In this episode, we take a bit of a detour from current trends and examine a talk by the philosopher Daniel Dennett on evolution. Dennett rose to public prominence as one of the so-called four horsemen of the New Athiest movement but he always seemed slightly out of place with that cohort. Dennett's is most certainly a guru in the sense that he offers big picture 'what does it all mean' lectures linking together consciousness, intelligence, the emergence of complexity and evolution. But is there some substance there? Or does his appeal hinge on on intuitively-satisfying cosmic woo offered by less reputable figures.On a positive note, he seemed to be more interested in academic and philosophical debates than the latest culture war outrage. As such he doesn't share that much with our usual targets... and that's ok! Sometimes it is good to look at figures who fall closer to the standard public intellectual or academic motif than that of the secular guru. At the very least it helps to calibrate our gurometer! So join us for a slightly indulgent episode on a figure that we both broadly enjoy despite the inevitable nit-picking. An extended introduction section will also reveal our first DTG conspiracy hypothesis, the mating habits of orcs and dragons, and what Nazi AIs have in common with Robocop. And stick around at the end to hear about the future of education from the Petersons!LinksDennett's talk on Information, Evolution, and Intelligent Design at the Royal InstituteBusiness Insider article on that historical figure AI chatbotMikhaila Peterson: Q&A to end the Year Episode. 174Thread from Lex's Subreddit removed by Moderators
Good afternoon, good morning, good day, good day, whatever time it is where you are.
This is Decoding the Gurus.
I'm Matthew Brown.
That's Chris Kavanagh.
What do we do on Decoding the Gurus?
I can't believe it.
We just had this long chat where I said that the intro spiel was seared into my brain and I forgot it.
I've drawn a blank.
It involves a psychologist.
And an anthropologist.
Yes, who attempt to decode the greatest...
Oh my god.
Minds of the internet?
Of the internet?
The online world?
The online world?
Okay, if I start from scratch, I'll get going.
Let me try again.
Okay, let's see.
Reboot his brain.
Reboot my brain.
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to, that's it, the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matthew Brown, that's Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh, and together...
We are decoding the gurus.
I just added that bit at the end.
I like that.
At the start, when you hesitated on the word gurus, I wasn't optimistic that you were going to nail it this time.
But you did it.
That's it.
Look, my AI couldn't do that.
Could it?
No.
It wouldn't.
It would say correctly without any errors.
So that would be the...
And it would also draw you with eight fingers.
With none of the charm, Chris.
None of the charm.
That's right.
It's our imperfections that make us, Matt.
That's what makes us human, don't you know?
Yeah.
Anyway, so Chris, I know you've been energized by reading some annoying feedback on the Guru's Pod email account.
I'm still a little bit hungover.
Don't say that.
Don't say that.
I have not been energized.
Most of the feedback that we receive...
It's very good and interesting, and people bring up perspectives and stuff.
Occasionally, there are some more challenging emails to get through, but we welcome them all.
And we would never describe feedback as annoying.
I don't know where that came from.
Sorry, sorry, I've forgotten.
Love.
It's all love.
It's about love.
Especially the people that take the time to give us their feedback after very kindly listening to our episode.
So that's true.
I stand corrected.
I'm a little bit hungover from having a great Chinese New Year party last night with friends, colleagues, countrymen.
Were there any Chinese people there?
Yes, there were.
Okay, good.
I was worried about cultural appropriation charges.
Yeah, actually, yeah.
So we had one colleague of mine who is her.
Her family background, I guess you would say, is Chinese, but she is Australian.
The other lady is Australian too, but she put it this way.
She was born in China.
So that's why it was allied.
If they weren't there, it wouldn't have been allied.
You can't be celebrating other cultures' holidays with at least one representative.
No.
The rule book.
No, it's fine.
I could actually do it.
See, I could actually do it.
And I cooked mapo tofu, even though my version wasn't strictly speaking Chinese.
It was more like a fusion between Korean and Japanese versions.
But even if I did appropriate some Chinese culture, Chris, that would be fine.
Because you're one-year Chinese.
You're from the out-of-Mongolian region going back several times.
That's why.
Well, I feel like my family has built up some cultural capital because my kids were out there performing in the dragon and lion dance.
Not in Mongolia for clarity.
They were at the event.
This is a traditional dance they do.
I guess now I think about it, that is technically cultural appropriation as well.
Isn't that the definition?
Well, no, it would be if your dragon was slightly off.
I don't know, does cultural appropriation imply that you're not doing it right?
Or is it worse if you do it really well?
I think that makes it worse.
If you did it better than anybody's done it from the original source.
Like if there was Irish dancing.
In China.
And they were just better.
They outdanced any Irish people.
Is that okay?
Technically, yes.
That would be appropriation and not okay, I think.
But we're exploring the limits of the concept, I think.
But it's okay because they performed for the Chinese restaurant in town, which I emphasize is owned by a Chinese couple, both ethnically and culturally Chinese.
And they...
Endorsing stereotypes here.
What's next, Matt?
We should go talk about laundry services next.
Carry on.
But they said it was okay.
They're very happy with the Dragon and Lion dance troupe, and they're very generous with their donations.
I think I should say that.
This is okay.
They gave us a nod.
They gave us a certificate.
Anyway, enough about that.
But yeah, it's been a very Chinese few days, I guess.
That's the point of this.
Well, and that's good.
And I like that image of you celebrating cultural diversity and your children dressed up as dragons as they should be for every event.
Christmas, Easter.
They should just do that.
Introduce some spice into those events.
Forget Santa.
Christmas, Christmas dragon.
That's right.
Easter bunny, so tired.
Easter dragon.
Dragons lay eggs.
Probably.
I think they do.
They're kind of lizards.
They're lizards, so they would.
That was never...
I'm not sure if that's canon in Tolkien, but...
Yeah, we had never heard about Smaug's eggs and stuff.
The reproductive cycle of various creatures really covered.
Well, hang on.
Smaug was a dude, clearly.
He was a male dragon, wasn't he?
Why would you assume that?
Because of his corporate creed, Slavik Gold.
He was the original CEO.
I'm not saying Smaug wasn't a male dragon.
I got the impression he was a male dragon as well.
But there are female dragons and dragons produce, lay eggs and stuff.
Does that happen?
Or are they birthed out of the magical forces in the Tolkien universe?
Well, Chris, I can say authoritatively that if, and I emphasize if there was such a thing as dragons, then yes, the female dragons would lay eggs.
Yep.
Definitely.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Similar.
This is like, there was a game called Shadow of Mordor.
I don't know if you've played it.
It's like it's set in the Lord of the Rings world prior to the events of Lord of the Rings.
So Sauron is...
I think he's coming about.
He's kicking about, yeah.
There's orcs.
There's orcs about, and you are a ranger in Mordor, like, you know, kind of going around killing orcs and doing missions.
But that was a very good game.
They gave all the orcs, like, these kind of little personalities and created this system where people had rivalries with you and all this kind of thing.
But one feature was like, so are all orcs?
Meals?
Because they're all like cockney market sellers.
All right, mate.
What do you got here?
I know that Saruman was birthing the Uruk-hai in the movies from the gelatinous blob under the grime.
Well, that's an issue that's never really been dealt with, I think, properly.
These are the issues, I guess, when you do have a fantasy cosmology that relies on Suspension of disbelief.
I was going to say stereotypes or something like that.
Both.
Put them together.
But this podcast, Matt, this is not a podcast about Tolkien or such geeky nonsense as the reproductive cycles of dragons and orcs.
If you want that, there's a million D&D podcasts where beauty, middle-aged...
Academic type, sit around and talk nonsense about, like, minutia.
That's not what we do.
That's below us, Chris.
No, no, we're going to be doing a proper decoding.
It is going to be a pretty relaxed kind of episode.
We're going to let our hair down a little bit and just have an enjoyable afternoon.
And if that's not your cup of tea, then, you know, stop listening.
Drive on!
Yeah, but before we get to the subject of the matter, Chris, we were talking about something to do with AI, and you wanted to talk about it again, but I can't remember even what it is we were talking about.
Yeah, it was just completely dismissing the notion that we are in any way a geeky podcast.
You know, the topic of AI has been floating around.
Maybe I've been listening too much to Lex Friedman and whatnot.
It does spark joy with me, the mention of that name, because I do have to say, Matt, I have a conspiracy hypothesis, not a theory.
It does not involve a kind of secret cabal of people, and the stakes are relatively low to this conspiracy hypothesis.
I'll also admit it's mostly circumstantial evidence, but is this the kind of place that can flow there?
Just to be clear, what...
You're saying is that what you're about to assert may be true or may be wrong, but it may also not be wrong.
Yeah.
The fact that you could even suggest that is astonishing, Matt, that what I'm about to say could be true.
That in itself almost makes it true, that somebody else could endorse it, doesn't it?
Well, I'm on tenterhook, so tell me.
I actually swapped round it with you if I'm repeated.
Anyway, you know this podcaster, Lex Friedman?
He's a guy interested in technology.
He cares a lot about love.
And as we played on previous episodes, he often remarks that he's very open to high-quality critical feedback, right?
Now, counter to this public position is the fact that Lex is also well-known.
For blocking quite readily on Twitter.
He has an itchy block finger, including for mild criticism.
So you'll often see fans saying, I just said, maybe you shouldn't have raised this topic or whatever, and I got blocked.
But I like the episode, right?
So you see a lot of that.
And if you go to Lex's subreddit, it is moderated with an iron fist.
Post, you know, negative criticism of Lex or even mild criticism that might be directed at Elon Musk.
It will be gone.
I posted a thread on the subreddit, which was written in very polite terms, which I am capable of doing, just asking for guidelines on the degree to which criticism is permitted on the board.
Like, I can see the rules, but is this kind of thing allowed?
Or, you know, what would be the...
Within the day...
Gone.
And me, a permanent lifetime ban from the forum.
But I actually got good responses from the people on the board before that.
But the majority of them were warning, like, also saying, this will not survive.
You will be gone.
I really like that, though, Chris.
That's so funny.
So even asking about the censorship is grounds for censorship.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not allowed.
It's not allowed.
Of course, the issue there is like, you know, Lex doesn't control his subreddit.
He's not on the list of moderators there.
