00:00:23.280 Welcome to Topcast, the beginning of infinity, chapter 15, the evolution of culture,
00:00:28.400 and now the section on dynamic societies and more about memes, anti-rational and rational memes.
00:00:37.200 In the last part we talked primarily about static societies, the conditions under which things go wrong
00:00:44.560 and cause societies to cease making progress. Therefore we have stasis and the key driver of stasis
00:00:53.200 of static societies are these things called anti-rational memes, anti-rational memes are those
00:00:59.440 ideas which disable the holders critical faculties. I actively prevent people from thinking of new
00:01:06.640 ideas and therefore if everyone in society possesses those same kind of memes the entire society
00:01:12.560 grinds to a halt in terms of its progress which causes it to cease making progress across all
00:01:18.240 domains, scientific, moral, spiritual, aesthetic, there ceases to be optimism that things can
00:01:25.920 improve and the society becomes pessimistic. So here when we get into a discussion as we're about
00:01:31.760 to about dynamic societies we are bringing together many threads from the beginning of infinity,
00:01:38.400 this idea of good explanations which enable us to transform the world that we live in,
00:01:44.720 this idea of optimism where we believe that all evils are due to a simple lack of knowledge and
00:01:51.360 if only, I say simple, but if only we create the knowledge then we can solve those problems which
00:01:56.560 are evil which are causing us suffering or whatever else happens to be a problem for us at any
00:02:01.200 particular point in time. So the idea in some sense the idea of a static society is in many ways
00:02:08.960 easier to appreciate because the vast majority of societies that have ever existed have been static
00:02:15.600 and as a consequence they've typically gone extinct and even if they haven't been perfectly static
00:02:21.200 they've been unable to make progress in time, they've been unable to solve certain problems
00:02:26.640 in time and so therefore the society itself has gone extinct in one way or another. As David has
00:02:32.960 said in many places we can be the exception to this rule. At the moment we are the exception to
00:02:39.360 this rule. Our culture is one of criticism which is a very unusual thing. Traditions traditionally
00:02:47.360 are those things that remain the same in a society over time and in our society what is different
00:02:54.960 is that our tradition is one where we have constant change, a tradition of criticism, our tradition
00:03:01.040 of being able to find the faults and flaws, weaknesses and improvements in our existing ideas and
00:03:08.400 institutions and so on and for this reason we're a dynamic society. For this reason we are able to
00:03:14.720 have ongoing progress which is sufficiently fast but also does not destabilise the society which is
00:03:23.200 called dynamic, our society which is called dynamic. We manage to make progress without falling apart.
00:03:29.280 There can be all sorts of changes that society could undergo which could in many ways destabilise
00:03:36.400 the society this is when we have revolutionary type change and that could cause the society to go
00:03:42.080 extinct. So it in a sense might not be static because there could be change going on but it's not
00:03:48.640 changed for the better, it's changed for the worse and in that sense we can throw all of those
00:03:53.840 kind of societies into the one bin, into the one bin of being not a dynamic society in the way
00:04:00.320 that David Deutsch is about to explain. So let's just go to the book and David writes,
00:04:06.240 subtitle dynamic societies. But our society, the West, is not a static society. It is the only
00:04:13.600 known instance of a long lived dynamic rapidly changing society. It is unique in history for
00:04:19.600 its ability to mediate long-term, rapid, peaceful change and improvement including
00:04:24.640 improvements in the broad consensus about values and aims as I described in chapter 13.
00:04:29.360 This has been made possible by the emergence of a radically different class of memes which
00:04:34.560 though still selfish are not necessarily harmful to individuals. To explain the nature of these
00:04:40.080 new memes let me pose the question. What sort of meme can cause itself to be replicad for long
00:04:45.440 periods in a rapidly changing environment? In such an environment people are continually being
00:04:51.680 faced with unpredictable problems and opportunities. Hence their needs and wishes are changing
00:04:55.920 unpredictably too. How can a meme remain unchanged under such a regime? The memes of a static
00:05:02.320 society remain unchanged by effectively eliminating all the individual's choices. People choose neither
00:05:08.160 which ideas to acquire nor which to enact. Those memes also combine to make the society static.
00:05:14.320 So the people's circumstances vary as little as possible. But once the stasis has been broken
00:05:19.840 and people are choosing, they will choose in part according to their individual circumstances
00:05:25.440 and ideas. In which case memes will face selection criteria that vary unpredictably from
00:05:31.920 recipient to recipient as well as over time. Just pausing that as my very brief reflection. Again
00:05:37.680 this idea which is so important and central to David Deutscher's philosophy of civilization for
00:05:45.040 one of another term is this idea that we can have certain things remaining the same in an environment
00:05:53.440 which is changing rapidly. So there must be certain ideas or memes that our society possesses
00:06:00.400 that remains stable over time despite everything else in the society more or less changing completely.
00:06:07.040 And one of those is this idea of respect for criticism. This idea that nothing should be dog
00:06:13.760 medically held. Of course people in a dynamic society will embrace certain dogmas. They will
00:06:20.080 regard certain things as holy or beyond criticism. But not an overwhelming majority of people in
00:06:27.120 the wappy legal structures in a society that prevent criticism even of those deeply held beliefs
00:06:33.760 so to speak. Okay let's continue and David writes. To be transferred to a single person,
00:06:40.560 a meme needs seem useful only to that person. To be transferred to a group of similar people under
00:06:46.080 changing circumstances, it need be only a parochial truth. But what sort of idea is best suited
00:06:51.920 to getting itself adopted many times in succession by many people who have diverse, unpredictable
00:06:58.160 objectives. A true idea is a good candidate but not just any truthful. It must seem useful to
00:07:04.880 all those people. For it is they who will be choosing whether to enact it or not.
00:07:09.600 Useful in this context is not necessarily mean functionally useful. It refers to any property
00:07:14.240 that can make people want to adopt an idea and enact it. Such as being interesting, funny,
00:07:19.440 elegant, easily remembered, morally right and so on. And the best way to seem useful to diverse
00:07:25.440 people under diverse, unpredictable circumstances is to be useful. Such an idea is or embodies a
00:07:33.120 truth in the broadest sense. Factually true if it is an assertion of fact. Beautiful if it is an
00:07:39.280 artistic value or behaviour. Objectively right if it is a moral value. Funny if it is a joke
00:07:45.040 and so on. The ideas with the best chance of surviving through many generations of change
00:07:50.960 are truths with rich, deep truths. People are fallible. They often have preferences for false
00:07:58.400 shallow, useless or morally wrong ideas. But which false ideas they prefer differs from one
00:08:04.000 person to another and changes with time. Under change circumstances, a specious falsehood or a
00:08:10.160 parochial truth can survive only by luck. But a true deep idea has an objective reason to be
00:08:15.920 considered useful by people with diverse purposes over long periods. For instance, Newton's laws are
00:08:22.880 useful for building better cathedrals, but also for building better bridges and designing better
00:08:27.520 artillery. Because of this reach, they get themselves remembered and enacted by all sorts of people.
00:08:33.920 Many of them vehemently oppose to each other's objectives over many generations. This is the kind
00:08:39.200 of idea that has a chance of becoming a long-lived meme in a rapidly changing society. In fact,
00:08:45.120 such memes are not merely capable of surviving, under rapidly changing criteria of criticism.
00:08:50.240 They positively rely on such criticism for their faithful replication. Unprotected
00:08:55.360 by any enforcement of the status quo or suppression of people's critical faculties,
00:08:59.840 they are criticized. But so are their rivals, and their rivals fare worse and are not enacted.
00:09:06.240 In the absence of such criticism, true ideas no longer have that advantage,
00:09:10.960 and can deteriorate or be superseded, pausing their just my reflection on this.
00:09:16.560 So here is the idea, central concept really, that the reason the useful ideas manage to survive,
00:09:25.840 even though there's rapid change going on in the society more widely, is because rivals too,
00:09:33.280 the very useful, the very true ideas, are being criticized as well as the useful and true
00:09:38.800 ideas being criticized. But those rivals fail to be replicated because they're rightly criticized,
00:09:45.600 shown to be false, shown to be wanting in some way, and so they tend not to get replicated.
00:09:51.120 But because the useful idea survives the process of criticism, that makes it more robust in a sense.
