39:39.200 acquire a set of values for judging themselves and everyone else, which amounts to reading themselves
00:39:46.880 of distinctive attributes and seeking only conformity with the society's constitutive means.
00:39:54.080 They not only enact those means, they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them.
00:40:00.960 So not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience, piety, and devotion to duty,
00:40:06.960 their members sense of their own selves is invested in the same standards. People know no others.
00:40:12.880 So they feel pride and shame and form all their aspirations and opinions by the criterion
00:40:19.600 of how thoroughly they subordinate themselves to the society's means. Okay, so just pausing there and
00:40:25.520 I'm reflecting on that. Here's the idea that there are certain kinds of means which
00:40:33.280 disable the ability of their holders of thinking it's anything new because their creativity
00:40:42.080 instead is being used to ever more faithfully enact the status quo. Okay, and then David writes,
00:40:52.880 quote, how do memes know how to achieve all such complex reproducible effects on the ideas
00:40:59.520 and behavior of human beings? They do not of course know. They are not sentient beings. They
00:41:04.720 merely contain that knowledge implicitly. How did they come by that knowledge? It evolved.
00:41:10.400 The memes exist at any instant in many different variant forms and those are subject to selection
00:41:15.760 and favor of faithful replication. For every long-lived meme of a static society,
00:41:22.080 millions of variants will have fallen by the wayside because they lack that tiny
00:41:25.840 extra piece of information, that extra degree of ruthless efficiency in preventing rivals
00:41:31.360 from being thought of or acted upon. That slight advantage in psychological leverage
00:41:36.480 or whatever it took to make it spread through the population better than at travels and,
00:41:41.120 once it was prevalent, to get it copied and enacted with just that extra degree of fidelity.
00:41:47.520 If ever a variant happened to be a little better at inducing behavior with those self-replicating
00:41:52.560 properties, it soon became prevalent. As soon as it did, there were again many variants of that
00:41:58.160 variant which were again subject to the same evolutionary pressure. Thus, successive versions of the
00:42:05.040 meme accumulated knowledge that enabled them to ever more reliably inflict their characteristic
00:42:10.640 style of damage on their human victims. Like genes, they may also confer benefits though,
00:42:16.080 even then, they are unlikely to do so optimally. Just as genes for the eye implicitly know
00:42:22.080 the laws of optics, so the long-lived memes of a static society implicitly possess knowledge
00:42:28.080 of the human condition and use it mercilessly to evade the defences and exploit the weaknesses
00:42:33.760 of the human minds that they enslave. Then skipping a substantial bit here, where David talks
00:42:40.960 about time scales, and he says that static societies are not perfectly unchanging,
00:42:47.840 but certainly primitive societies would have been static by our, any measure that we would
00:42:56.560 think of as being static. Over the course of anyone's lifetime, nothing would have been improved
00:43:01.200 much. Your life would have been the same as your parents' lives, would have been the same
00:43:04.880 as your grandparents' lives, and so on, back hundreds or thousands of generations.
00:43:09.760 David also then mentions the fact that meme evolution tends to make memes static,
00:43:16.800 but not necessarily whole society static. Memes, he says, do not evolve to benefit the group,
00:43:23.920 just like genes, as we were saying, the genes, not only don't benefit necessarily to benefit the
00:43:31.280 group, genes don't even exist to benefit the individuals in which they exist as well.
00:43:39.040 They might, but the gene is there to try and get itself replicated, and that can be via various
00:43:45.120 means, which might not include necessarily the survival of that particular individual,
00:43:50.400 let alone that particular group. Okay, and then I'll pick it up where David says, quote,
00:43:56.880 a static society forms when there is no escape from this effect, or significant behavior,
00:44:02.800 or relationships between people, and all thoughts are subordinated to causing
00:44:06.640 faithful replication of the memes. In all areas controlled by the memes,
00:44:10.960 no critical faculties are exercised, no innovation is tolerated, and almost none is attempted.
00:44:16.720 This destruction of human minds makes static societies almost unimaginable from our perspective,
00:44:21.840 countless human beings hoping throughout lifetimes and for generations for their suffering to be
00:44:26.800 relieved, not only fail to make progress in realizing any such hope, they largely fail even to try
00:44:32.960 to make any, or even to think about trying. If they do see an opportunity, they reject it.
00:44:38.800 The spirit of creativity with which we are born is systematically extinguished in them before it can
00:44:45.920 ever create anything new. A static society involves, in a sense consists of, a relentless struggle
00:44:53.520 to prevent knowledge from growing. But there is more to it than that, for there is no reason to
00:44:58.240 expect that a rapidly spreading idea if one did happen to arise in a static society would be true
00:45:03.920 or useful. That is another aspect missing from my story of a static society above that David
00:45:10.160 imagined. I assumed that the change would be for the better. It might not have been,
00:45:16.560 especially as the lack of critical sophistication in a static society would leave people vulnerable to
00:45:22.000 false and harmful ideas from which their taboos did not predict them. And then David mentions
00:45:27.920 the example which I won't read about, the Black Death, and all the bad ideas that people
00:45:32.720 used to use in order to try and cure disease like the Black Death, killing Jews, killing witches,
00:45:39.760 flagellating yourself, all these silly things that of course didn't work. In fact,
00:45:45.280 caused far more harm than good. And then he goes on to write, thus ironically, there is much
00:45:51.120 truth in the typical static society fear that any change is much more likely to do harm than good.
00:45:58.000 Okay, so pausing that as my reflection. Yeah, any change is more likely to do harm than good.