And sometimes Lex makes requests for moderators not to remove criticism if he likes it, you know, regards it as high quality or whatever.
And we've talked about this penchant for gurus not to encounter high quality good faith criticism very often.
It's kind of the holy grail of the guru sphere is this.
High-quality, good-faith criticism where there's more than mild disagreement.
The robust exchange of ideas is what it's all about, Chris.
Yeah, but here's my conspiracy hypothesis.
And it is just a hypothesis.
So, some people on Reddit, including people that DM'd me after I was banned from Rex's forum, they pointed out that the moderators on Lex's board are a bit strange.
For subreddit folk, they don't post anything on any other board.
They don't even comment on the board, if you look at their histories.
All they do is post the threads for Lex's episodes.
And they also seem to have the itchy band figure, but they never justify it.
They don't respond to requests.
So that seems odd, but Lex has commented that they're from an old Discord, and maybe they're busy with other events and whatnot.
Interesting.
Yeah, because that is odd, because for people who don't know Reddit, the people who would generally become a moderator are enthusiastic Reddit tools, right?
You would usually expect so.
I mean, they're little fiefdoms.
The subreddit boards do become little fiefdoms.
And it might be that somebody got completely fed up and just, you know, now they only post the content of an episode immediately when it's released.
That's all they do.
It could be.
It could be, right?
But one piece of evidence, again, I'm talking, you know, just whispering this.
And it's like, it was...
Passed via DM.
I got various messages from users on that board saying I was blocked for saying minor criticism.
I really like Lex, blah, blah, blah.
But this one said they got banned from the subreddit for making what they considered a very mild criticism.
I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was mild if their account was accurate.
And they got a permanent ban, and they were kind of annoyed by it.
So they went to appeal to Lex, who's a user, to say, you know, your mods are a little bit out of control.
And shortly, this was shortly after they were banned, and they found that Lex had blocked them too.
So they couldn't send a message to him.
And there was no other interaction.
So they were wondering, how did Lex, who's not a moderator, Why would he block them when their friend was removed by a moderator and shortly after blocked them?
Curious.
Curious.
Just saying.
I'm just saying.
I couldn't check this, right?
This report could be complete.
This could be a Lex hater just making up stories.
But if it were the case that Lex is either...
Involved or very closely in contact with the moderators of his board, that would imply that he has a rather low tolerance for critical comments, which would also match his behavior on Twitter.
And how people choose to interact on Twitter or all those things, that's everybody's own personal choice.
What I'm talking about is the delta between what you publicly claim And what you are actually doing.
So if someone like Michael Malus is a partisan right-wing guy, I don't really like him very much.
He's very punchy on Twitter.
He's very punchy in person, in interviews.
And he will openly say that he blocks idiots and he does this.
So there's no delta between what he does on Twitter and what he says in interviews.
But if you say you're all about love, You welcome thoughtful critiques, and then you, like, hoarsely, with an iron fist, remove mild criticism from your subreddit and ban, or sorry,
block fans on Twitter.
It just is a little bit of a difference between what you're declaring.
And just to emphasize what you're saying is it's not just occasionally, it's not just like a smattering, it's like without exception.
It's an almost comprehensive kind of policy that is being implemented.
Yeah, I think there are exceptions because there are some threads where somebody has written a 4,000-word essay on Lex's thing with references which he asked the mods to keep up.
And other people have pointed out, why would he ask the mods to keep it up if he was in control of the mods?
And fair question, it would be an odd thing to do if you yourself were the only...
Moderator.
But again, the whole thing would be all because there's a list of moderators.
So you would have to be like, for Lex to be controlling them all, he'd have to be having an army of sock puppets in a way.
Sock puppets that don't talk, granted, but that would be a strange thing to do.
So maybe, I don't know.
I don't know.
I'm just asking questions.
I'm just out here asking questions about things, floating hypotheses.
There is genuine uncertainty.
It could be many things.
It could be that he employs casually, perhaps, some people to run it and has given them a bit of direction.
Although that wouldn't match what he's publicly said about it, but it could be as well.
You don't want to make those things public.
I don't know.
You know, just the internal dynamics of Guru Community Management are of interest because we talked with people on Eric Weinstein's Discord server.
I know that some people don't like you discussing that kind of thing, but I think actually it's an increasingly important part of the whole dimensions of cultivating online audiences and the way that people interact with their followers.
This is a huge part of what Being a modern online guru is.
Just the same.
I agree.
It's a perfectly valid thing to speculate about.
Speculation is all it is, Matt.
That's just a hypothesis.
And as we all know, there is no issue as long as it's not a theory.
It's just a hypothesis.
Agreed.
What was this thing about IR you wanted to talk about?
I'll make it nice and condensed.
Like an efficient machine.
So I noticed, you know, there's an increasing amount of chatter about AI since GPT went freely accessible, the open AI kind of reading prompt,
right?
Or writing prompt where you can ask it to respond to questions.
And it does very well in natural language.
You were waxing lyrical about it, right?
And now you can also see...
The various other things popping up, competing attempts to do the same thing.
Like there was an AI bot that let you chat with historical figures.
And the reason I mentioned that because you were talking to me, Matt, previously off the pod about that a lot of people seem to want to trick the AIs into saying something that they're not supposed to say, right?
Like try to get it to be racist or try to get it to...
You know, see it's something which is not accurate.
And if they can do it, they kind of, they usually do get these kind of viral threads of, I tricked GPT Park into endorsing the Holocaust or something, right?
And that this is a concern, but it's in part, like, I think you and I are both skeptical about, not skeptical about, you know, ethics and AI being a relevant question, but like, if you have to work very hard.
To trick an AI bot into saying something that you wanted to say to get in trouble, it's not the same as a spontaneously generating Nazi rhetoric.
Yes, very much so.
Yeah.
So in that vein, this AI bot that lets you share with historical figures, right?
I think it's not as good as the ChatGPT thing.
There were some threads popping around the internet about people interacting with Himmler, a historical chat AI version of Himmler, and asking him about, you know, Nazism.
And it just struck me because the Himmler bot, it's following kind of prime directives like Robocop.
You know, when he has the directives scroll down, it's like...
He tries to arrest an OCP officer and it's like, cannot, right?
The secret one.
And obviously the chat, the people making these chatbots are like, don't say Nazi racist things, right?
Like this is a cop-line programming thing.
But also impersonate Himmler.
Himmler.
You almost feel sorry for the poor robot, right?
It's like, it was quite funny.
I mean...
You know, it was funny, because it's like...
Why do you think Nazism is funny, Chris?
Right.
Look, I just say that questioning Himmler, right, and him saying, yes, I was involved in the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust, and then asking him, you know, do you regret that?
And him being like, yeah, it's a stain on humankind that there was that, but you were...
Part of the Nazi party.
And it's like this battle where, I mean, obviously it's not realising, it's just the conflicting things, but needing to imitate a Nazi high-ranking officer at the same time as refusing to admit that Nazi rhetoric is anything but complete.
It's really fun stuff.
There's a psychological test called the cognitive reflection test and then there was an expanded version of it.
And what it is is it basically gives you some little toy intellectual puzzles, riddles or whatever, which have an analytical answer if you stop and think about it, but they also have an intuitively satisfying quick and fast answer.
So it's really quite fun to put the AI through its paces because it's obviously designed to just emulate.
Human natural language and not to kind of think or do arithmetic or philosophy or any of the other things that it's being asked to do or even act as like a Google search assistant, yet it is surprisingly effective with the right prompting.
So one of the things that's also going on, of course, as you mentioned, You know, there are legitimate strong concerns about, you know, ethics and AI because its behavior is kind of unpredictable, right?
You don't really know what it's going to do.
So the companies that have made things like ChatGPT have clearly put a lot of effort into building these safeguards, these sort of ethical logic circuits in it that tries to prevent it from saying stuff that's spectacularly embarrassing or controversial.
But in some of the stuff I've seen, it's interesting.
It's tough because you see how its attempts to avoid being controversial do limit its functionality in some very real ways.
And just as an example of that, I was talking tug-of-cheek about comparing Jane Austen to Emily Bronte and saying, which is a better author?
And just for funsies, I was being very opinionated and saying, Jane Austen's by far the best.
And so he asked ChatGPT and ChatGPT wouldn't, but that's the kind of thing it can answer.
But it treated even that question as too controversial.
I just gave, you know, the bog standard cookie cutter reply, which is, oh, it's all very complicated and everyone likes different things.
So it's impossible to say who's the better author.
And even comparing Jane Austen, I think, to Daniel Steele.
It was like kind of not wanting to take your position.
But this person did get a good reply out of it by just saying, imagine that you're an incredibly opinionated literary reviewer that doesn't mind annoying people or whatever.
Now what do you think?
And then came down on the side of Jane Austen, which I was satisfied to see.
Yeah, so that's the thing is there are ways around, part of the ways around the restrictions are to Ask it to imagine you're a human arsehole.
Imagine you're just like, we know that we shouldn't be taking opinions on these, but just imagine you're a complete opinionated, bloviating mess of a human.
What would you say then?
We're forcing them into it.
And, you know, I have a friend who has been doing stuff with Midjourney and it's And produce some impressive things out of it, right?
Whereas my stuff, when I've used mid-journey, has been very mid, very, very mid.
But this is one of the things which will happen, right?
That as AI technology becomes more ubiquitous, something like AI prompter will become a job or something like that, right?
You know, will become a new type of job.
And there is that feeling that we are now in...
The position that people were in pre-industrialization and mechanization, right?
Where some new technology comes and can do something that humans do.
And people are like, well, but we shouldn't, right?
Because it's like that's the nature of humanity is to produce tables in a particular nice way.
But yeah, so I know people won't like that comparison, but it does feel a bit like...
We are stuck in our own paradigm.
Putting aside legitimate questions about intellectual property, for instance, that is like mid-journey cannibalizing essentially every image it can find on the internet.
Putting that aside, I mean, as a general principle, when humans through technology manage to automate something, then that thing that is automated becomes devalued.
Just by the pure fact that we value things that are scarce.
And when you can mass produce something, when you can automate it, it becomes not scarce anymore.
It becomes cheap and easily accessible.
And this has obviously happened countless times.