00:09:58.160 It is able to weather the storms of criticism, and everyone around can see that it's useful for
00:10:03.520 doing useful stuff like building bridges, making better artillery in the case of Newton's laws.
00:10:10.400 Let's move on to rational and anti-rational names, which really gets to the heart of this particular
00:10:16.160 matter. So I'll just get into reading it. Rational and anti-rational memes. Thus, memes of this
00:10:23.200 new kind, which are created by rational and critical thought, subsequently also depend on such thought
00:10:29.200 to get themselves replicated faithfully. So I shall call them rational memes.
00:10:35.040 Memes of the older, static society kind, which survived by disabling their holders' critical
00:10:40.000 faculties, I shall call anti-rational memes. Okay, already I'm going to pause there, because clearly
00:10:46.960 we're jumping in at a point where David is referring to something that he just said in the previous
00:10:52.720 section. So I guess it's important that we reread that previous section, and he writes in the
00:10:59.600 paragraph prior to this new section, such memes are not merely capable of surviving under rapidly
00:11:06.080 changing criteria of criticism. They positively rely on such criticism for their faithful replication.
00:11:12.720 Unprotected by any enforcement of the status quo or suppression of people's faculties,
00:11:16.960 they are criticized, but so are their rivals, and the rivals fear worse and are not enacted.
00:11:23.120 In the absence of such criticism, true ideas no longer have that advantage and can deteriorate
00:11:28.480 or be superseded. And so what David is saying here is that the rational memes, this kind of idea,
00:11:36.960 this kind of meme, survives not because of the suppression of critical faculties, but it thrives
00:11:42.640 in an environment of criticism, because the rivals are themselves criticized out of existence.
00:11:48.160 They're refuted leaving behind the rational memes, but of course we're about to get to the key
00:11:53.600 point here about anti-rational memes that managed to get replicated despite criticism back to the
00:12:01.440 book. Rational and anti-rational memes have sharpening differing properties, originating in their
00:12:08.000 fundamentally different replication strategies. They are about as different from each other as they
00:12:13.680 are both from genes. If a certain type of hobgoblin has the property that, if children fear it,
00:12:19.920 they will grow up to make their children fear it, then the behaviour of telling stories about
00:12:24.880 that type of hobgoblin is a meme. Suppose it is a rational meme, then criticism over generations
00:12:30.720 will cast doubt on the story's truth. In reality, there are no hobgoblins, the meme might
00:12:35.760 evolve away to extinction. Note that it does not care if it goes extinct, memes do what they
00:12:41.280 have to do, they have no intentions even about themselves, but there are also other paths that it
00:12:46.320 might evolve down. It might become overtly fictional. Because rational memes must be seen as
00:12:52.000 beneficial by the holders, those that evoke unpleasant emotions are at a disadvantage, so it may
00:12:58.480 also evolve away from evoking terror and towards, for instance, being pleasantly thrilling, or else,
00:13:04.080 if it is settled on a genuine danger, exploring practicalities for the present and optimism for the
00:13:10.160 future. Pause there, my diversion, I suppose, here. Consider Halloween, Halloween is a perfect
00:13:16.560 example of this. It is supposed to be a little bit scary, and I guess the Christian tradition of
00:13:24.480 all souls day, thinking about the dead and various other traditions, thinking about the dead,
00:13:29.040 it's not all that pleasant, but Halloween has morphed into this more thrilling, exciting type
00:13:35.680 celebration, where kids get together and get to have lollies or candy and sweets and so on.
00:13:41.680 It wouldn't persist in its present form, and it wouldn't have persisted for so long.
00:13:46.640 If it wasn't pleasant, if it didn't have that thrilling sort of aspect, even though ostensibly,
00:13:51.680 it's supposed to be a scary kind of a thing, and people are supposed to scare one another,
00:13:56.080 but not terrified of them. And as another related aside to this, when it comes to talking about
00:14:03.360 absolutely terrible memes that can be created and then take on a life of their own,
00:14:10.880 well, I typically don't call out people on this podcast. It's not a thing that I do,
00:14:18.320 I'm going to make an exception. I'm going to make an exception for the talk show host in the USA
00:14:24.560 Jimmy Kimmel. Each year, for a number of years now, Jimmy Kimmel has had this Halloween show and this
00:14:33.200 segment on his Halloween show, where the humor is supposed to come from, adults sending in videos
00:14:42.240 to Jimmy Kimmel, playing a prank on their children, their unsuspecting children, their innocent
00:14:49.120 children, that all of their hard-earned, carefully collected over many hours on the night of
00:14:55.280 Halloween, all of their candy that they've collected, has been eaten by their parents.
00:15:00.400 And you can look this up. I've sort of been two minds about promoting it. I don't really want to
00:15:04.400 promote it. I think it's absolutely a terrible idea. I think many people who watch it can barely
00:15:10.800 get through the segment because it's disturbing. It's public child abuse. Many people wouldn't
00:15:17.200 see it in those terms. Of course they won't because we still exist in this culture of memes that
00:15:22.240 says it's okay to cause a child to cry. Now, telling a child that the candy that they have
00:15:30.720 collected on Halloween has all been eaten by mum and dad as a joke is kind of like, I suppose,
00:15:38.400 the bank, the bank ringing up the parents and saying, excuse me, Mr. and Mrs. Smith,
00:15:45.600 very sorry about this, the bank's finances are in disarray and the only way that we can keep the
00:15:51.360 bank afloat is to call in all the mortgages. So unless you can pay off your $400,000 mortgage
00:15:57.120 right now, we're taking the house and you have two weeks to vacate and hanging up the phone,
00:16:02.160 telling you have no legal recourse. That's approximately, I guess, a similar sensation that would be
00:16:09.600 evoked in the parents as the children. The parents would be extremely upset, extremely disturbed,
00:16:16.960 emotionally violated in many ways. And it wouldn't be funny if the bank rang back in 10 minutes
00:16:23.920 and said, April fools, just jerking, but with children, you know, they're equivalent of money
00:16:30.400 if they don't have any, is the candy. Something they've worked hard for over many hours.
00:16:34.720 So why this continues to be a segment on Jimmy Kimmel, despite many, many people
00:16:42.960 informing him that it's a form of abuse, he shouldn't be promoting it, he shouldn't be laughing
00:16:47.280 at these children, it is a bad thing. He persists with it, and he persists with it because the
00:16:52.720 culture is saturated in this stuff. A child hurts themselves and we're supposed to laugh.
00:16:59.200 Now, of course, shout and Freud is a real thing. We found a friend for you to play with.
00:17:21.360 You know, as someone trips over in the street, some people's first impulse is to laugh. I think
00:17:26.480 that's kind of unfortunate at times. There are certainly funny YouTube clips you can see
00:17:30.640 where people are deliberately doing things silly, deliberately running the risk of causing themselves
00:17:35.680 injury. Something goes wrong, and it is kind of funny because they've brought it upon themselves.
00:17:40.720 But when people don't bring these things upon themselves, I for one don't tend to find humor
00:17:46.880 in it. If they're actually suffering, if it's not merely tripping over and causing them
00:17:53.600 no pain, and it's just a funny way in which someone falls, okay, that can be funny.
00:17:57.840 If someone trips over and breaks their leg and is laying on the ground suffering, that's not funny.
