One amusing corollary of this theory is, I think, that it is quite possible that human appearance, as influenced by human sexual selection, satisfies standards of objective beauty as well as species-specific ones. We may not be very far along that path yet, because we diverged from apes only a few hundred thousand years ago, so our appearance isn’t yet all that different from that of apes. But I guess that when beauty is better understood it will turn out that most of the differences have been in the direction of making humans objectively more beautiful than apes.
The two types of beauty are usually created to solve two types of problem – which could be called pure and applied. The applied kind is that of signalling information, and is usually solved by creating the parochial type of beauty. Humans have problems of that type too: the beauty of, say, the graphical user interface of a computer is created primarily to promote comfort and efficiency in the machine’s use. Sometimes a poem or song may be written for a similar practical purpose: to give more cohesiveness to a culture, or to advance a political agenda, or even to advertise beverages. Again, sometimes these purposes can also be met by creating objective beauty, but usually the parochial kind is used because it is easier to create.
The other kind of problem, the pure kind, which has no analogue in biology, is that of creating beauty for its own sake – which includes creating improved criteria for beauty: new artistic standards or styles. This is the analogue of pure scientific research. The states of mind involved in that sort of science and that sort of art are fundamentally the same. Both are seeking universal, objective truth.
And both, I believe, are seeking it through good explanations. This is most straightforwardly so in the case of art forms that involve stories – fiction. There, as I mentioned in Chapter 11, a good story has a good explanation of the fictional events that it portrays. But the same is true in all art forms. In some, it is especially hard to express in words the explanation of the beauty of a particular work of art, even if one knows it, because the relevant knowledge is itself not expressed in words – it is inexplicit. No one yet knows how to translate musical explanations into natural language. Yet when a piece of music has the attribute ‘displace one note and there would be diminishment’ there is an explanation: it was known to the composer, and it is known to the listeners who appreciate it. One day it will be expressible in words.
This, too, is not as different from science and mathematics as it looks: poetry and mathematics or physics share the property that they develop a language different from ordinary language in order to state things efficiently that it would be very inefficient to state in ordinary language. And both do this by constructing variants of ordinary language: one has to understand the latter first in order to understand explanations of, and in, the former.
Applied art and pure art ‘feel’ the same. And, just as we need sophisticated knowledge to tell the difference between the motion of a bird across the sky, which is happening objectively, and the motion of the sun across the sky, which is just a subjective illusion caused by our own motion, and the motion of the moon, which is a bit of each, so pure and applied art, universal and parochial beauty, are mixed together in our subjective appreciation of things. It will be important to discover which is which. For it is only in the objective direction that we can expect to make unlimited progress. The other directions are inherently finite. They are circumscribed by the finite knowledge inherent in our genes and our existing traditions.
That has a bearing on various existing theories of what art is. Ancient fine art, for instance in Greece, was initially concerned with the skill of reproducing the shapes of human bodies and other objects. That is not the same as the pursuit of objective beauty, because, among other things, it is perfectible (in the bad sense that it can reach a state that cannot be much improved on). But it is a skill that can allow artists to pursue pure art as well, and they did so in the ancient world, and then again during the revival of that tradition in the Renaissance.
There are utilitarian theories of the purpose of art. These theories deprecate pure art, just as pure science and mathematics are deprecated by the same arguments. But one has no choice about what constitutes an artistic improvement any more than one has a choice as to what is true and false in mathematics. And if one tries to tune one’s scientific theories or philosophical positions to meet a political agenda, or a personal preference, then one is at cross purposes. Art can be used for many purposes. But artistic values are not subordinate to, or derived from, anything else.
The same critique applies to the theory that art is self-expression. Expression is conveying something that is already there, while objective progress in art is about creating something new. Also, self-expression is about expressing something subjective, while pure art is objective. For the same reason, any kind of art that consists solely of spontaneous or mechanical acts, such as throwing paint on to canvas, or of pickling sheep, lacks the means of making artistic progress, because real progress is difficult and involves many errors for every success.
If I am right, then the future of art is as mind-boggling as the future of every other kind of knowledge: art of the future can create unlimited increases in beauty. I can only speculate, but we can presumably expect new kinds of unification too. When we understand better what elegance really is, perhaps we shall find new and better ways to seek truth using elegance or beauty. I guess that we shall also be able to design new senses, and design new qualia, that can encompass beauty of new kinds literally inconceivable to us now. ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ is a famous question asked by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. (More precisely, what would it be like for a person to have the echo-location senses of a bat?) Perhaps the full answer is that in future it will be not so much be the task of philosophy to discover what that is like, but the task of technological art to give us the experience itself.
TERMINOLOGY
Aesthetics The philosophy of beauty.
Elegance The beauty in explanations, mathematical formulae and so on.