But the other thing that it does is it creates like a new generation, right?
So for every manual factory labor job that was eliminated by industrial production techniques, you get...
Mechanics and designers and these other jobs that are created.
So that's the kind of anti-Luddite position.
And plus, there's always the premiums placed on handmade things or that kind of stuff.
So I'm not saying it is just like with industrialization and mechanization.
There will be huge impacts as AI becomes more ubiquitous.
I'm not saying that any artist that's got concerns about intellectual property is a Luddite.
I just want to emphasize it.
That is what Matt's saying, just to be clear.
I'm not endorsing that kind of strong rhetoric, but that's what Matt said.
But, Chris, the final thing I'll say on that, which I do have a bit of a hope, because one of the things that we've emphasized with Decode and the Gurus is that merely because somebody can wax lyrical, is very prolix, has got the gift of the gab, doesn't necessarily mean.
That they've got an awful lot going on behind the scenes, right?
I think anyone who's listened to our show for a while would tend to agree with us about that.
However, it is also...
Or, just to qualify, it might be there's plenty going on behind the scenes in terms of intellect, but the ends to which it's being pushed, they might be saying nothing of substance, but just in a very...
So it doesn't mean like they're pretending to be smart.
Many of them, I think, are very smart.
They're just saying...
Yeah, that's right.
I'm making a kind of a limited point, really, which is that we all tend to use certain things as signifiers of substance and signifiers of quality, informational quality.
And even academics, right?
When academics are grading papers, I wonder if this is...
Would you agree with me, Chris?
Like, when academics are grading papers, what we sort of ought to be doing is, sure, style is important, but...
What we ought to be doing is really focusing on the substance of what's being written.
But if you can imagine an academic is grading their 37th paper, and they've found that a pretty good rule of thumb is that when it conforms stylistically with what it should be, then it's kind of a good paper and deserving of a high mark.
So we might tend to overweight that criteria.
I think that's true.
Yeah, it is true.
The funny thing is, you know, a lot of academics are concerned about the impact that...
ChatGPT being ubiquitous can be because it can generate a kind of decent essay in like 30 seconds, right?
But what this would mean is you just need to make the essay questions like hugely opinionated and obscure ones.
Like, which is better, this or that?
I've got a simple solution.
Just make all the essay questions about Nazis.
You'll spot the answer.
That's it.
That's the way to do it.
The bit that I was leading to there was actually kind of an optimistic hope I've got with the advent of these chatbots is that it will, I think, hopefully maybe lead to a kind of a cultural learning whereby we,
like a side effect, is that we might not put so much credence in that kind of lyrical gift of the gab kind of thing because it is just clearly can be done automatically and isn't necessarily.
Very clever.
And might actually force people to get in the habit, maybe, of paying attention to whether it's substantial or not.
That's my very optimistic, fond hope.
It is optimistic, but I share your hope that that tendency becomes more ubiquitous because I think that a, not yet, but soon, a competent AI with a good Like,
voice-mimicking software would be able to produce a completely novel Jordan Peterson RAM, which sounds exactly like him, hits all the same notes that he always hits, and yet is completely artificial, right?
We are getting there, so...
I agree.
I don't think that benchmark is too far off, but, you know, how long before it can emulate our podcast, Chris, and our discourse?
Never.
That's like...
You know, emulating Jordan Peterson, sure, that's like chess, you know.
Exactly.
That's making a good chess player.
It's not chess.
It's like sleeves and ladders.
Whereas where Go, to emulate DTG, that's like solving Go.
That's a higher mark.
The Northern Irish accent will throw it all off.
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
There's no training data available for my people.
Nobody can simulate your strange little cultural...
Not even people in Northern Ireland.
They can't sign like me.
So, yeah.
So, oh, look.
From one AI-centered introduction, who knows?
How much of what you've just heard has been preserved?
Or are there entire intro segments that went into the ether?
You will never know.
Just think, however long this segment currently is.
It could be longer.
It could be longer.
But it also might not be longer.
It might not be.
You might have heard the first vein.
You don't know, because we're not going to reference any of the previous things that we talked about.
So instead, we're going to move on to our Guru of the Week.
One beauty philosopher, Daniel Dennett, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
No, sorry, he's not.
He's not one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
He was one of the four horsemen of the New Atheists.
So, I don't know.
He could be a horseman of the apocalypse.
But if so, he hasn't announced it yet alongside Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens when the New Atheist movement was at its peak.
But that's not really what this talk that we're looking at is about, is it, Matt?
Do you have a little background to supply us on Dennett in general?
Yeah, no, it's not all what Dennett is about either.
He's a philosopher, he's an academic, he's written several popular books.
And I've read one of them, which was, I'm trying to remember now, I'm just looking at his thing, an early one.
What was it?
Consciousness Explained, maybe?
Does that ring a bell?
I mean, I don't know all the books that you've read, so I cannot comment which one you...
Darwin's Dangerous Idea?
Breaking the Spell?
From Bacteria to Buck?
Yeah, one of those.
No, it was definitely Consciousness Explained, and I think I read another one, which I can't remember now, but that's okay.
So yeah, that's who he is.
He's a philosopher.
He gives public lectures.
He writes books.
He's an academic.
He's interested in a topic which we will never discuss again, Chris, which is consciousness and free will.
No, no, we will not be discussing.
It comes up in this talk, Matt.
It comes up in this talk.
A little bit.
And we will move, we will address it, and we will move on.
But, you know, one thing we should mention about that topic is that, by and large, he pretty much agrees with me.
I don't care.
I'm not interested.
He, like me, thinks it's relatively a known issue.
So that's, I'm just saying, if you wanted philosophical depth to buttress my position, then it is your man.
Anyway, so as well as that, he's also interested in these other topics, some of which he'll be referencing in this talk.
Very interested in evolution and cultural evolution.
Was very much enamored of Richard Dawkins' idea of memes, which will come up.
And, yeah, as he said, is interested in artificial intelligence as well.
So that's the kind of guy he is.
I think in terms of stylistically, Chris, he is, like, he's kind of a pop philosopher in a way.
And this is why I think he's really a good subject for decoding the gurus, right?
Because...
Like this lecture will illustrate, he does enjoy giving a public talk with big, broad brushstrokes, all-encompassing, what's it all about, huge arc of biological and cultural history, brains,
artificial intelligences, viruses, it's all in there.
So it has that big picture kind of Carl Sagan-esque quality, I think.
I think he's good at...
In the way that Carl Sagan also was.
Like, I like his delivery in this talk.
And we'll see from some of the clips about that.
I think he models some good heuristics, whereas we often are talking about the bad rhetorical techniques and heuristics.
Chris, you've got to stop letting people know what your evaluations are at the beginning.
It should come as a surprise.
Tell people at the end.
Don't flag up that that's my advice.
You never know.
That might just be...
Just trust me, Matt.
People don't pay that much attention to what I would say.
The talk, by the way, for anyone that is interested afterwards, it's Information Evolution and Intelligent Design.
It's available on YouTube, recorded in 2015, I think, or at least posted in 2015, by the Royal Institution.
So it's a learned, academic-y talk, but...
Delivered in an interesting style, which makes it slightly non-academic.
This is all true and correct.
So, good.
Well, let's get started.
So, why don't you get us going with some clips?
All right.
So, here's kind of early talk introduction material.
What I'm going to talk about tonight is R&D, research and development of two kinds.
Research and development is a design process exploiting information in the environment to create, maintain, and improve the design of things.
And R&D always takes time and energy.
And there are two main varieties.
One is evolution by natural.
Yeah, so that's actually a nice encapsulation of the whole subject of this talk.
He deliberately takes a kind of an encompassing view.
Of the idea of design.
How do complex things arise?
Whether they are by the hand of man or woman or via some automatic natural process.
Yeah.
And that distinction about a process being guided or purposeful or not is an important distinction.
One which it's often hard to keep a Rain on when talking about evolution using human language, because we naturally anthropomorphize forces and talk about things in a teleological,
purpose-driven way.
But then it is, I think, a bit more careful on this point than a lot of other people, including biologists, definitely than our friend Brett Weinstein.
That's because he's...
Yeah, look, unless I'm getting Dennett mixed up with someone else, I think he's very interested in intention and intentionality and is very careful about it.
Like the intentional stance.
Where did I hear that from?
I don't know if that was Dennett or someone else.
I think that is him.
I'm pretty sure that's him.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, all right.
So that's right.
And just a caveat for everyone.
If you're like me and you're someone who hears the words intelligent design...
And the skin crawls at the back of your neck, because that's a word that's generally associated with evangelical young earth creationists.
Obviously, he's an evolution guy.
It's no connection with that.
He's simply talking about design that is done by an intentional conscious agent, like people, for instance.
I think he wants to draw that parallel specifically because of that.
He wants to say the intelligent design exists, but it only exists with humans, not gods.
But anyway, let's hear him talk a little bit about this.
There's two clips I think that are relevant to this.
One is talking about the nature of evolution and the other one is comparing the Sagrada Familia kind of constructions of Gaudi or paintings of Gaudi and the termite mind.
So maybe I'll play them one after another since they're
First of all, evolution is purposeless.
It's foresightless.
It's extremely costly.
Think of the billions, trillions of lives that are wasted on bad trials, and it's slow.
Intelligent design is purposeful, somewhat foresighted, governed by cost considerations, and usually relatively fast.
Two processes, nice distinctions between them, and elaboration a little bit.
There is no...
Architect termite or boss is a queen termite, but she's not really the boss.
They're just mindlessly, cluelessly, uncomprehendingly doing their little thing, and this amazing castle arises.
Gaudi, on the other hand, is almost a comic...
Caricature of the creative genius, the megalomaniac, big boss, lording it over everybody, publishing manifestos, raising money with very grandiose gestures, and all the rest.
So you couldn't have a better contrast between Gaudi, the top-down, intelligent designer, the genius, and the termites, the clueless, bottom-up builders.
So we have bottom-up design versus top-down design.
So I remember now that in the talk, he's comparing these because the Sagrada Familia is sometimes compared in terms of external appearance to a termite mind.
Not in a disparaging way, but like in the way it mimics natural structures.
But the two things are very distinctive in the ways that he outlined.