00:18:02.800 They're hurt, and emotional hurt is the same kind of thing. So when people hurt children in this
00:18:08.560 way, as Jimmy Kimmel does, and I guess to make given that this has become a bit of a rant now,
00:18:13.520 I'm going to have to put up some vision of this, of what you're looking for if you want to look
00:18:18.880 for it. I think it's a terrible mistake, and it's a terrible mistake for parents to do this,
00:18:24.240 and the reason it's a terrible mistake is even ignoring the idea that you're laughing and finding
00:18:32.240 joy in the pain of your child, the actual literal mental anguish of your child, putting that aside,
00:18:38.880 it teaches your child a particular lesson. It teaches them that mum and dad cannot be trusted
00:18:45.360 anymore, that when mum and dad say something, it just might not be true. They just might be playing
00:18:52.000 a trick on you. You can't be trusted. Now, for many of us with friends, that's fine,
00:18:58.160 that's par for the course, but with your parents, I think a different set of rules apply,
00:19:03.120 especially when they're younger. I should mention that Jimmy Kimmel this year claims, if you look
00:19:11.840 at his 2020 video, that he didn't do it this year, and I thought, great, as I began to watch the
00:19:18.240 segment, I thought, great, he's not doing it anymore. Within 10 seconds he says, although we're not
00:19:24.320 doing it this year, parents nonetheless still played the prank, and so we're going to show the
00:19:29.040 videos anyway, so he still did it this year anyway, he still did it this year. So, this is an example
00:19:34.080 of where, even though Jimmy Kimmel decided he wasn't going to do this thing, maybe he had good
00:19:39.200 second thoughts about it. It's now taken on a life of its own, and so now there is this practice
00:19:44.400 throughout the United States, where I'm suspecting innocent children who know nothing about
00:19:47.840 Jimmy Kimmel and nothing about this kind of prank, collect their sweets, collect their candy,
00:19:53.200 and then the following day morning, whenever they wake up to find the candy missing, and mum and
00:19:59.520 dad telling that all the candy is gone permanently, because it's all been eaten. I think this needs
00:20:05.280 to stop, it doesn't seem like a big deal, but I actually think for those children, it is a big
00:20:09.440 deal, and it should be stopped, and I think that next year, the best thing that Jimmy Kimmel could do
00:20:14.800 is not run the segment and apologize for having a run the segment. The year after that, he could
00:20:19.520 possibly track down every child that was ever involved in the segment and reward them in some way,
00:20:24.800 and apologize to them and make them feel a little bit better, and say that he won't do this sort of
00:20:29.360 thing again. I sound like a terrible schoolteacher, but I think that sometimes a tone that needs to be
00:20:38.800 done when people do the wrong thing, and I think Jimmy Kimmel is doing the wrong thing with this segment,
00:20:45.280 he's creating a new meme, and it's not going anywhere good. After that, while deviation,
00:20:53.760 let's go back to the book, and David writes, now suppose it is an anti-rational meme. A
00:21:00.960 working unpleasant emotions will then be useful in doing the harm that it needs to do,
00:21:06.000 namely disabling the listener's ability to be rid of the hobgoblin and entrenching
00:21:11.040 compulsion to think and therefore to speak of it. The more accurately the hobgoblin's attributes
00:21:15.680 exploit genuine widespread vulnerabilities of the human mind, the more faithfully the anti-rational
00:21:21.520 meme will propagate. If the meme is to survive for many generations, it is essential that it's
00:21:27.040 implicit knowledge of these vulnerabilities be true and deep, but it's overt content, the idea of
00:21:32.640 the hobgoblin's existence, need contain no truth. On the contrary, the non-existence of the hobgoblin
00:21:38.560 helps to make the meme a better replicator because the story is then unconstrained by the mundane
00:21:43.680 attributes of any genuine menace, which are always finite and to some degree compatible.
00:21:48.640 And that will be all the more so if the story can also manage to undermine the principle of
00:21:54.080 optimism, thus just as rational memes evolve towards deep truths, anti-rational memes evolve away
00:22:00.800 from them, pause their my reflection. Okay, just to remind people, especially if people dip in
00:22:06.800 and out of these episodes at certain points. David mentions the principle of optimism there,
00:22:15.120 the principle of optimism is that all evils are due to insufficient knowledge. And so actually I'm
00:22:23.520 going to include that in my introduction to the philosophy of David Deutsch, part two,
00:22:29.760 I'll talk more about the principle of optimism there, but suffice it to say for now that if you
00:22:37.840 believe that certain problems cannot be solved, then that is a kind of anti-rational meme. It's an
00:22:44.800 undermining of this principle of optimism, which says that all evils are due to lack of knowledge
00:22:49.520 or insufficient knowledge, which is a special case in my view of this idea that problems are
00:22:55.200 soluble, given that evil is just another kind of problem. And if you knew if you had the knowledge,
00:23:01.040 then you would be able to fix that thing. Whatever the evil happens to be, evil might be a certain
00:23:06.320 disease. It might be a particular virus. And that evil, which is causing a lot of harm,
00:23:11.520 is only not solved due to the lack of knowledge. If we were able to solve it and we can solve it,
00:23:19.120 given the right knowledge, then the evil would be destroyed. We'd be rid of it. And the principle
00:23:24.560 of optimism says that all such evils, whether they be viruses, bacteria, hurricanes, earthquakes,
00:23:31.840 whatever, in order to get rid of the evil part of them, but the damaging part, the harmful part,
00:23:37.520 the bit that causes suffering, we need to create the knowledge in order to do so. And that's
00:23:42.400 always possible with sufficient effort, creativity, and so forth. So just to very briefly recap,
00:23:50.000 we have two types of memes, rational and anti-rational, and two kinds of replication strategies.
00:23:55.840 On the one hand, with the rational memes, it thrives in an environment of criticism,
00:24:00.320 because all of its rivals are criticized and refuted, shown to be false in some way,
00:24:05.520 shown to be lacking in some way, leaving it as the survivor. So it's an evolutionary type process.
00:24:11.280 The anti-rational memes, on the other hand, disable critical faculties. And so prevent themselves
00:24:16.880 from being criticized, and so they survive for that reason, because they, they themselves,
00:24:21.520 are not criticized, unlike with the rational memes, which are, but survive the process of criticism.
00:24:27.200 So they're your two kinds of memes, and they're your two kinds of replication strategies.
00:24:32.480 So back to the book and David says, as usual, mixing the above two replication strategies
00:24:38.000 does no good. If a meme contains true and beneficial knowledge for the recipient,
00:24:42.880 but disables the recipient's critical faculties in regard to itself, then the recipient will be
00:24:47.360 less able to correct errors in that knowledge. And so we'll reduce the faithfulness of transmission,
00:24:53.200 and if a meme relies on the recipient's belief that it is beneficial, but it is not in fact
00:24:58.560 beneficial, then that increases the chance that the recipient will reject it or refuse to enact it.
00:25:04.240 Similarly, a rational memes natural home is a dynamic society, more or less any dynamic society,
00:25:10.640 because there, the tradition of criticism, optimistically directed at problem solving,
00:25:15.600 will suppress variants of the meme with even slightly less truth. Moreover, the rapid progress
00:25:21.840 will subject these variants to continually varying criteria of criticism, which again,
00:25:27.120 only deeply true memes have a chance of surviving. An anti-rational memes natural home is a
00:25:33.200 static society, not any static society, but preferably the one in which it evolved for all the
00:25:39.360 converse reasons, and therefore each type of meme, when present in a society that is broadly of
00:25:44.960 the opposite kind, is less able to cause itself to be replicated, pause their my reflection.
00:25:50.960 Okay, there's that grand discovery that has been mentioned many times before on this podcast
00:25:58.960 and hinted at throughout the book, a rational meme is to a dynamic society as an anti-rational
00:26:06.400 meme is to a static society. Now this is not to say that all memes in dynamic society is
00:26:12.880 a rational, far from it, or that all memes in static societies are anti-rational, again far from it.
00:26:19.200 There's a mix, but when those anti-rational memes reach some threshold within a particular society,
00:26:26.720 then that can cause the accelerate like in our society, we've got an accelerating rate of
00:26:30.960 progress as people often are fond of saying. If the anti-rational memes tend to get more and more
00:26:38.080 of a foothold, then that rate of accelerating progress will slow, eventually the increase in progress
00:26:44.720 itself will slow, it will stagnate, and eventually will get regression, and once you have regression,
00:26:50.000 then what you can expect is extinction of the society or the civilization. So anti-rational
00:26:56.160 memes are those things that actively prevent progress because they actively prevent one,
00:27:01.360 and people in society, from criticizing the ideas they have, and if you can't criticize the
00:27:06.320 ideas you have, you're not going to improve the ideas you have, things are going to remain the
00:27:09.680 same, and in fact what generally happens is because the problems keep on coming, but no new solutions
00:27:14.960 are being developed, you actually start to regress, you start to go backwards because your society
00:27:18.880 are staying the same, but the environment around you continues to evolve, you're still going to be
00:27:23.920 plagued by all the awful slings and arrows that the earth tends to throw at you, and the rest
00:27:28.880 of the cosmos mind you. So there almost is no such thing as a society, a static society
00:27:34.400 remaining the same throughout time, it will decline, eventually it will disappear all together.
00:27:40.800 Now, on the other hand, a dynamic society can weather some degree of anti-rational memes.