00:46:03.600 When we talk about progress, we're not just talking about change for changes sake. After all,
00:46:09.200 most change that could happen could be random. And a random change should not be expected to
00:46:16.000 improve things, quite the opposite. A lot of institutions that exist, a lot of ideas that we have,
00:46:21.120 have evolved over time, and weathered the criticisms that have been brought to bear against it, and
00:46:28.160 have survived. And so we end up with robust ideas, good ideas, good institutions, any change to that,
00:46:35.840 any random change is going to be for the worse. What we need is very carefully calibrated change
00:46:42.240 that itself is subject to criticism, which can cause change in a particular direction that we
00:46:47.120 call progress. So back to the book and David writes, static society survive by effectively
00:46:54.720 eliminating the type of evolution that is unique to memes, namely creative variation intended
00:47:00.640 to meet the holders individual preferences. In the absence of that, meme evolution resembles
00:47:05.920 gene evolution more closely, and some of the grim conclusions of the naive analogies between them
00:47:11.120 apply after all. Static societies do tend to settle issues by violence, and they do tend to
00:47:16.960 sacrifice the welfare of individuals for the good of that is to say for the prevention of changes
00:47:21.440 in society. I mentioned that people who rely on such analogies end up either advocating a static
00:47:26.960 society or condoning violence and oppression. We now see that those two responses are essentially
00:47:32.640 the same. Oppression is what it takes to keep a society static. Oppression of a given kind will not
00:47:38.480 last long until the society is static. Since the sustained exponential growth of knowledge has unmistakable
00:47:45.120 effects, we can deduce without historical research that every society on earth before the current
00:47:50.560 western civilization has either been static or has been destroyed within a few generations.
00:47:56.880 The golden ages of Athens and Florence are examples that are latter, but there may have been others.
00:48:01.360 This directly contradicts the widely held belief that individuals in primitive societies
00:48:05.520 were happy and away that has not been possible since. They were unconstrained by social
00:48:10.400 convention and other imperatives of civilization, and hence were able to achieve self-expression
00:48:14.960 and fulfillment of their needs and desires. But primitive societies, including tribes of hunter
00:48:20.080 gatherers, must all have been static societies. Because if ever one ceased to be static,
00:48:26.480 it would soon cease to be primitive. Or else destroy itself by losing its distinctive knowledge.
00:48:31.440 In the latter case, the growth of knowledge would still be inhibited by the raw violence which
00:48:34.960 would be immediately, which would immediately replace the static societies institution.
00:48:39.200 For once violence is mediating changes, they would typically not be for the better.
00:48:44.400 Since static societies cannot exist without effectively extinguishing the growth of knowledge,
00:48:48.400 they cannot allow their members much opportunity to pursue happiness. Ironically,
00:48:52.960 creating knowledge itself is itself a natural human need and desire. And static societies,
00:48:59.840 however primitive, are naturally suppressed. I'll say that again because I think I bespoke a little,
00:49:04.800 but it's worth repeating. Creating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire.
00:49:12.560 Creating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire. So as I was saying right at the
00:49:18.400 beginning of this, so much of what is regarded as unnatural, artificial and therefore bad,
00:49:24.720 it's actually what we do naturally. Creating knowledge, this whole natural artificial,
00:49:29.760 natural, unnatural distinction is a chimera of sorts. It's a silly way of trying to divide up
00:49:36.640 any aspect of reality. Unless you're a biologist, I suppose. Moving on, David writes.
00:49:42.720 From the point of view of every individual in such a society, its creativity,
00:49:47.200 suppressing mechanisms are catastrophically harmful. Every static society must leave its
00:49:52.720 members chronically borked in their attempts to achieve anything positive for themselves as people.
00:49:57.600 Or indeed anything at all. Other than their meme mandated behaviors, it can perpetuate itself
00:50:04.480 only by suppressing its member self-expression and breaking their spirits and its memes are
00:50:09.760 exquisitely adapted to doing this. And that's where we'll end. The next section is about
00:50:15.280 dynamic societies. So just to summarize all of this, the reason a static society exists
00:50:23.200 and persists over time, despite having creative people within it, is that the creativity
00:50:31.040 has been disabled and all being used to ever more faithfully enact the status quo.
00:50:40.720 And it does that because all the other kinds of creativity have been switched off, disabled,
00:50:46.960 especially in young people. They're threatened with violence and violence is used,
00:50:51.680 they're told that they're going to an eternal hell of suffering if they do not enact the rituals
00:50:57.920 in the same way that has always been done. If they seek to improve something, then that would be
00:51:03.680 regarded as unholy or unnatural. And so in this way, the society remains the same over time,
00:51:10.480 it remains static. Even if the people would like things to improve, they have no means by which
00:51:16.960 to improve because the ideas are switched off. And it's not to say that our society is perfectly
00:51:22.320 dynamic and that we lack these kind of irrational memes. We're going to learn about that in the very
00:51:28.240 next part that we talk about, about dynamic societies. And then after that, the real distinction,
00:51:35.840 the rational versus anti-rational memes. But that's the next time. Until then, let's see it.
00:51:41.920 As always, thank you to everyone who's supporting me. I have means and ways by which you can support
00:51:48.720 my ongoing efforts with this via Patreon. Just look up, top-cast Patreon or Brett Hall Patreon.
00:51:55.680 You can also pay power me, which a couple of people have and thank you very much to those people.
00:52:02.320 Once more, I'm able to bring these out and buy little gadgets like this to hopefully improve
00:52:07.680 the quality somewhat with people's contributions. So thank you very much for that. Until next time, bye-bye.