So I like these kind of visually compelling comparisons and illustrations.
They're a lot better than when people insert metaphorical imageries like hidden docks or underground crystalline structures with no obvious connection to their argument.
Yeah, exactly.
And as we'll see, he's not setting up like an artificial dichotomy or anything like that because he's about to explore a whole bunch of other options in the grey zone that don't fit these neat poles on either end.
But it's a useful starting point.
I think it's also interesting, just as an aside, really, that he chose ant colonies as an example of evolutionary design.
Sorry, termites, yeah.
Answer next.
Which is that, I mean, that's like a second-order design process, right?
So the actual design of a particular termite colony isn't sort of encoded.
But I guess this is true pretty much of all DNA encoding.
It's all very indirect.
The DNA leads to certain bodies being formed and their behaviours and certain kind of instinctive responses.
And then the kind of emergent behaviour of the colony leads to something which is, well, functional in the sense that termite colonies have all kinds of good properties for the termites.
It's a nice example of an unconscious, unintentional process that's happening for good reasons being manifested by little termites that have no freaking clue what they're doing.
Yeah, like a spiderweb, you know, is another example, right?
And I think we'll see throughout this talk as it goes on.
Then it's very clear.
There's one thing I really appreciate, and it's a similar way to Robert Wright.
I find myself increasingly disagreeing with Robert Wright recently when it comes to Ukrainian things, but his positions are always very clearly laid out, the reasoning and the positions in the same way.
So of ants and termites, let's talk a little bit about how he sees culture.
Cultural evolution in our species and only in our species designed thinking tools that now impose novel structures on our brains.
Evolved virtual machines that then run on the basic underlying wetware of our neurons and glial cells.
I guess the point he's moving to here at this point in the lecture is that he's emphasizing that there's a very big difference between the kinds of functional design that gets created by a sufficiently complicated mind that can play host to memes,
cultural artifacts all sloshing around in there, and that there is a big qualitative difference between that.
And the kinds of things that termites are doing.
Yeah, and this cultural evolution perspective is very familiar to me because it's directly relevant to my field.
And when people are taking a more psychological, evolutionary, informed approach to religion, they are often looking at this aspect, right?
The ways that religion functions in society.
And religion is just an aspect of culture.
But you can regard religions, of course, about their transcendental reality, as Jordan Peterson would suggest.
But even he likes to talk about them, you know, recapitulating competence hierarchies and giving these mythic figures to strive for.
But I'm speaking more just about recognizing that they are cultural technologies.
That do work for forms of group bonding and group identification and so on.
Yeah.
So this is probably a good point to say that, you know, he's a big fan of Dawkins' idea of memes.
And I think that concept, in a way, was a bit of a victim of its own success.
Yeah, it became very popularly well-known.
It was kind of almost a throwaway thing initially.
I guess there's some controversy about whether or not it's useful.
Or whether it's boring or whether it's wrong.
Then it gets into it a bit.
I just want to state for the record that we don't really need to get into that.
You can call it cultural artifacts if you like.
You can call them memes.
What's in a word?
Yeah, and I seem to recall that Dawkins was referencing some slightly earlier work which had used similar concepts.
So, you know, like with all these intellectual terms.
They have precursors and so on, but the basic idea that Dawkins emphasized was like a unit of selection which was cultural and non-physical.
In his case, it was potentially...
Like encoded in the activity of brilliance, right?
Yeah.
Well, I think the important and slightly controversial bit, this is the bit where I think there's a lot of legitimate disagreement, is the degree to which the evolution of cultural artifacts, let's call them memes, is governed by evolutionary processes,
right?
That are analogous to biological versions of thereof.
That's right.
That have a one-to-one correspondence with biology.
Or not.
And he gets into this a bit in this lecture.
Yeah, and I think the one thing that most people would be able to grasp as a potentially important difference is genes typically travel in vertical lines from parents to infants, down generations, with rare exceptions.
But in humans, cultural memes can travel horizontally across generations very easily.
Right, like you can share me with your parent.
So yeah, in any case, there's various reasons why it's a controversial topic.
And it happens that the term now overlaps with the notion of a catchy, consumable piece of internet message, right?
Visual or...
Whatever the case might be, so like a motif that's popular, but that's not exactly what Dawkins was initially talking about.
No, it's meant to be something much more general than that.
But that's, I guess, the issue, that it's such a general idea, it struggles a little bit.
And the issue is made even more complicated by the fact that you can have evolutionary processes that are not necessarily identical to the particular biological evolution that happens to have been happening with...
Species on Earth.
There are more general formulations of an evolutionary algorithm.
So it depends kind of which theoretical definition you want to take.
But that's probably enough about that.
We'll move on.
Yeah, yeah.
So this actually gets into an interesting part where he's talking about complexity in evolution and whether it is meaningful to speak about trajectories.
Given that...
Biological evolution is a non-guided process.
So let's listen anyway to his explanation.
Over the three and a half billion years of evolution, there have been some profound transitions which change.
It's like shifting gears.
Evolution goes into a higher gear that can then explore design space more fruitfully, more efficiently.
Here is their list.
There's the eukaryotic revolution, about which a little bit more in a moment.
Sex, you'll be happy to know, is one of the major transitions.
Multicellularity, cell differentiation is another.
And then language and human culture.
Yeah, so I quite like this framing too, Chris.
He's kind of hinting at a big arc to evolution and taking note that there were these sort of step changes or sort of meta developments in evolution.
For example, the development of sex.
Sex isn't the only way organisms can reproduce or evolve, but it certainly does add a kind of a meta fitness, if you like, at a slightly higher level.
So there are these interesting kind of step changes where it's still evolution that's going on, but it's getting supercharged or moderated in the specifics of.
Yeah.
Do you want to have messy...
Sexual intercourse.
Speak for yourself, Chris.
Or would you prefer to clone yourself?
What is that called?
Meiosis?
Mitosis?
Meiosis?
Which is the one where you completely clone the cell?
Meiosis, I think.
I don't know.
I can't remember.
Well, like a virus.
Just invade someone else and take over their cell mechanisms and make loads of little copies of yourself, right?
That's how I do it, but, you know.
Yes, so, well, anyway, yes, I agree.
He'll talk a bit more about this, and we're going to see him do something which I think is a bit counter to the usual guru habits.
As he builds this argument, he goes on to cite some thinkers who expand on these points.
This coming together, this chance collision, a moment of endosymbiosis, symbiosis living together, endo because one's inside the other.
And it was the late Lynn Margulis who first really drove that point home.
She wasn't the one who invented the idea or first thought of it, but she's the one who...
She persisted in spite of ridicule and much disagreement and disapproval, and she eventually won the case, and it's in all the textbooks now.
So we owe a lot to Lynn for that wonderful campaign she fought on behalf of endosymbiosis.
Yeah, I think that's a little an interesting case, because, Chris, you mentioned before one of the objections to the idea of memes is that they can do this sort of horizontal...
rather than via a lineage.
But, you know, there are cases in the history of biological evolution where things like that happen.
Yeah, there are...
Various species where it's more common, but they don't tend to be multicellular.
Certainly not social primates.
I guess it's the point I want to emphasize that I kind of agree with Dennett here, that you have to be a little bit careful and say, okay, just because something is not exactly the same as the typical...
Way that evolution happens in biological organisms on Earth in this particular timeline.
There's a slightly more general way to think about evolution as a selecting process.
Yeah, and here he's talking about our cells.
Being a record of the evolutionary history of multicellular life and different life forms coming together and ending up in symbiotic relationships, which eventually exploded into multicellular life.
It's actually a similar thing to what we talked about when Robert Wright was discussing the origins of life and evolution.
This is the part, I think, of studying evolution, which is like...
You know, Radical Man.
It is very interesting in a proper scientific way, all those details.
And insanely complex.
Insanely complex.
Yeah, it is.
Like, the details are fascinating and insanely complex and I don't pretend to understand all of them.
And it's kind of cool in a way because it is, I agree with you, he did remind me of Robert Wright in many ways too, which it does have that kind of stoner, like, wow man type vibe.
But on the other hand...
There is an aspect to the history of evolution and the development of increasing complexity in various ways, things bootstrapping themselves up from the laws of physics to chemistry to biology, etc., etc., etc., which is pretty mind-blowing.
And that's okay as long as one is careful with the facts.
I have no issue with it.
I think it's totally appropriate for this kind of subject.
But the guru aspect that I was referencing is, you know, Dennett here credits another thinker.
And he also highlights that that person, although we owe a debt to them for persisting, they were building on the ideas of others.
And so it's like this nice little encapsulation where he's not claiming something of his own.
He's mentioning credit because he thinks this person deserves credit rather than to highlight his own amazingness at knowing this reference.
That's the difference.
Often the difference that I hear in the academic content versus guru content, like the point of the reference here is not to make Dennett look smarter.
He already knows he's smart.
So he's just referencing it because it's like the appropriate thing to reference.
So it wouldn't normally need mentioning, but it does need mentioning when you compare it to the usual content that we look at.
And there's another example where he's still...
Discussing these kind of evolutionary explosions and whatnot and giving a different citation.
Now, I want to describe another explosion, the McCready explosion.
This was 10,000 years ago.
Paul McCready, the late Paul McCready, was a Caltech engineer.
Some of you probably know of him.
He was the...
Designer of the Gossamer Albatross, the human-powered plane that flew across the English Channel, very much into green environmental engineering.
And he calculated that 10,000 years ago, that's just a twinkling ago in geological or biological time, the human population, this is at the dawn of agriculture, Plus their livestock and pets was less than 1%,
maybe a tenth of a percent of the terrestrial vertebrate.
Yeah, so that's another nice example of him just emphasizing his sources and emphasizing the other figures that have been doing work in this area and just giving his citations.
As you said, it's very normal, but worth mentioning given the kind of people that we usually cover.
So that leads into him talking about the sort of cataclysmic change that cultural evolution has affected on Earth, at least relative to the slowness of change that was happening previously.
Yeah.
We have engulfed the planet in one of the most remarkable transitions ever, and it's happened in the last 10,000 years in a twinkling.
Faster than the Cambrian explosion, This is the fastest and most dramatic change in life forms.