00:27:50.320 People, individuals, have a vast number of anti-rational memes operating on their mind at any one
00:27:56.080 time. Certain groups of people tend to have more anti-rational memes than others,
00:28:01.440 also different kinds of anti-rational memes than others, but so long as these are
00:28:06.560 corralled in some way, controlled by the institutions, especially the democratic institutions of
00:28:12.560 society, then we have some sort of defense, a bull walk against anti-rational memes,
00:28:18.960 causing stasis in a society. So what I mean by this is religious communities can have certain anti-rational
00:28:27.680 memes, secret societies can have certain anti-rational memes. People's homes can develop their own
00:28:35.280 set of anti-rational memes in a particular family and so on and so forth, but so long as they're
00:28:40.480 kind of corralled, fenced off into those smaller communities, then the wider society can protect
00:28:47.840 itself, content to protect itself, if those anti-rational memes do not become part of the broader
00:28:54.080 culture, and certainly not enforced on the wider society through legislation or something like that.
00:29:00.400 Now, one only has to turn to a society like North Korea, where anti-rational memes are actually
00:29:08.960 legislated. They're actually put into the penal code, lots of countries historically have had
00:29:14.400 this. I know a little bit about North Korea. If you criticize the leader, you will be thrown in
00:29:19.280 jail. So you're not allowed to criticize the leader. There's literally no way of improving the
00:29:24.160 leader from the community. There's no way of replacing the leader. It's not a democracy,
00:29:28.720 and there's no way of even suggesting that there's some deficiency with the leader.
00:29:32.080 So this is the worst kind, I would argue, of the anti-rational memes, because anti-rational
00:29:39.840 memes, dangerous though they are, tend to be most dangerous for their own holders,
00:29:45.760 but your anti-rational memes typically aren't going to hurt me. They could, but they generally
00:29:52.720 won't hurt me because there are other structures within society, institutions within society,
00:29:59.680 that will prevent you from enforcing your terrible ideas on to me, or telling me that I can't
00:30:05.360 criticize you, for example. Although we see around the world governments drifting in certain ways,
00:30:12.640 certain unfortunate ways towards speech codes. Towards a reluctance to allow any kind of speech,
00:30:21.040 and this is, of course, a dangerous turn. And it should be resisted, it should be resisted,
00:30:27.200 because anything that says you're not allowed to criticize X, where X is anything at all,
00:30:32.800 is an anti-rational meme. It's an anti-rational idea. It means that X is already in a perfect state,
00:30:38.960 there's absolutely nothing that could possibly ever be said about X that could improve our
00:30:43.520 understanding of X, and that is always wrong. Okay, another lengthy diversion, let's go back to the
00:30:49.120 book. And this section is titled The Enlightenment. Our society in the West became dynamic, not
00:30:56.240 through the sudden failure of a static society, but through generations of static society type
00:31:02.080 evolution. Where and when the transition began is not very well-defined, but I suspect that it
00:31:06.960 began with the philosophy of Galileo, and perhaps became irreversible with the discoveries of Newton.
00:31:13.520 In meme terms, Newton's laws replicated themselves as rational memes, and their fidelity was very
00:31:18.640 high, because they were so useful for so many purposes, so pausing there, because this bears a
00:31:25.280 little bit of emphasis. Newton's laws were so useful. Newton's laws work. They solve problems,
00:31:34.960 they allow us to create technologies to make predictions about the world. They improve our lives,
00:31:41.360 they improve society, they make civilization a better place, because now we can solve the problem
00:31:47.200 of figuring out how to launch rockets, we can solve the problem of figuring out how to
00:31:52.720 explain the tides, so on and so forth. And so they work because they're actually, they're saying
00:31:59.280 something true about the world, not perfectly true, but they're saying something true about the world.
00:32:03.200 The idea that a solution to your problem works is a true statement. It's either true or false,
00:32:10.560 either your solution works or it doesn't work. I'm just emphasizing that because there is actually
00:32:15.600 a school of thought that says, well, all we need to worry about is whether something works or not,
00:32:20.960 not whether something is true or false. I happen to think that these ideas contain a certain amount
00:32:27.920 of synonymous epistemic content to be technical, I suppose. If something works, then it's saying
00:32:35.840 something true about reality. There's something correct, something right. It's not false to say
00:32:41.360 that that solution works of that particular problem. And so in the case of Newton, although we know
00:32:46.560 strictly speaking, it's false, which is just to say it is not in all its parts true,
00:32:52.800 the conjunction of all the different assertions that it makes about the world is not true. Okay,
00:32:59.440 there are aspects of it that are false. And it's overall explanation of, for instance,
00:33:05.040 the way in which physics works is false, but it doesn't mean that it's completely an utterly false.
00:33:09.520 It's not completely an utterly useless. It's true to say it does solve some problems,
00:33:14.640 and it solves some problems as well as anyone needs to have those problems solved.
00:33:19.280 So that's just a by the by because it solved problems, however, because it is able to solve
00:33:25.360 problems. And lots and lots of problems, it becomes a meme that is a rational meme, a set of
00:33:30.640 memes that gets itself replicated over time. Why? Because it's so useful, simple idea. Okay,
00:33:36.640 skipping a very short part and then back to the book and David writes, in any case,
00:33:43.040 following Newton, there was no way of missing the fact that rapid progress was underway.
00:33:47.200 But some philosophers, notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, did try. But only by arguing that reason
00:33:52.960 was harmful, civilization bad, and primitive life. Happy, just an aside. And don't we hear this
00:34:00.000 often? It's anyone who is excited by the environmentalist movement tends to fall back on
00:34:09.680 some version of this, civilization is bad, primitive life good. Okay, let's get going.
00:34:16.800 There was such an avalanche of further improvements, scientific, philosophical, and political,
00:34:21.520 that the possibility of resuming stasis was swept away. Western society would become the beginning
00:34:27.600 of an affinity, or be destroyed. Nations beyond the West today are also changing rapidly,
00:34:33.760 sometimes through the exigencies of warfare, with their neighbours. But more often, even more powerfully,
00:34:39.840 by the peaceful transmission of Western memes, their cultures too cannot become static again.
00:34:45.760 They must either become Western in their mode of operation. We'll lose all their knowledge,
00:34:50.560 and thus cease to exist, a dilemma which is becoming increasingly significant in world politics,
00:34:56.240 causing that, well, I really should mention North Korea again here. The DMC, the demilitarized zone.
00:35:03.120 This is the border between North and South Korea. So the DMC, it was, it's an arbitrary line
00:35:12.320 to a large extent. It was a general Douglas MacArthur at the end of the Korean War in 1950,
00:35:21.280 that almost more or less it was him who just arbitrarily drew a line between the North and the South.
00:35:26.400 And it just so happened to be the case that the majority of the communist people were up in the
00:35:32.640 North, and the majority of the democratic capitalist type people were in the South. But some
00:35:40.000 capitalists got trapped in the North, and some communists got trapped in the South. So it wasn't
00:35:45.520 a good way of dividing things. And the history of why the communists were up in the North,
00:35:51.600 and the capitalists were down in the South, which stretches all the way back actually to Japan.
00:35:55.520 And so this is one of the reasons why there is friction between the Japanese and the Koreans,
00:35:59.680 because the Koreans look to Japan as being one reason why their country was split for historical
00:36:07.840 reasons and that takes us off into an entirely different area away from the beginning of infinity.
00:36:13.680 However, the DMC is a wonderful physical representation of the border between a static and
00:36:24.560 a dynamic society, a more static and a more dynamic society, where you have certain anti-rational
00:36:32.240 memes in the North, which do not obtain in the South. They don't exist in the South. South Korea
00:36:38.720 has a tradition of removing, typically without violence. It's leaders. In North Korea, it is a
00:36:47.680 hereditary dynasty now, where you cannot remove the rulers, or if you remove even any of the people
00:36:54.880 in the higher echelons of the North Korean communist party, it usually takes some amount of violence.
00:37:00.480 They tend not to go peacefully. They certainly don't get voted out. And of course,
00:37:05.600 it's not just the philosophical differences between the two. The philosophical differences
00:37:13.600 are the deep foundational or more foundationalists, but they underline, they underpin
00:37:20.560 the reasons why the explanation of why it is that North Korea is in the state that it is,
00:37:27.280 and that it's people are in the state that it is. South Korea is a technological, artistic,
00:37:34.480 scientific powerhouse around the world. For its size, it really does bat above its own weight.