Explicit Expressed in words or symbols.
Inexplicit Not explicit.
Implicit Implied or otherwise contained in other information.
MEANINGS OF ‘THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY’ ENCOUNTERED IN THIS CHAPTER
– The fact that elegance is a heuristic guide to truth.
– The need to create objective knowledge in order to allow different people to communicate.
SUMMARY
There are objective truths in aesthetics. The standard argument that there cannot be is a relic of empiricism. Aesthetic truths are linked to factual ones by explanations, and also because artistic problems can emerge from physical facts and situations. The fact that flowers reliably seem beautiful to humans when their designs evolved for an apparently unrelated purpose is evidence that beauty is objective. Those convergent criteria of beauty solve the problem of creating hard-to-forge signals where prior shared knowledge is insufficient to provide them.
15
The Evolution of Culture
Ideas that survive
A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behaviour. Thus the shared values of a nation, the ability to communicate in a particular language, the shared knowledge of an academic discipline and the appreciation of a given musical style are all, in this sense, ‘sets of ideas’ that define cultures. Many of them are inexplicit; in fact all ideas have some inexplicit component, since even our knowledge of the meanings of words is held largely inexplicitly in our minds. Physical skills, such as the ability to ride a bicycle, have an especially high inexplicit content, as do philosophical concepts such as freedom and knowledge. The distinction between explicit and inexplicit is not always sharp. For instance, a poem or a satire may be explicitly about one subject, while the audience in a particular culture will reliably, and without being told, interpret it as being about a different o
ne.
The world’s major cultures – including nations, languages, philosophical and artistic movements, social traditions and religions – have been created incrementally over hundreds or even thousands of years. Most of the ideas that define them, including the inexplicit ones, have a long history of being passed from one person to another. That makes these ideas memes – ideas that are replicators.
Nevertheless, cultures change. People modify cultural ideas in their minds, and sometimes they pass on the modified versions. Inevitably, there are unintentional modifications as well, partly because of straightforward error, and partly because inexplicit ideas are hard to convey accurately: there is no way to download them directly from one brain to another like computer programs. Even native speakers of a language will not give identical definitions of every word. So it can be only rarely, if ever, that two people hold precisely the same cultural idea in their minds. That is why, when the founder of a political or philosophical movement or a religion dies, or even before, schisms typically happen. The movement’s most devoted followers are often shocked to discover that they disagree about what its doctrines ‘really’ are. It is not much different when the religion has a holy book in which the doctrines are stated explicitly: then there are disputes about the meanings of the words and the interpretation of the sentences.
Thus a culture is in practice defined not by a set of strictly identical memes, but by a set of variants that cause slightly different characteristic behaviours. Some variants tend to have the effect that their holders are eager to enact or talk about them, others less so. Some are easier than others for potential recipients to replicate in their own minds. These factors and others affect how likely each variant of a meme is to be passed on faithfully. A few exceptional variants, once they appear in one mind, tend to spread throughout the culture with very little change in meaning (as expressed in the behaviours that they cause). Such memes are familiar to us because long-lived cultures are composed of them; but, nevertheless, in another sense they are a very unusual type of idea, for most ideas are short-lived. A human mind considers many ideas for every one that it ever acts upon, and only a small proportion of those cause behaviour that anyone else notices – and, of those, only a small proportion are ever replicated by anyone else. So the overwhelming majority of ideas disappear within a lifetime or less. The behaviour of people in a long-lived culture is therefore determined partly by recent ideas that will soon become extinct, and partly by long-lived memes: exceptional ideas that have been accurately replicated many times in succession.
A fundamental question in the study of cultures is: what is it about a long-lived meme that gives it this exceptional ability to resist change throughout many replications? Another – central to the theme of this book – is: when such memes do change, what are the conditions under which they can change for the better?
The idea that cultures evolve is at least as old as that of evolution in biology. But most attempts to understand how they evolve have been based on misunderstandings of evolution. For example, the communist thinker Karl Marx believed that his theory of history was evolutionary because it spoke of a progression through historical stages determined by economic ‘laws of motion’. But the real theory of evolution has nothing to do with predicting the attributes of organisms from those of their ancestors. Marx also thought that Darwin’s theory of evolution ‘provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle’. He was comparing his idea of inherent conflict between socio-economic classes with the supposed competition between biological species. Fascist ideologies such as Nazism likewise used garbled or inaccurate evolutionary ideas, such as ‘the survival of the fittest’, to justify violence. But in fact the competition in biological evolution is not between different species, but between variants of genes within a species – which does not resemble the supposed ‘class struggle’ at all. It can give rise to violence or other competition between species, but it can also produce cooperation (such as the symbiosis between flowers and insects) and all sorts of intricate combinations of the two.