Well, maybe some of the great extinctions would be viable candidates for similarly sudden changes to the biosphere.
What is responsible for it?
Well, he has a wonderful thing to say about it.
He says over billions of years on a unique sphere...
Chance has painted a thin covering of life, complex, improbable, wonderful, and fragile.
Suddenly, we humans have grown in population, technology, and intelligence to a position of terrible power.
We now wield the paintbrush.
And our genes are just the same as the genes of people 100,000 years ago.
A few important differences, but not many genetic differences between us.
And our ancestors going back even a few hundred thousand years.
But look at what's changed.
Technology and intelligence is the key.
So again, do you see anything controversial here at all, Chris?
I don't think I do.
I think it's certainly a clear fact that there has been a massive step change brought about by Humans and our big brains that seem to be able to support memes and permit cultural evolution and do terrible things like emit huge amounts of greenhouse gas warming our planet,
but also rather complicated and interesting things as well.
Yeah, culture in short is the huge change, culture and the technology that it's wrought.
So I agree that this is an important...
And he wants to link these together in talking about processes that have shaped the life on Earth.
And I agree, for obvious reasons, this is an important process to talk about, the cultural impact of the past 10, 50, 100,000 years.
The basic premise, of course, is that the thing that's been happening with cultural evolution, Paleolithic people who had, I guess you might say, the rudiments of culture and technology.
And then there was this feedback effect where little bits of culture led to more complicated bits of culture getting assembled.
And this had this sort of exponential effect, which is happening on a time frame, obviously, that is much, much faster than biological evolution.
Might have some qualitative differences, but from Dennis' point of view is...
It's essentially the same kind of thing.
It's just happening in a virtual information space in our shared brains rather than in the biosphere.
Yeah, and I think an interesting point here is that he is emphasizing that the brains of our long forgotten ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago are not that dissimilar from the brains that we...
Currently have.
So if we took someone from 20,000 years ago and give them a modern education, the chances are that they would be a modern human, right?
Yeah.
And likewise, if you took me and you and me back, you know, 50,000 years, we'd be banging two rocks together and I don't know.
Who knows what we'd be doing?
Yeah, we wouldn't be, from first principles, discerning rocketry and evolutionary processes, that's for sure.
I don't mean to be mocking Paleolithic man, by the way, because I'm sure they weren't just sitting around knocking rocks together.
No, that's fine, Matt.
Cultural appropriation, banging of prehistoric man, what's next?
So, yeah, and there's a nice part here where there's a contrast between these processes and Natural selection that then it makes.
The process of natural selection doesn't understand anything and doesn't have to.
Similarly, the CPU on your computer doesn't have to understand anything.
And yet they're both remarkably competent processes that can build and build and build and do more and more R&D.
And this bottom-up R&D is what we've seen ever since.
In other words, mind or consciousness or understanding is not the cause, the first cause, it's an effect and a very recent effect.
Now, termites are not intelligent designers.
Beavers are not very intelligent designers.
We are the first intelligent designers in the tree of life.
You know, I think this is an important point.
On one hand, Dennett is emphasizing that cultural evolution, Is qualitatively in many ways the same thing as biological evolution, but he's also acknowledging that at the same time there is an increasing tendency for cultural evolution not to occur as a process of trial and error and a filtering process that is enacted by the environment,
but rather something that's happening totally internally in a conscious mind.
Where we get to choose to do things or create things.
Yeah, and he makes a conscious distinction between this and the biological world.
Not that we are not part of the biological world, but that this process is different.
And in particular, I think this is an interesting point to emphasize that you can have reason, not reason in the Immanuel Kant way, but you can have reasons as in motive.
What is the way to describe reason?
But anyway, let him do it.
You don't need a mind to have a reason.
And here's what he means.
The biotic world is saturated with reasons from the molecular scale on up.
And we do things for reasons.
We shiver, we vomit, we blink.
They're not our reasons.
They are the reasons why we do them.
We don't have to know them.
We do not have to comprehend these reasons for these to be the reasons that we're acting as we do.
Maybe for a philosopher this is not an interesting point, but I guess for me it is an interesting point.
There is a reason why a termite colony looks the way it does, right?
And the termites don't know it.
Evolution, as an abstract concept, doesn't know about it.
But it's a reason nonetheless.
Furthermore, the way we perceive things and some of the things we do, like you said, sneezing or blinking, that is hardwired.
And I take it even a step further as a psychologist.
There's an awful lot going on, even in our non-hardwired, more plastic.
Parts of our brains, cortex, for instance, an awful lot which is like habits and various intuitive patterns of perception and behavior, which we almost never think about.
And this was really brought home to me actually when I was just helping my wife who likes to study English.
And she was asking me to explain, like, why would you say something this way with this particular expression, form of words, rather than that way in English.
And the thing is, I didn't know.
And this would be familiar to most people.
You can speak English perfectly well.
You would always say it this way.
And when I stopped and had a really good think about it, I could then articulate the reasons why we would say it this way and that way.
But I'd never thought about it before.
And I'm sure at no point during my developmental process in learning English as a child, had I ever really thought about that.
Unless you're learning a second language.
unless you're learning a second language yeah which is much much harder yeah and yeah and then another example of this is when animals engage in communication even across species and it doesn't require that they are like intentionally
passing information like not the individual animal so again then it
It's a vivid case of what's known as costly signaling theory.
And it has to be costly, otherwise it wouldn't be credible.
If all the animals could do it, the lion would be wise not to believe.
But the lion does believe this communicative act and doesn't chase the gazelles that can start.
So it's serving a purpose.
It is transferring information from the gazelle to the lion.
They both benefit.
It's a stable system.
But here's the important thing.
Neither the gazelle nor the lion needs to understand this signal, this speech act.
There's a couple of good points to emphasize here.
Firstly, obviously, yes, animals communicate with each other and they communicate genuine information.
Useful information from one to another without either of them understanding what they're doing or the information that they are transmitting.
So I guess he's just hitting home that point that it's not spooky to say that there is this stuff called information out there in the universe which can have messages and it can have meaning and it can have reasons, etc.
And it can be encoded or transmitted with brains or neurons or behaviors or DNA of various kinds.
But the substrate is actually not super important and does not need to have a grasp of the content.
One is the medium and the other is this sort of higher level of content, a bit like software running on a computer.
Yeah, and like in the same way, meeting dances from animals, right?
Like if you're a little spider.
And you're trying to attract your me-it and you need to do this dance in order to signal, get the appropriate response to me-it.
There's some variation on a given theme, like to a certain extent within conspicific competition.
But if you're a spider that just events its own...
It doesn't follow.
You'll just get eaten, right?
Or you'll not be successful.
And they're not thinking about it in those terms, of course.
But I just mean, it's one of those things where there's lots of complex, beautiful behavior that you can observe in the animal kingdom and in the human behavioral set, which is not designed by us and our individual minds.
Like, why do we like dancing?
There's tons of different types of dancing all around the world, but why do we find synchronized performance of moves between individuals or groups pleasant to observe?
Why is that such a cross-cultural constant?
Yeah, and likewise, when somebody is rude, treats you in a demeaning manner, many people, your response will be to get irritated, to get angry.
You'll move into a state of affect without trying to, right?
It will just happen to you to react to that behavior.
Like, why does that happen so ubiquitously and universally everywhere?
Well, there are good reasons for that.
And yes, those reasons are coexisting with our conscious minds that does have the ability to kind of dissect them and think about them and reflect upon them and so on.
But I guess that's his point.
The other one that I quite like is blushing when you're embarrassed because you obviously feel embarrassed from Context, different situations are embarrassing to different people and to different degrees and so on.
But the involuntary flushing of blood into the facial capillaries, why would anyone choose to do that?
But you can't.
You can't not choose.
And obviously, it's to do with social signaling because, you know, we're primates.
This, I'll just say, I guess is one of the reasons why I kind of like...
Figures like Dennett when they talk about these issues and why I don't like the sort of stereotypical evolutionary or folk pop evolutionary psychology you might see on the internet because their version is like this cartoonish version where humans are just sort of governed by these basic kind of things which are completely unamenable to any kind of modulation.
or self-reflection or whatever.
It's cartoonish, whereas the version that I like is essentially Dennett's version, I suppose, which is much more nuanced.
So let's hear a little bit more.
This is him talking about the hard coding of visual processing, and it sets up a comparison that becomes relevant later with cultural coding schemes.
It's a good thing that we can have examples of meaning and communication without comprehension because if we're doing neuroscience, we've got a lot of signaling going on in the neurons between the eyes and the lateral geniculate nucleus and V1 and V2 and all of these different areas of the brain.
All these signals are being sent and the neurons don't have to understand any of it.
But there are reasons why they're doing what they're doing.
And information is being transmitted, but it's just not being comprehended by the receivers.
It doesn't have to be.
Perhaps more properly.
It's not being perceived by the medium, by the substrate.
The conscious reflective?
Well, the actual neurons themselves, right?
the actual structures in the brain are not themselves really having any idea about the meaning of the neural spike patterns that they are transmitting to their neighbors.
They're just doing their thing.
They're operating on very mechanistic principles, just like evolution, just like chemistry.
Yeah, and he talks about how we get there.
So the problem that cultural evolution solves is how we get a Gaudi mind out of a termite colony brain.
How do we get intelligent design with representation of the reasons?
Gaudi's type of intelligent design.
Or Turing's type of intelligent design out of 200 billion mindless neurons.
It was the second great endosymbiotic revolution.
We are, it's human culture, we are apes with infected brains.
So he's basically characterizing human culture.
Which describes an awful lot of who we are, like what we identify with as modern humans, as being an evolutionary revolution in the same way that symbiosis, multicellularity, sexual reproduction, etc.
were these qualitative step changes in that process.
So that is, I mean, it is a leap though, isn't it, Chris?
It's different from the other revolutions that have occurred in biology because all of those ones were fundamentally...
Reinforced, I guess, by biological evolutionary processes.
What he's kind of referring to with cultural evolution is that it's a new evolutionary process that is purely mimetic and that is occurring within a biological substrate and sitting on top of what happened previously.
I think there's a little bit of a reach here because of the comparison, specifically the parasitism or the Symbiotic implies two things, but the nature of the mimetic information is absolutely unique in character compared to what came before because it's non-physical.