00:37:41.600 And certainly in technology, it's exceeded by very few other countries in terms of what it's
00:37:47.920 achieved. Clearly, the United States is first. If you were going to put something second, well,
00:37:54.400 Samsung, LG, Hyundai, the list of technologically advanced companies and companies at the frontier
00:38:02.480 of making advances in technology exist in South Korea, probably overtaken Japan by now.
00:38:08.640 Now, why? Well, because it has this culture of free enterprise, capitalism, rational
00:38:16.720 names. It tries to avoid the anti-rational names. North Korea is completely the opposite,
00:38:22.240 in almost every way. Any technology it does have is either stolen or a cheap ripoff of the
00:38:28.560 technology from elsewhere. Most of its money, where it doesn't generate it itself, is from charity,
00:38:36.080 from around the world, from people actually giving it food aid, giving it cash aid, and so on.
00:38:43.280 It's not because the United States is placing sanctions on it. It's not because other countries
00:38:48.560 are treating North Korea badly. I would urge anyone who thinks that that's the reason why
00:38:53.280 North Korean people are suffering to look deeply into the history of North Korea. North Korea has,
00:39:00.000 the North Korean regime has brought it upon themselves. And with people, of course, we should have
00:39:04.960 great compassion for it. It is largely a hostage situation. And we know this because people are
00:39:11.440 desperate to escape from North Korea and do, quite often, into China and then from China,
00:39:16.800 they make their way south and South Korea welcomes them with open arms. No one is trying to go
00:39:22.720 in the other direction. I should correct that. There are interesting handful of cases where
00:39:31.200 people not completely stable, one would say, who do fight their way into North Korea and never leave
00:39:38.480 again, of course. Okay, whatever the case. We have clear real world examples out there.
00:39:44.320 North and South Korea are just one. But where we can observe the effect of anti-rational memes
00:39:51.920 upon a society, causing stasis to a greater or lesser degree, certainly retarding the progress
00:39:59.120 within that society. And we can see places where we have very dynamic societies, like South Korea,
00:40:07.040 that welcome criticism, challenging in the status quo. There are still, I should say,
00:40:13.920 of course, in any of these traditional societies, South Korea is an excellent example of a
00:40:18.240 confusion society where there are absolutely anti-rational memes that operate. However, there are
00:40:24.880 likewise, as we say, institutions within that society which enable criticism to flourish nonetheless
00:40:35.200 and to ensure that peaceful, and to ensure that people are able to peacefully cooperate
00:40:42.800 one with another without fear that if they criticize the government or someone else, they're going
00:40:48.160 to be thrown in jail. Certainly nothing to the extent like what goes on in North Korea. Anyway,
00:40:52.800 the point has been made, I think, back to the book and David Rites. Even in the West,
00:40:59.600 the Enlightenment today is nowhere near complete. It is relatively advanced in a few vital areas,
00:41:06.880 the physical sciences and Western political and economic institutions are prime examples.
00:41:11.200 In those areas, ideas are now fairly open to criticism and experimentation and to choice
00:41:16.720 and to change. But in many other areas, memes are still replicated in the old manner by means
00:41:23.040 that suppress the recipients' critical faculties and ignore their preferences.
00:41:27.600 When girls strive to be ladylike and to meet culturally defined standards of shape and appearance,
00:41:33.680 and when boys do their utmost to look strong and not to cry when distressed, they are struggling
00:41:38.720 to replicate ancient gender stereotypes, hyping memes, that are still part of our culture.
00:41:44.240 Despite the fact that explicitly endorsing them has become a stigmatized behaviour,
00:41:49.520 pause their just my reflection. This is an extremely interesting point to just dwell upon
00:41:56.880 for a moment. David observes throughout the book a number of these kinds of ideas. The ideas that
00:42:03.360 no one really believes but nonetheless continue to get replicated anyway. He's going to write
00:42:11.840 shortly, we're going to get to the bit shortly where he talks about the because I say so idea.
00:42:17.440 When parents say in response to a child who they're in a dispute with, because I say so,
00:42:23.520 it's a weird kind of thing where the parent doesn't actually believe it, even though it's true
00:42:29.440 that David will explain it much better shortly. Basically it's when a parent has run out of patience,
00:42:36.480 they lack the knowledge of how to be patient in that situation, they resort to because I say so.
00:42:42.560 Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself so let's just go back to the book and he writes,
00:42:47.760 those memes have the effect of preventing vast ranges of ideas about what sort of life one should
00:42:52.800 lead from ever crossing the holder's minds. If their thoughts ever wander in the forbidden directions,
00:42:58.240 they feel uneasiness and embarrassment and the same sort of fear and loss of centeredness
00:43:04.960 as religious people have felt since time immemorial at the thought of betraying their gods
00:43:10.320 and their worldviews and critical faculties are left disabled and precisely such a way
00:43:15.120 that they will in due course draw the next generation into the same pattern of thought and
00:43:20.640 behaviour. I just pause the mind reflection so I just want this to come down upon you if it's an
00:43:27.280 idea that you've not encountered before, especially if you're not a religious person let's say
00:43:33.840 and there are certain religious practices where if the person does not engage in them,
00:43:38.720 they feel this sort of shame and regret and you might think well how could you be so silly?
00:43:47.360 If you don't manage to make it to church on a Sunday and you feel really guilty about that,
00:43:53.120 that's a strange sort of sensation I couldn't imagine as an atheist. What it must feel like to
00:44:00.240 feel so guilty, to have not met the standards of my religion, that this imaginary god expects me
00:44:06.560 to turn up to this building each and every Sunday and kneel before a figurine of that god,
00:44:13.600 that must be a weird thing to feel guilt over not doing that or praying five times a day or
00:44:18.960 so on and so forth for an even religious practice that you might think is a bit of a bizarre one.
00:44:24.240 But as David is saying here we all feel this and you will know it when you feel any kind of
00:44:31.920 uneasiness or embarrassment at transgressing any kind of social cultural practice. You have these
00:44:42.240 memes operating these anti-rational memes, this unwillingness to criticise to a large extent,
00:44:48.560 certain ideas that you have, even if they don't make much sense. He's going to get to some examples
00:44:58.320 shortly so let's just wait for that back to the book. That anti-rational memes are still today
00:45:05.200 a substantial part of our culture and of the mind of every individual is a difficult fact for us to
00:45:11.520 accept. Ironically it is hard for us that it would have been for the profoundly closed-minded
00:45:16.800 people of earlier societies. They would not have been troubled by the proposition that most of
00:45:21.600 their lives were spent enacting elaborate rituals rather than making their own choices and pursuing
00:45:27.440 their own goals. On the contrary the degree to which a person's life was controlled by duty,
00:45:32.240 obedience, authority, piety, faith and so on was the very measure by which people judged
00:45:38.640 themselves and others. Children who asked why they were required to enact onerous behaviours that
00:45:43.920 did not seem functional would be told because I say so. And in due course they would give their
00:45:49.840 children the same reply to the same question never realizing they were giving the full explanation.
00:45:56.880 This is a curious type of meme whose explicit content is true that its holders do not believe it.
00:46:03.840 Pause their repeating, summarising. Because I say so, when parents say because I say so,
00:46:11.680 this is a curious type of meme whose explicit content is true though its holders do not believe it.
00:46:19.920 Just cogitate on that for a moment, reflect on that for a moment. It's really interesting.
00:46:25.840 When a parent says to a child because I say so, the parent is generally thinking well this is not
00:46:31.840 the reason actually why I'm expecting you to do this thing. Okay for example,
00:46:37.200 little Johnny's playing in the dirt. Johnny get out of the dirt, stop playing in the dirt.
00:46:43.680 Why? Because I say so. Now, the parent probably thinks or has an idea in their mind. No,
00:46:51.280 I've got a complex explanation to do with bacteria and disease and this is why I want little
00:46:56.000 Johnny to get out. But that's too hard to explain, I won't even attempt to explain it so I'm going
00:47:02.160 to say because I say so. Which actually is the reason why. It's only because I say so. That other
00:47:08.720 thing, that other stuff about all the its full of disease and its bad, you could explain that to
00:47:14.640 the child. It's just that you're too lazy, you lack the patience, or perhaps you simply lack the
00:47:21.120 capacity to conjure the words into an explanation that's appropriate for the child. If indeed you
00:47:25.600 think that's true. But generally you don't think it's true. When a parent says because I say so,
00:47:30.400 it's usually because they're at the end of their tether. They have run out of patience. They
00:47:34.800 don't know, they don't have the knowledge of how to be more patient in that particular situation
00:47:39.120 or to come up with a better explanation or to interact with their child in a better way.