Although Marx and the fascists assumed false theories of biological evolution, it is no accident that analogies between society and the biosphere are often associated with grim visions of society: the biosphere is a grim place. It is rife with plunder, deceit, conquest, enslavement, starvation and extermination. Hence those who think that cultural evolution is like that end up either opposing it (advocating a static society) or condoning that kind of immoral behaviour as necessary or inevitable.
Arguments by analogy are fallacies. Almost any analogy between any two things contains some grain of truth, but one cannot tell what that is until one has an independent explanation for what is analogous to what, and why. The main danger in the biosphere–culture analogy is that it encourages one to conceive of the human condition in a reductionist way that obliterates the high-level distinctions that are essential for understanding it – such as those between mindless and creative, determinism and choice, right and wrong. Such distinctions are meaningless at the level of biology. Indeed, the analogy is often drawn for the very purpose of debunking the common-sense idea of human beings as causal agents with the ability to make moral choices and to create new knowledge for themselves.
As I shall explain, although biological and cultural evolution are described by the same underlying theory, the mechanisms of transmission, variation and selection are all very different. That makes the resulting ‘natural histories’ different too. There is no close cultural analogue of a species, or of an organism, or a cell, or of sexual or asexual reproduction. Genes and memes are about as different as can be at the level of mechanisms, and of outcomes; they are similar only at the lowest level of explanation, where they are both replicators that embody knowledge and are therefore conditioned by the same fundamental principles that determine the conditions under which knowledge can or cannot be preserved, can or cannot improve.
Meme evolution
In the classic 1956 science-fiction story ‘Jokester’, by Isaac Asimov, the main character is a scientist studying jokes. He finds that, although most people do sometimes make witty remarks that are original, they never invent what he considers to be a fully fledged joke: a story with a plot and a punchline that causes listeners to laugh. Whenever they tell such a joke, they are merely repeating one that they have heard from someone else. So, where do jokes come from originally? Who creates them? The fictional answer given in ‘Jokester’ is far-fetched and need not concern us here. But the premise of the story is not so absurd: it really is plausible that some jokes were not created by anyone – that they evolved.
People tell each other amusing stories – some fictional, some factual. They are not jokes, but some become memes: they are interesting enough for the listeners to retell them to other people, and some of those people retell them in turn. But they rarely recite them word for word; nor do they preserve every detail of the content. Hence an often-retold story will come to exist in different versions. Some of those versions will be retold more often than others – in some cases because people find them amusing. When that is the main reason for retelling them, successive versions that remain in circulation will tend to be ever more amusing. So the conditions are there for evolution: repeated cycles of imperfect copying of information, alternating with selection. Eventually the story becomes amusing enough to make people laugh, and a fully fledged joke has evolved.
It is conceivable that a joke could evolve through variations that were not intended to improve upon the funniness. For example, people who hear a story can mishear or misunderstand aspects of it, or change it for pragmatic reasons, and in a small proportion of cases, by sheer luck, that will produce a funnier version of the story, which will then propagate better. If a joke has evolved in that way from a non-joke, it truly has no author. Another possibility is that most of the people who altered the amusing story on its way to becoming a joke designed their contributions, using creativity to make it funnier intentionally
. In such cases, although the joke was indeed created by variation and selection, its funniness was the result of human creativity. In that case it would be misleading to say that ‘no one created it.’ It had many co-authors, each of whom contributed creative thought to the outcome. But it may still be that literally no one understands why the joke is as funny as it is, and hence that no one could create another joke of similar quality at will.
Although we do not know exactly how creativity works, we do know that it is itself an evolutionary process within individual brains. For it depends on conjecture (which is variation) and criticism (for the purpose of selecting ideas). So, somewhere inside brains, blind variations and selections are adding up to creative thought at a higher level of emergence.
The idea of memes has come in for a great deal of radical, and in my view mistaken, criticism to the effect that it is vague and pointless, or else tendentious. For example, when the ancient Greek religion was suppressed, but the stories of its gods continued to be told, though now only as fiction, were those stories still the same memes despite now causing new behaviours? When Newton’s laws were translated into English from the original Latin, they caused different words to be spoken and written. Were they the same memes? But in fact such questions cast no doubt on the existence of memes, nor on the usefulness of the concept. It is like the controversy about which objects in the solar system should be called ‘planets’. Is Pluto a ‘real’ planet even though it is smaller than some of the moons in our solar system? Is Jupiter really not a planet but an un-ignited star? It is not important. What is important is what is really there. And memes are really there, regardless of what we call them or how we classify them. Just as the basic theory of genes was developed long before the discovery of DNA, so today, without knowing how ideas are stored in brains, we do know that some ideas can be passed from one person to another and affect people’s behaviour. Memes are those ideas.
The Beginning of Infinity Page 44