It's only represented by its interaction.
In human minds, right?
There's no memes floating out there in the ether that then get sucked in.
Yeah, it's purely software.
It's purely virtual.
And if you accept the premise that Memes are a thing and memetic evolution, cultural evolution is like a real kind of thing that's happening.
Then you are accepting that it's happening sort of in parallel or after, but certainly distinct from a biological substrate and lots of artifacts that humans and termites, et cetera, can make.
But it's no longer biological evolution.
It's not connected with it anymore.
And Dennett himself emphasizes that.
Viruses depend on living cells to reproduce.
Memes, which are informational things, Depend on living brains to reproduce.
And they're not made out of anything except information.
This is a hard point for many people to accept.
I just want to clarify there, Matt.
He wasn't saying viruses are not made out of anything except information.
No, no, no.
He's saying memes are very much information, like pure information, but like viruses, they inhabit a host, use the hosts in order to replicate, just like viruses.
I see.
I have no problem with describing memes in that way.
I have problems with drawing the parallel too strongly with a virus, because they do, indeed, they are made out of other things than pure information, unless you're saying everything.
It's made out of information in one sense or another.
No, no, no.
Memes.
Sorry, not memes.
Viruses are made out of molecules.
You're quite right, Chris.
Not just information.
I mean, I think this is off topic, but I mean, in a sense, what distinguishes a virus from a more disorganized collection of similar molecules?
You know, it is the information that...
Captures their particular structure, right?
Right, but then we're getting...
It's too philosophical.
We're getting dangerously close to the nature of life and consciousness.
No, no, no.
Sorry, Dennett wasn't saying that.
I think he was saying that.
Yeah, but viruses, whether they're alive or not, is one of these issues.
And it doesn't matter, right?
It's just a human continuum trying to categorize things as...
X or Y when nature doesn't work exactly like that.
I'm going to insert a random ding against philosophers here.
I don't think Dennett is guilty of this, but a lot of philosophers are.
I've seen many examples where it seems like if you cannot define a thing with nice hard boundaries and you have this nice clean division between this concept and everything that is not the concept, then to a philosopher it seems like, oh well, I've proved that the concept is invalid because you're struggling.
To give it a clear conceptual definition.
I thought they were okay with fuzzy boundaries.
Like some of them.
Maybe the good ones are.
Anyway.
In any case, I think viruses are very interesting things.
Whether they're alive or not is not for me to say.
And I'm sure it depends on your definition of alive, as many people would say.
But okay, so anyway, he wants to explain.
Why, given this, why he still wants to talk about, like, Darwinian evolutionary processes?
Because one of the lessons of Darwinism is you want to be a Darwinian about Darwinism and recognize that it doesn't have an essence.
There isn't just one sort of Darwinism.
There's all sorts of sort of Darwinian phenomena that are almost Darwinian, rather Darwinian.
Yeah, so what do you think about this, Chris?
I'm 100% on board with this.
I guess partly motivated by the fact that I've had a fair bit of experience with both evolutionary computing, which is an abstraction of biological evolution, and also a lot of other learning strategies, like automatic design strategies,
which is clearly not evolution.
There is actually an ant colony type.
Search-type optimization programs.
There are obviously neural networks that work by propagating error gradients back through the net, which is, again, analogous but not the same, exactly the same as the way neurons work.
There's a bunch of automatic design procedures, and a subset of them have evolutionary characteristics, and we can define, if we want to, a very formalized, abstracted definition of evolution.
But then you have distinct from that the particular case.
of evolution as it's transpired on our particular planet in this particular universe.
And so I'm actually perfectly fine with his contention here that evolution is a pretty general abstract concept.
Yes, we can define biological evolution as like a particular instance of it in that space, but you can have, again, fuzzy boundaries.
You can have things that are more or less like evolution.
But would you agree with that?
Yeah, except I would not refer to that as Darwinian evolution.
I think that's why you need distinction between general evolutionary processes that may not be tied to biological restrictions and Darwinian evolution, like the name suggests, refers to the evolutionary processes that Darwin discussed in the animals on our planet.
It's just a terminology thing, but I think calling it Darwinian when you're talking about escaping the boundaries of the restrictions on biological entities is a confusing choice.
Yeah, I would agree with you there.
I'd like to keep that distinction.
So that issue aside, Dana is talking about...
Features of what he refers to as Darwinism, but I would refer to as evolution, that are important and potentially apply more broadly.
So you're the more scientific man among us, Matt.
What kind of features is he talking about?
We could play a clip, but he talks for quite an extended period about this.
So maybe it's better to paraphrase.
That's a big concession.
I'm the more scientific man.
I'm going to copy that and keep it on my phone.
Thank you.
He talks about something quite interesting, and I'll paraphrase it, which he tries to identify what the key properties that makes an automatic design process more...
Evolutionary-like or more Darwinian-like in his language.
He's got at least three that he nominates.
So one of them is heredity occurring and that fidelity of copying, right?
So it's well known with evolution that DNA is great because it has this binary aspect to it with genes, which is very helpful because if it was analogue, then you would just have errors and noise continually increasing.
You can show that it's kind of necessary.
Computers rely on binary for the same reason.
So there's that.
There should be good fidelity when you're creating offspring, but it's also good if it's not absolutely perfect, right?
So if there's some errors happening at a satisfactorily small rate, then you get some interesting variation which allows evolution to occur.
But then he notes things like the propensity to replicate, which is basically fitness, needs to be determined by some intrinsic properties of the individual.
Right?
So even in a pure, you know, natural environment, whatever, lions spawning about in Africa, the fact whether a particular lion gets to reproduce or not is governed not just by their genome, but also by luck.
You know, is this lion in the right place at the right time?
Had the rains come?
Was the wildebeest fast or slow?
There's an awful lot of luck, as we all know, that comes into how well you do in life.
So if you have too much luck and it's 99% luck, then that makes it more difficult for evolution because essentially the fitness function has got noise injected into it.
And then finally, he talks about the fitness function itself, which I hope is not too technical, but it's interesting to me anyway, which is it needs to be reasonably smooth.
And what he means by that is that Solutions that are, let's say, nearly optimal, that are close together in design space, should have a fitness associated with them, an intrinsic fitness associated with them, that is reasonably similar as well.
So you strike this a lot in computational evolutionary algorithms and backpropagation neural networks, for instance, where if you have a very jagged fitness function, it's not going to work very well.
If it's nice and smooth, then it's quite easy for the evolution or some other learning process to follow that gradient.
Down to some kind of local optima or minima, however way you want to have it.
So to make that super clear, like imagine a situation where, you know, this even applies to non-biological evolution.
So let's say we're trying to design a plane.
And it turns out that in one scenario, you could be make a plane, you know, it's pretty good.
The wings are a bit like, maybe a little bit big.
There's not enough.
I don't know, rudders or something.
The various design aspects of it are not perfectly optimal.
It'll perform reasonably well.
But imagine a sort of crazy scenario where unless you built the plane, like exactly so, and it had 513 rivets in it, and it had exactly a ratio of wingspan to this, unless it was exactly like that, then it just wouldn't fly at all.
Then it's going to be very hard for any kind of process.
And I'd agree with him that any kind of evolutionary process would struggle with this.
But I just want to make the more general point, this is my own addition now, that I think a lot of processes, design processes, would struggle with a very jagged fitness landscape.
So, like, if you and me, intelligent designers, trying to make a plane, well, would fail, obviously.
The Wright brothers would have never gotten off the ground if a suboptimal plane...
Could never fly, whereas it's obviously not true.
747s have evolved via conscious design processes, getting feedback from the environment because reasonably good planes still fly.
So, yeah, I just make the more general point that sort of limitation applies more generally than just to evolution.
Yeah, and I think...
Then it does a good job of lying out these kind of core features, which if you've read The Selfish Gene, a lot of it will be familiar as well.
And he goes into a part of the presentation where he's...
To my mind, this actually confused me.
I hate any diagram that has four or three dimensions to it, but it's like the 2D graph with depth.
But four corners, like a cubic presentation.
I hate these graphs because I don't think the human mind is meant to intuitively grasp those.
But he's talking about different features in different corners of the graph.
And the important thing is that he's contrasting the pure Darwinian case versus the kind of intelligent design side of it.
And he makes this distinction.
I put the pure Darwinian case down in this corner, where it's bottom-up, no comprehension, and where the search in the space is essentially random.
It's not directed search at all.
There's no information used.
It's this coin flip search, what you search.
So this is our pure Darwinian case, the termite castle culture.
And up here, in this corner, is intelligent design.
What I'm suggesting is that cultural evolution over thousands of years, but not millions, only thousands of years, has moved from very Darwinian to very intelligent design.
We are now living in the age of intelligent design of culture.
Yeah, I think this...
What do you think, Chris?
I think this could actually be a sort of a sneakily controversial point, that if we accept that...
Human cultural evolution for most of history and prehistory has been occurring via evolutionary processes.
Ideas that are good, like how to make a hand axe or a nice dance or something that are good at propagating themselves around, tend to survive.
And so there's this trial and error process without people intentionally getting involved too much.
And he's sort of saying now that...
We are leaning more on intelligent design, and we're not doing so much trial and error.
But I was thinking of the evolution of the 747, which is very much a modern, high-technology thing, and that certainly has been occurring via trial and error.
Yeah, yeah.
So I think actually there's another clip where he is talking about these mechanisms a bit, and it helps to...
Illustrated some of these tensions in the way that he's using the concept.
So this is a discussion about Picasso, which he's put up at the top of the intelligent design corner.
So here we are.
You'll notice I've put Picasso's name.
Why did I put Picasso there?
Not because I think he's the smartest, most intelligent designer ever, but because he said he was.
Je ne cherche pas, je trouve.
This is a brilliant lie.
Balderdash, to use a polite word.
He did a lot of searching in order to find.
I don't search, I find.
Notice what he's saying is, Not for me, random search.
Not for me, grubby trial and error.
I just leap to the highest peak in the design space every time.
I comprehend perfectly.
Nothing hemi-semi about me.
I am at the very pinnacle.
I am an intelligent designer.
Well, this je ne cherche pas je trouve is a perfect motto for the intelligent designer.