00:47:44.240 It is a general purpose, criticism of the behaviour of a child because I say so. Do what you're
00:47:51.120 told. I'm the authority. Not a good way to deal with anyone of course. So anyway, in summary,
00:47:57.520 the because I say so thing is true. When a parent uses that, that's in fact the correct
00:48:03.840 explanation. It really is. That really is why the child is being requested not to do something,
00:48:10.880 rather than some other more complicated correct explanation to do with the world.
00:48:19.440 Even though the parents don't believe that that's why the child needs to stop doing whatever they're
00:48:25.040 doing. Okay, we'll do whatever they're supposed to be doing. According to the parent.
00:48:31.920 Today, with our eagerness for change in our unprecedented openness to new ideas and to self-criticism,
00:48:37.280 it conflicts with most people's self-image that we are still, to a significant degree,
00:48:42.640 the slaves of anti-rational means. Most of us would admit to having a hang up or two,
00:48:48.800 but in the main we consider our behaviour to be determined by our own decisions and our decisions
00:48:54.160 by our reason assessment of the arguments and evidence about what is in our rational self-interest.
00:49:00.160 This rational self-image is itself a recent development of our society. Many of whose
00:49:06.640 memes explicitly promote and implicitly give effect to values such as reason, freedom of thought,
00:49:13.440 and the inherent value of individual human beings. We naturally try to explain ourselves in terms
00:49:18.960 of meeting those values. Obviously, there is truth in this, but it is not the whole story.
00:49:24.400 One need look no further than our clothing styles, and the way we decorate our homes to find evidence.
00:49:31.360 Consider how you would be judged by other people if you went shopping in pajamas,
00:49:35.200 or painted your home with blue and brown stripes. That gives a hint of the narrowness of the
00:49:40.160 conventions that govern even these objectively trivial and inconsequential choices about style
00:49:46.480 and the steepness of the social costs of violating them. Is the same thing true of the more
00:49:52.720 momentous patterns in our lives such as careers, relationships, education, morality,
00:49:57.520 political outlook, and national identity? Consider what we should expect to happen when a static
00:50:02.480 society is gradually switching from anti-rational to rational memes. Pause their
00:50:07.920 my reflection. That should give you pause as I like to say. The social costs of violating
00:50:19.040 these norms that you're expected to have a certain kind of career or a certain kind of relationship
00:50:25.280 engage in a certain kind of fashion. Paint your house a certain color. If any of these
00:50:30.400 are violated, you feel, as David said earlier, the unease, the uncomfortableness, the embarrassment
00:50:37.440 of violating these norms in any particular way. So we all know what the hardcore religious
00:50:46.320 person feels like at times. If they are required to partake in a particular practice which is
00:50:55.040 in contravention to their deeply held religious convictions, we have that. All you would need to do
00:51:01.840 is to paint your house bright pink or wear a particularly bright pink suit. Anything with bright
00:51:09.120 pink seems to do it. It's a violation of usual conventions. And so the point here that David's
00:51:18.320 making is that we have to expect that any static society, a society that tends towards
00:51:24.560 status, can only possibly remove towards a dynamic society gradually, very gradually, incrementally,
00:51:34.320 because it might be hard enough for you to violate norms about fashion. But then if you start
00:51:42.160 violating all the other social norms in your social circle, in your family and so on, then you will
00:51:48.400 feel ever more uncomfortable with each social norm that you violate. Now, if you repeat that for a
00:51:55.040 large group of people from an entire society, then it really becomes an issue as David says
00:52:01.280 on this point about transitioning from the static society to the dynamic society. He writes,
00:52:08.080 such a transition is necessarily gradual because keeping a dynamic society stable requires a
00:52:13.680 great deal of knowledge. Creating that knowledge, starting with only the means available in a static
00:52:18.880 society, namely small amounts of creativity and knowledge, many misconceptions, the blind
00:52:24.720 evolution of memes, and trial and error, must necessarily take time. Moreover, the society has
00:52:31.520 to continue to function throughout, but the coexistence of rational and anti-rational memes makes
00:52:36.240 this transition unstable, memes of each type, cause behaviors that impede the faithful
00:52:41.680 replication of the other, to replicate faithfully, anti-rational memes need people to avoid
00:52:47.120 thinking critically about their choices. While rational memes need people to think as critically
00:52:52.000 as possible, that means that no memes in our society replicate as reliably as the most successful
00:52:57.600 memes of either are very static society or, and as yet hypothetical, fully dynamic society.
00:53:05.600 This causes a number of phenomena that are peculiar to our transitional era. One of them is that
00:53:12.320 some anti-rational memes evolve against the grain, towards rationality. An example is to transition
00:53:18.960 from an autocratic monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, which has played a positive role in some
00:53:24.640 democratic systems. Given the instability that I have described, it is not surprising that such
00:53:30.240 transitions often fail. Another is the formation within the dynamic society of anti-rational subcultures.
00:53:37.520 Recall that anti-rational memes of press criticism selectively and cause only finely tuned
00:53:42.640 damage, this makes it possible for the members of an anti-rational subculture to function normally
00:53:47.360 in other respects. So such subcultures can survive for a long time until they are destabilized
00:53:53.760 by the haphazard effects of reach from other fields. For example, racism and other forms of
00:53:58.320 bigotry exist nowadays, almost entirely in subcultures that suppress criticism.
00:54:03.200 B bigotry exists not because it benefits the bigots, but despite the harm they do to themselves
00:54:08.800 by using fixed non-functional criteria to determine their choices in life.
00:54:13.840 Present day methods of education still have a lot in common with their static society predecessors.
00:54:18.480 Despite modern talk of encouraging critical thinking, it remains the case that teaching by
00:54:23.360 road and inculcating standard patterns of behaviour through psychological pressure are integral
00:54:28.400 parts of education. Even though they are now wholly or partly renounced in explicit theory.
00:54:34.320 Moreover, in regard to academic knowledge, it is still taken to granted in practice that
00:54:38.240 the main purpose of education is to transmit a standard curriculum faithfully.
00:54:42.960 One consequence is that people are acquiring scientific knowledge in an anemic and instrumental way.
00:54:48.640 Without a critical discriminating approach to what they are learning,
00:54:52.080 most of them are not effectively replicating the memes of science and reason into their minds.
00:54:56.640 And so we live in a society in which people can spend their days conscientiously using laser
00:55:01.920 technology to count cells and blood samples. And their evenings have been cross-legged and
00:55:06.720 chanted to draw supernatural energy out of the earth. Pause their my reflection.
00:55:11.680 On a few little things here, this issue about critical thinking in schools is that there is
00:55:18.240 modern talk of encouraging critical thinking. It is replete throughout syllabi and
00:55:24.000 curricula around the world that educationalist teachers are expected to inculcate cultures
00:55:30.560 of critical thinking. But they never get the critical thinking right. They don't know what
00:55:35.120 critical thinking is. They don't know what criticism is. I've made videos about this. I'll link
00:55:40.880 to those as well about critical thinking as it is. As it appears in education, people have very
00:55:48.160 competing ideas, not all of which have anything to do with the kind of critical rationalism of
00:55:54.480 Papa and David Deutsch. At best, it's a perversion of the whole concept of critical thinking.
00:56:02.640 At worst, it's just another form of indoctrination about ways in which one shouldn't
00:56:08.400 criticize the knowledge that is being fed to them via the standard curriculum. And yes, that last
00:56:15.600 point, they're about people using laser technology to count cells and blood samples. In other
00:56:21.920 words, people who are scientifically literate and Sam Harris makes this point. People who are
00:56:26.800 scientifically literate being nonetheless incapable of applying critical reasoning to other aspects
00:56:35.440 of life. This compartmentalizing of the good thinking, I guess, practices. Well, I think David
00:56:45.840 would probably go even further than that to say that just because you're using laser technology
00:56:51.280 to count cells and blood samples doesn't make you a scientific thinker. It doesn't make
00:56:55.040 you a rational thinker. It might make you competent at using the piece of technology. That is,
00:56:59.200 the laser technology. But that doesn't necessarily make you a good critical thinker.