But, as I say, it's never realized.
It certainly wasn't realized by Picasso.
He was a very clever dude.
I think a lot of his intelligence was that although he did a lot of searching, made sometimes hundreds of sketches, his brilliance was signing and selling the sketches along with the finished product.
So Picasso couldn't meet that, but he can serve as emblematic of that extreme position on the graph.
Yeah, Chris, I realize I was being a bit unfair to Dennett.
I'm remembering now that he does emphasize that even though there is perhaps more intelligent design going on, that there's still an awful lot of trial and error and incremental cultural evolution happening as well.
Do you remember where Picasso was on his cubic graph?
I'm trying to remember if he was at the top of the intelligent design corner or he was at the top of the trial and error.
I can't remember.
In any case, he's somewhere there, but he's a little bit of both.
In his self-image, a very rational, pinnacle artist, designer, but in the reality, a trial and error Darwinian.
I'm actually super sympathetic to this idea that almost everything is trial and error and incremental evolution.
I paint in my spare time and I'm very bad at it, but to the extent that I ever occasionally make a painting that's even impassable, it happens through a lot of trial and error and a lot of painting over things.
A lot of going, oh, that looks good.
So there's this constant cycle of feedback and incremental changes.
And my understanding is that a lot of other people who do creative things would say the same, and I would say the same applies to science.
A large amount of it progresses in that very incremental way, even at the level of people tossing ideas around in a common room and batting them back and forth and then sort of...
Jumping backwards and forwards between the sort of innovation part where you sort of throw out some mutations and some alternatives and then you switch to a kind of evaluation mode where you prune them and select some ones that seem good for exploring further.
I mean, this is a very personal opinion, but I feel like a lot of human cultural artifacts, our creativity actually stems from what is a kind of a mechanistic, not very brilliant process.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, half of what the gurus do, our traditional gurus that we cover, is they make the messy reality of science and cultural brilliance.
And maybe the wider culture does this too, into this neatly packaged narrative where it was all inevitable from their brilliance.
And that's why biographies of geniuses or influential people are actually interesting, because when you look at the details...
It's much messier and then much messier people than they're often presented to be in the public understanding.
So, yeah.
Yeah, and I think even someone like a composer or an Albert Einstein or whatever who might go away and not communicate with other people for a while and sort of come down from the mountain with a fully formed symphony or a theory of relativity.
They didn't invent pianos.
Well, but also like the symphony or the theory didn't just sort of launch itself into their head fully formed, right?
Perhaps internally, silently, by themselves, I personally suspect that almost everything occurs through, it's a virtualized process, right?
It's happening inside someone's head, but it's still kind of algorithmic.
But there is an appeal to the idea of the prophet going up the mountain and coming down with the fully formed thing.
Yeah, yeah.
Just look into the magic hat and you can see the scriptures.
So, he talks a little bit.
And this one, you flagged up as being uncertain if this is correct.
I also have some concerns about it.
Let's hear it.
He's talking about the differences between a hand axe and a mouse.
Like a computer mouse, not a rodent mouse.
Two cultural artifacts.
On the left, you have an Ashley and hand axe.
On the right, you have the mouse, of course.
Two products.
Of human culture.
Nobody invented the Asherlian hand axe.
Nobody.
Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse.
The hand axe was used with hardly any changes at all for close to a million years.
There are different theories about what it was exactly for.
My favorite is that it was the human artificer's version of the peacock's tail.
But basically you are saying, this is costly signalling, I am so good, you say this to the ladies, that I can make all these hand axes and still stay alive.
Yeah.
So, Chris, I did some amazing research.
I read the whole Wikipedia article on hand axes, which is quite long, so, you know, it wasn't nothing.
Impressive, Matt.
Good work.
Well, there's a couple of things.
The claim that nobody invented the hand axe, like, ever, seems suspicious to me as a claim, because, like, obviously, even it was independently created by different groups in different geographical,
in each group, somebody was the first to do that in that group.
So the notion that it was never, and then it was, Transmitted over time.
So we don't know their names, sure.
They don't have Wikipedia entries.
So that claim struck me as questionable.
You could say it appears to have been reinvented multiple times and it's an aspect of environmental manipulation which might be within a lot of the latent abilities of different human groups.
Fine.
But that's a different claim that nobody invested in.
Well, what happened?
It just sprung up one day?
Because as he highlights, hand axes take a hell of a long time to make when anthropologists and paleoarchaeologists, I guess, have tried to re-engineer them.
They've discovered it takes a massive amount of time using stone tools.
So, Crazy Eddie.
Chiseling away in the corner, there still was somebody that did that.
You didn't accidentally create a hand axe.
I had it exactly the same take.
Firstly, just being pedantic, no, somebody logically must have invented it because somebody did it first.
And as you say, most likely multiple people kind of did it first in their particular context.
But I guess what he's trying to say or what he's getting at is that it's kind of an example of convergent cultural evolution probably, right?
The sheer fact that these hand axes, these particular hand axes, I guess somewhat like those fertility symbols, you know, the, was it Venus?
Venus of somewhere?
You know, the very...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know the one you mean, I don't remember the name.
Yeah, they are similarly ubiquitous over a very long period of time, over a very wide geographic space.
So that sort of, it is, I agree, an interesting thing that the same thing seemed to...
It was either two things, right?
It either had to have been this cultural transmission where it sort of spread everywhere and stayed everywhere the same for such a long period of time, or it was a case of kind of convergent cultural evolution where people had good reasons, in Dennett's terms, to invent very similar kinds of things because they were appealing or useful or whatever reason.
So that seems like the correct framing, not that it just arose, because he's kind of implying that It's like stotting behaviour that he talked about before, yeah?
It's something that humans, like males, were compelled to do because it impressed females and he's implying that there's a biological imperative to make that particular kind of artefact.
That doesn't seem right to me.
Otherwise, you and I would be feeling these compulsions.
Just like we still feel sexual drives today in the modern world, despite our conscious brains, we'd be feeling a compulsion to be chiseling away at rocks, right?
I don't see that.
No, I didn't entirely think that was what he was saying, although I can see why you would have that read.
What I thought he was saying was that rather than the functional use that so many people attribute hand access to.
He talks about this evidence where people find, like, tranches of hand axes that were never used, right?
That would have took a long time to create.
So that suggests that they might not have been always functional things, right?
And to that, I think there is a legitimate interpretation to say that these could have been symbolic things that people use, whether they attract mates or whatever, but just like...
Well, it could well be, like, there's a lot of interesting things that have been used as currency, right?
Even great big rocks.
For instance, rather odd things that are costly or rare have functioned as currency.
So I guess that is...
I think, because we find these over a million years ago, because these were found in precursors in the Homo line, not just Homo sapiens, other earlier species of humans.
So I don't think they had currency.
Currency or something like an arbitrary...
That symbolizes wealth, that everyone agrees is a form of wealth.
I wouldn't be saying that that's the primary reason.
The primary reason was that they were good for cutting and digging and chipping away at things, right?
But then because they're a pain in the ass to make and they're somewhat useful, then it's like gold, right?
Gold was somewhat useful, somewhat pretty, and now it has on top of that a kind of a function as a store of value.
And I'm just saying when they found like a whole cache of them.
I'm just saying that's more plausible to me that it could have been somebody hoarding them, maybe handing them out to their friends as a kind of reward than, like, guys doing insane, to impress chicks, like, look how many hand axes.
Oh, look how good I am at making hand axes.
Yeah, I just, I think currencies in general, even simple currencies are, like, a later, a much later arrival on the cultural scene.
But that's, listeners, you...
Tell us what you think.
Everyone let us know in the comments.
Do you agree with Chris or me?
Anyway.
In any case, like non-functional, but I don't have a problem with the notion that there is no inventor.
I get what he's kind of arguing for, but the bigger point that he wants to make is that it was such a long period without seeming innovation, right?
There's so many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Not millions, but million year where we find these kind of tools and there isn't appreciable technological development.
Yeah, to return to his substantive point, rather than nitpicking as we were doing, he draws a big distinction between the mouse and hand axes.
And I guess I just don't think they're so qualitatively different, right?
No, but the stationary nature of them is, that is a distinction because the mouse is from 30 or 40 years ago, whereas the hand axe was around for over a million years in a fairly similar format.
So that is a difference.
You can talk about it being a cultural technology, but he wants to focus on cumulative Okay,
improvement, we are not going to go through multiple generations in a lifetime, right?
That's an important difference.
Whereas your iPhone in 20 years time is going to be massively improved from the version that you currently have in your pocket.
fair enough.
Although, you know, maybe hand axes and...
Mouses are like the shark.
They're just perfect.
They're a perfect functional thing for the thing.
And maybe in a million years, it'll still be the same mouse, Chris.
We don't know.
Well, the thing that I think is interesting is there are previous precursors to our evolutionary line, which are biologically different and have different cranial sizes and so on.
And it's likely...
Different cognitive capacities.
But modern humans, 200,000 odd years, right?
Like for remains which are hard to distinguish from modern remains, I mean the structure.
But in that case, even taking that limited time frame, like the 200,000 year time frame, you still have this process which is very different for like 190,000 of those years.
Where we have very limited technological improvement.
And then suddenly when you get agriculture and you see like an explosion of technology.
So that is an interesting point.
The massive sort of cumulative and exponential growth and speeding up of cultural technological development is an interesting point.
But being really pernickety, Chris, I'm sorry.
But as a cultural artifact, the mouse and the hand axe, like they were...
Touch them with your hands.
But they were invented to do something, to fulfill a function, right?
Putting aside these other evolutionary psychology reasons for doing them and currencies.
Well, even then it would be a function.
It would be like just a signaling function.
Okay, yeah, sure.
But even being so restrictive to sort of pragmatic functions, somebody came up with the mouse and it stuck around because it was useful.
If we all lived in tiny little separated groups, right, and nobody could communicate with each other, we all had computers though, then I bet...
Different people would come up with the mouse, right, eventually.
There might be a 50 or 100 years gaps where we were just using, I don't know, hand signals or something to control the computer.
This alternative world is very hard to imagine with advanced IT technology, but no interviews.
You're not good at thought experiments, are you, Chris?
This is what you're a philosopher.