00:57:03.600 Neil deGrasse Tyson said some wonderful things about this when it comes to UFO sightings.
00:57:10.400 He talks about how the UFO sightings can be high among pilots. They can be high among police
00:57:17.520 officers. But they're not high among astronomers. Why? Because astronomers, when they look up,
00:57:22.800 they kind of know what they're looking at. Neil Tyson makes the point that, and quite rightly,
00:57:28.560 that other people in the broader community think that just because you've got a badge like a policeman,
00:57:32.560 who've got a license like a pilot, and you're in control of this very sophisticated piece of
00:57:36.880 technology, that somehow therefore your brain, your mind, your thinking abilities are at a level
00:57:43.440 above the average person. But they need not necessarily be. It's a whole separate skill set to be
00:57:49.120 able to be critical of your own thoughts, critical of your own observations, to not immediately
00:57:53.040 leap to those lights in the sky, aliens visiting from a distant galaxy, so on and so forth.
00:57:59.040 We think that because you have a badge, or you're a pilot, or you're whatever, that you're
00:58:02.880 testimony somehow better than that of an average person, it's all bad because we're human, okay?
00:58:08.080 So there was a police officer who was tracking a UFO that was swaying back and forth in the sky,
00:58:16.800 okay? Reported on the hot, they're in one of the, what do you call the squad car, chasing a UFO,
00:58:22.640 and you have those moving back and forth like this, okay? Later it turned out that
00:58:28.080 car car was chasing Venus, and he was driving on a curved road, but was so distracted by Venus,
00:58:37.680 he thought Venus was the one moving, and people are even thinking that he was doing this.
00:58:43.440 So all this is just to say that we still exist in a culture which, in many ways, is very
00:58:50.480 anti-critical. We have, I would argue, great deference to authority, great deference to authority,
00:59:00.640 where it's not deference to religious authority, which I guess in some ways has the
00:59:08.000 positive side of, at least not deferring to people who believe in the supernatural,
00:59:13.680 that kind of deference to authority was not replaced with a critical attitude towards
00:59:21.120 lots of our knowledge and lots of the authorities, but rather was just transferred whole
00:59:27.760 sale to replace the priest with the scientist or the priest with the politician or the priest
00:59:34.640 with the expert. So the typical person in society is still looking upwards to the authority,
00:59:40.240 so the one with the greater power, the greater knowledge, so that they can give them answers
00:59:46.000 in their own life for how to live their life and what to think and how to think, and the how to
00:59:51.440 think of course often comes down to will listen to me, do what you're told, because I say so,
00:59:58.880 kind of explanations from these people, and many people object, certainly when I wrote this
1:00:07.040 kind of argument up, the objection comes, well what do you expect me to do, to reason through
1:00:16.000 all of these claims on my own, I have to believe the expert, I have to believe the scientists,
1:00:22.240 because I can't possibly understand what they understand, I have to defer to their greater authority
1:00:29.040 in this area. I make a subtle shift, it's not and David Deutsch makes this point in his
1:00:35.760 first podcast with Sam Harris, the subtle shift is not in thinking that the expert has greater
1:00:42.560 authority or claim to more perfect knowledge in that area, it's that you should expect,
1:00:47.760 you should have a positive explanation and understanding of how that expert in that particular
1:00:55.200 domain of expertise has gone about acquiring the knowledge, were the methods of error correction
1:01:01.280 within that particular area, up to the standards that you would expect, or that you would want
1:01:06.000 to use in that particular area. If the answer is ever no, then you shouldn't be deferring to
1:01:10.720 that expertise, and either way I distinguish myself between experts and authorities,
1:01:16.720 an authority as someone who is deemed by the state via some ostensibly democratic process,
1:01:22.960 to have power over your life in some way, and if you agree to be in the democratically
1:01:27.280 a hem-constituated society, then you defer to their authority. It doesn't mean that you have
1:01:33.760 to obey without question, you can question, question authority, don't reject authority, it's a
1:01:39.200 dangerous thing to do, especially if the man has a badge and a gun. So you should question,
1:01:44.640 but defer to the authority at certain times, but in other areas where the person is not
1:01:50.320 in an officially designated authority, but just claims expertise in a certain area, that doesn't
1:01:57.840 give them authority, an authority is not an expert in vice versa, an authority might be very
1:02:03.600 well someone who has almost no knowledge in the relevant area. For example, a police officer
1:02:12.480 let's say enforcing certain restrictions to do with preventing the spread of a virus
1:02:19.200 shouldn't be expected to be an expert in the transmission of viruses, but the police officer
1:02:24.400 has a certain job to do and so you should respect the authority of the police officer,
1:02:29.200 and it's probably not much point, even questioning the police officer, you shouldn't expect
1:02:33.520 them to be an expert. So the authority isn't the expert, and on the other hand, if a particular
1:02:39.680 doctor happens to think that the law should be even more strict than what it is to do with,
1:02:46.800 let's say, locking down a society, well, they might very well be an expert, they might even be
1:02:52.240 a virologist, but that doesn't make them an authority. So people shouldn't turn to them and say,
1:02:57.280 well, we have to obey this person. Well, no, that's not the way in which democratically
1:03:03.760 constituted Western democracies work. That's not the way we do things. We listen to the experts,
1:03:11.120 but then we have a number of competing, competing ideas about what kind of laws need to be put
1:03:18.080 in place, that the cure or the treatment for this virus, let's say, using the contemporary example,
1:03:26.000 isn't worse than disease itself, the cure shouldn't be worse than the disease.
1:03:30.720 Of course, if you're an expert, one of the problems with expertise,
1:03:35.200 the actual problem with expertise is people becoming too narrowly focused on a particular area.
1:03:39.760 If they come too narrowly focused on a particular area, they might be the world's greatest expert
1:03:46.240 on brown coal-fired power stations, the world's greatest expert, but that doesn't, therefore,
1:03:53.280 mean they need to be listened to about how wonderful brown coal can be for powering the world's
1:04:00.080 economies, cheap though it is, perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't. There are many other considerations
1:04:04.800 we need other than just listening to one person's narrow solution, which ignores the consequences
1:04:12.640 for wider society. This is why we have democracies. This is why we have politicians who listen to
1:04:18.720 experts and consider what the best explanation is, considering as many variables as they can,
1:04:25.200 refuting certain poor ideas. After another long rant, let's go back to the book,
1:04:31.440 and the next section is titled Living With Means. Existing accounts of memes have neglected the
1:04:36.960 all-important distinction between the rational and anti-rational modes of replication.
1:04:41.600 Consequently, they end up missing most of what is happening and why. Moreover,
1:04:45.760 since most obvious examples of memes are long-lived anti-rational memes and short-lived arbitrary
1:04:51.760 fads, the tenor of such accounts is usually anti-name. Even when these accounts formally
1:04:58.080 accept that the best and most valuable knowledge or so can also consist of memes. For example,
1:05:03.280 the psychologist Susan Blackmore in her book The Meme Machine attempts to provide a fundamental
1:05:08.000 explanation of the human condition and in terms of meme evolution. Now memes are indeed integral
1:05:13.280 to the explanation for the existence of our species, though as I shall explain in the next chapter,
1:05:17.760 I believe that the specific mechanism she proposes would not have been possible, but crucially,
1:05:22.640 Blackmore downplays the element of creativity, both in the replication of memes and in their origin.
1:05:28.560 This leads her, for example, to doubt that technological processes best explained as being due to
1:05:32.800 individuals as the conventional narrative would have it. She regards it instead as meme evolution.
1:05:38.400 She cites this historian George Baszler, whose book The Evolution of Technology denies the myth
1:05:44.640 of the heroic inventor. Poor semi-reflection has part of my undergraduate studies,
1:05:49.680 University of New South Wales, and I'll call out the department. It was the School of Science and
1:05:54.400 Technology Studies, I think, kind of like philosophy, but not. And I remember a lecturer giving a
1:06:03.600 series of lectures attempting to drive a wedge between, it's bizarre to me now as I say it,
1:06:10.560 attempting to drive a wedge between scientific discovery and technological progress.
1:06:15.760 He was trying to make the case that these two things were quite independent and that we shouldn't
1:06:22.240 thank science and scientists for everything the engineers were doing, that these were two
1:06:27.760 quite separate things and they could be separated out. And of course, this person was a
1:06:31.920 relativist and they wanted to kind of cut science down to size as being just another narrative.
1:06:39.440 But of course, as we know, the best way to defend against relativism, postmodernism, anti-science
1:06:47.760 types, is to show them that it works. Now, this lecturer was willing to just go the whole
1:06:53.040 hog and say, well, now it doesn't work. Technology has nothing to do with science. Of course,
1:06:57.440 it's completely unreasonable irrational. I can't remember precisely what the arguments were,
1:07:01.680 probably because there were no actual arguments there. It was just a bunch of assertions.
1:07:07.040 And so here, this is reminiscent of that idea that individual inventors, individual scientists,
1:07:15.040 aren't doing anything particularly amazing. It's just a natural outworking of the kind of human
1:07:21.840 evolutionary process. The memes just appear. But that's not true. And you do hear this,
1:07:28.560 that the history of science is not a history of heroic endeavors. Of course, of course, everyone knows
1:07:37.040 the quip that if, as Newton said, if I have seen further, it's because I have stood on the shoulders
1:07:44.240 of giants. But Newton himself was a great giant, greater than the giants that preceded him,
1:07:53.040 in large part. Yes, he used the work of Galileo and Kepler and so forth. However, he made advances
1:08:01.040 that were far and away more advanced than what his predecessors did. We really can point to certain
1:08:08.000 people throughout history that have made substantially greater contributions in science and technology
1:08:14.720 than others. It's not always a hugely collaborative process even across time. It is partly
1:08:22.480 a collaborative process, more or less a collaborative process across time. But Newtonian physics
1:08:29.440 was in very large part a product of the mind of Newton. Einstein's theories of relativity
1:08:36.320 were very much largely a product of his mind. Yes, he was solving problems that other physicists had
1:08:42.800 already put out there. But that does not detract from the fact that overwhelmingly we can attribute
1:08:50.080 the discoveries of Einstein to Einstein. Let's keep on going. Faberites. But that distinction
1:08:58.560 between evolution and heroic inventors as being the agents of discovery makes sense only in a
1:09:03.600 static society. Their most changes indeed brought about in a way that I guess jokes might evolve,
1:09:08.960 with no great creativity being exercised by any individual participant. But in a dynamic
1:09:14.000 society, scientific and technological innovations are generally made creatively. That is to say
1:09:19.680 they emerge from individual minds, as novel ideas, having acquired significant adaptations inside
1:09:25.440 those minds. Of course, in both cases, ideas are built from previous ideas by a process of
1:09:31.040 variation and selection, which constitutes evolution. But when evolution takes place largely within
1:09:37.120 an individual mind, it is not meme evolution. It is creativity by heroic inventor. Of course,
1:09:44.880 they're just a comment. That's brilliant. That is a brilliant retort for anyone out there at
1:09:50.960 university, perhaps, or at school, perhaps, who is asked to write essays or whatever about this
1:09:59.360 kind of thing. Or if you engage in a philosophical discussion with your friends about this kind of
1:10:04.160 idea, can we really attribute the great man, what is it, vision of history? Well, the great man
1:10:12.160 or the great person, vision of science, is it the case that it's always just this cooperative
1:10:19.600 effort by groups of scientists working together, or their memes just coming together and creating
1:10:25.120 this thing? No, rarely. That is probably more the exception. If you can point to specific theories,
1:10:32.720 named theories, it's usually the product of an individual heroic inventor. Evolution by natural
1:10:40.080 selection really was a discovery in advance by Charles Darwin. Even though there are other people
1:10:47.520 who got the idea, who contributed things here and there, he really did take that biggest leap.
1:10:56.000 And that is the lesson. That is typically the rule, not the exception, for these big grand
1:11:03.680 theories, these big grand discoveries. Okay, I'm skipping a little more about Susan Blackmore
1:11:12.160 and the criticism of her idea. I think this will come up again later, and I'm just going to pick it
1:11:19.280 up where David writes. Another thing that should make us suspicious is the presence of the conditions
1:11:26.400 for anti-rational meme evolution, such as, deference to authority, static subcultures, and so on.
1:11:33.920 Anything that says, because I say so, or it never did me any harm, anything that says,
1:11:39.200 let us suppress criticism of our ideas because it is true. Suggest static society thinking.
1:11:45.520 We should examine and criticize laws, customs, and other institutions with an eye to whether they
1:11:51.280 set up conditions for anti-rational memes to evolve. Avoiding such conditions is the essence
1:11:57.600 of Popper's criterion, Popper's criterion being the ease with which we can remove bad ideas going
1:12:05.040 on. David writes, the enlightenment is the moment at which explanatory knowledge is beginning to
1:12:10.080 assume it's soon to be normal role as the most important determinant of physical events.
1:12:15.680 At least it could be. We had better remember that what we are attempting,
1:12:21.520 the sustained creation of knowledge has never worked before. Indeed, everything that we shall
1:12:26.400 ever try to achieve from now on will never have worked before. We have so far been transformed
1:12:32.800 from the victims and enforcers of an eternal status quo into the mainly passive recipients
1:12:38.480 of the benefits of relatively rapid innovation in a bumpy transition period. We now have to
1:12:44.400 accept and rejoice in bringing about our next transformation to active agents of progress in the
1:12:51.040 emerging rational society and universe. Befores there, the end of the chapter, there we go, the end
1:12:58.400 of chapter 15, and I really have to go back because that's a powerful way to end this particular
1:13:04.400 chapter. That first sentence of this last paragraph, David says, the enlightenment is the moment
1:13:10.960 at which explanatory knowledge is beginning to assume it's soon to be normal role as the most
1:13:17.520 important determinant of physical events. That's phenomenal. That's phenomenal. It's one of these
1:13:27.360 claims true in the beginning of infinity that has really hooked many people who've read the book.
1:13:35.280 After all, if you're interested in physics and you've studied physics and you look out in there
1:13:42.160 to the universe, even just to planet Earth, you notice that natural phenomena, other things
1:13:48.960 that shape physical reality and physical events. Why, and I'm very early on in this series,
1:13:58.720 some episodes ago, even, I showed a picture of Sydney Harbour and you look at Sydney Harbour,
1:14:03.520 and yes, a large part of Sydney Harbour appears the way that it does because of weathering and erosion.
1:14:12.160 They fall of rainfall over millions of years as carved out rivers and harbors and hills and
1:14:17.920 mountains and so on. Natural forces have done that. Gravity has done that. The reason why galaxy
1:14:25.520 looks the way that it does. Gravity, gas and thermodynamics. The reason why the solar system
1:14:33.040 looks the way that it does. Again, gravity, balls of gas being pulled into spheres and so on.
1:14:39.920 But at some point in the future, the rest of physical reality is going to be the way that it is
1:14:47.440 because people have chosen to do stuff with that matter that otherwise would not come
1:14:53.360 have come about without creative thought. The New York skyline looks the way that it does
1:14:59.040 in very small part because of natural events. It is now explanatory knowledge which is changing
1:15:08.880 the entire structure of Manhattan, of the island of Manhattan. And so true of any large city.
1:15:16.240 Soon it will be the entire world from there, the solar system, the galaxy and then it will soon
1:15:23.920 be normal for the overwhelming majority of what we humans, people into the distant future can see
1:15:31.600 throughout the distant cosmos. We'll be explicable only in terms of what people have chosen to do
1:15:38.000 in the universe. It will look a certain way. It will look different to the way that it does.
1:15:41.920 Either otherwise would have done under the action purely of deterministic physical laws.
1:15:48.080 Creativity will be the explanation as to why it looks the way that it does.
1:15:51.520 Okay, next we're on to chapter 16, the evolution of creativity, where we will pick up
1:16:02.960 those ideas and explore them even more about the consequences, the significance of human creativity
1:16:11.280 and what people are and how they are cosmically significant. Until then, see you later.
1:16:17.360 As always, thanks for any support on Patreon or PayPal, whether you're a audio listener or
1:16:23.120 whether you watch this on YouTube. Thank you very much for your support. Bye-bye.