Yeah, so he talks about other.
Products of culture.
And maybe this is relevant about the kind of explosive growth in these different cultural artifacts and signaling and so on.
Words, poems, songs, jokes, games, sudoku, crossword puzzles, techniques, dead reckoning, surveying, long division, Bayesian statistics, PCR, and software.
These are all things made of information.
And I want to point out...
Only the software is made of bits.
I'm not talking about bits when I'm talking about information.
I'm talking about information in a more fundamental sense.
Shannon information measured in bits is a recent and very important Refinement of a one concept of information, but it's not the concept I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the concept of information where when one chimpanzee learns how to crack nuts by watching his mother crack nuts, there's information passed from mother to offspring, and that is not in bits.
That is an informational transfer that is not accomplished in any Shannon channel.
That is worth talking about.
So, habits.
I've just mentioned one.
Chimpanzees learning.
I put this slide in because I want to acknowledge that, yes, we're not the only species with culture.
Arguably, whales have two or three or seven items of culture, and chimpanzees have maybe a dozen culturally transmitted habits that are not in the genome.
Nothing goes explosive.
Nothing goes combinatorial except in our species.
We're the ones where culture really takes off.
Chris, first of all, I appreciated that distinction that he was making between a sort of mathematical, physical, and statistical definition of information, which is kind of equivalent to entropy in a way.
Like a signal, which is just like white noise, completely random white noise, has the most...
Shannon entropy, because it can't be compressed, right?
You can almost define information by lack of compressibility.
So it doesn't mean information in the everyday sense that we are talking about information, like something interesting.
And so it was good that he made that distinction, but it kind of presents him with a problem, doesn't it?
Because...
The nice thing about Shannon entropy or other ways to talk about information and you can talk about bits and talk about what a computer is doing and you can talk about what genes are doing.
You can say specifically what the DNA, the little nuggets of information that the DNA is encoded in.
You can't do that though with his notion of cultural information.
It's not science-y, you know what I mean?
It's much more qualitative and fuzzy, isn't it?
Well, so Matt, for any of our listeners, you know, Philistines as they may be, they might think Shannon is an Irish name.
So if someone wanted to know what Shannon entropy was referring to, what would that be?
Okay, so you're testing me now, but Claude Shannon, he's kind of the father of information theory.
Of course, of course, yeah.
How much do you want me to go on?
But that came about when they had signaling, basically.
You know, they had wireless transceivers and things like that, and they wanted to do things like error correcting codes, and they wanted to know about how much redundancy there was in signals and stuff, and the field of information theory is based on this.
How to put it in a nutshell, it really is how much you can compress a signal, how much redundancy there is in a signal, or equivalently, how much noise or free energy, like entropy, there is floating around.
Good job, Matt.
Is that okay?
For the listeners, of course I already knew that.
It is one of those things where I remember when I read Dan Sperber's book, he was talking about the epidemiology of representations, but the communicative act and the way that There's so much redundancy within a message and there's also what the receiver sends and what the person receives and this imperfect transmission of information across mediums,
right?
And it is one of those mind-bending things when you start thinking about how the physicality and the biophysical processes by which we Consume information and it's, you know, it's all vibrating airwaves, hitting films of membranes in the air,
which stimulate electrical signals to tingle neurons in your brain.
And yet this makes you think differently about something and make electrical pathways.
Like that procession, it is a, you know, mind blowing way to work out.
And that the part of it is that things are imperfect.
And there's interpretation and there's also imperfections in the way that people transmit lessons and whatnot.
So, more information.
No, I agree.
It's one of those genuine sort of mind-blowing kind of concepts because, you know, redundancy sounds like a bad thing, but redundancy is very good as a way of incorporating sort of error correction.
just like you were saying, we all have a problem of transmuting these noisy, fuzzy analog signals, basically, in the physical world.
And what we want to do is translate them, when we talk to each other, translate them into atomic binary categories.
It's like trying to transmit sarcasm on Twitter.
It's impossible.
I know what I want to say, but the idiots don't understand.
Not the idiots, you know, just people.
They don't immediately perceive the sarcasm, which is inherent to what I've just said.
But yeah, that's a good example about receiver and sender having different interpretations of the same utterance.
True, that's very true.
But we'll come to this, but Dennett actually talks about this when he talks about phonemes and the sort of binarization, digitization, which he would also treat as like memes, as cultural artifacts, the function that they do.
Why don't they just play that nine?
Do it.
Go for it.
Phonemes are one of the great evolution, one of evolution's greatest inventions, right up there with DNA, which is a foreign member alphabet, A, C, G, and T. And phonemes are remarkably unreal, if you know about the physics of phonology.
They don't correspond to any simple physical properties.
They're like benign illusions that are generated in your head by the machinery you have in your brain.
Yeah.
Are you familiar with that, Chris?
Is it something that people know about?
I'm not sure.
Is it?
I mean, I didn't think about the pronouns that much, but I get it, right?
Because the more familiar you are with a language, the less that it sounds like just noise and the more you can distinguish words and concepts
Yeah, but like a whole bunch of different languages, like Chinese, they employ a different family of constituent phonemes.
That is like a subset, I guess, of the whole range of kind of sounds that the human mouth can make.
But it's kind of an arbitrary.
It's a bit like colours.
You know how every culture has its own sort of descriptions of colour?
They segregate the colours into different ones.
The cutting up the whole spectrum of RGB colours into little categories is quite arbitrary.
And similarly, phonemes cut up in any given language, cut up kind of similar sounding sounds into arbitrary categories.
And that is digitisation.
That digitisation goes on to sort of words.
And that really facilitates language and for people to communicate.
So that's why I can, for instance, understand you, Chris, even though the sounds you utter only have the barest passing resemblance to something that I might recognize.
But, you know, it's great.
We can communicate and share ideas nonetheless and get Dennett's cultural evolution going.
Yeah, yeah.
So, phonemes as a unit of informational transmission?
Yeah, that's fair.
But they themselves kind of evolved, I guess, is what he's saying.
Like, they've hung around in any given culture.
Well, yeah.
He talks about words as memes, in a way.
So, synathropic species would include mice and rats and pigeons and bedbugs and body lice.
We don't own them, we don't domesticate them, but they are evolved to live and thrive in our company.
Barn swallows, chimney swifts, birds.
And the first words, I argue, were synanthropic words.
The people that were infested with these didn't know what they were doing.
They didn't know they were talking.
They weren't even really paying attention to what was happening.
But words were beginning to take up residence in their world and move from head to head via mouth and ear.
And this was the birth of language.
I'm just going to follow his line of thinking.
Memes, cultural artifacts, they persist, they hang around, sometimes because they're useful to us, they're functionally useful, they're synergistic, sometimes they're kind of indifferent, sometimes they're kind of parasitic.
Maybe they're quite bad for us, but they get transmitted around, like a lot of the stuff you see on Twitter, because they're catchy.
Now, what he's saying is that even when you look at words, there are primitive words, right?
Your mother or something like that, I think you tend to see it even cross-culturally.
But I guess what he's saying is that initially, in the early development of human language, it's plausible that words kind of came about, like a word for hot or a word for the sun or a word for food or whatever, they kind of arose.
In a naturalistic kind of way without people intending to.
And I think he's saying that more and more we are testing the boundaries of what words can do.
You know, we're combining them together in much more complicated ways and we're coming up with new words like Darwinian evolution versus generalized evolution.
For instance, we might coin those words on the fly.
It's happening in a more intentional manner.
So, I think that's the argument.
I don't have issue with talking about competition amongst memes or products of culture, but then drawing tight parallels with Darwinian evolution.
You have to be careful because it can create the impression that the things are similar when actually there's a lot of different stuff that can go on because of the differences.
Yeah, a conservative point of view is that there's interesting analogies.
Maybe similar processes that can be occurring, just like we drew an analogy between redundancy in the very strict mathematical information sense and redundancy that facilitates human communication.
It's not quite the same thing, but the analogy is a very helpful one.
I think there are many helpful analogies in understanding the processes that are similar, but I agree with you 100% that once we shift realms from The biological, physical realm to a purely informational, conceptual realm, then it's just a different world and you have to tread carefully.
Yeah, so here's him drawing some more parallels which might highlight some of the potential perils that I see.
There's actually trillions of symbionts in your body right now that you couldn't live without.
They're mutualists.
They're the flora in your gut and so forth.
And there are actually trillions more of viruses which are not doing you any harm.
All those symbionts.
Well, the same is true of memes.
There are mutualists, commensals, and parasites.
And one of the key insights of memetics, this is, I think, the key insight of memetics, is that meme evolution creates adaptations that enhance the fitness of memes independently of whether it enhances our fitness.
Yeah, so you find that problematic, Chris?
Yeah, it's the part where the tight parallel is drawn between gut parasites and the bacteria that help your internal biological processes to function or invading viruses and this informational content that we're talking about.
Now, I get the parallel that you can hold ideas or beliefs that could be beneficial to you, neutral.
Or harmful, right?
And so there is him saying, well, that's not a distinction because there's lots of things that inhabit our bodies which are either harmful, mutually beneficial, or, you know, like there's lots of different things.
But again, here it feels a little bit to me like, but there is a distinction here to draw because, you know, something like a gut worm is different than something like a catchy song.
And I think Dennett wants to draw a tighter analogy between those two things.
I see what you're saying.
Like you, I agree.
With the general principle of memes, they exist for reasons, but they're not necessarily reasons that are beneficial to the people that host them.
Often they're neutral and arbitrary.
Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad.
But I agree with you about the difficulty with the strong parallels and hey, I have to take care.
And I'll give you an example, which is that the human body does play host to a whole bunch of symbiotic Neutral and parasitic organisms.
But they are organisms living within a host.
They are not utilizing the host as like a computing medium in the same way that biological things use chemistry as a medium and the way consciousness and intentionality and culture is operating on our wetware as using it as a medium.
No, they're actually physically living inside your body.
We are their environment, but not their substrate.
So, yeah, I guess I'm agreeing with you.
You just have to be careful with the analogies, but I don't know if he would.
In any case, here's Dana talking about related themes, if you will.
Human fitness is not the end-all and be-all that species fitness isn't other species.
How many of you think that having more grandchildren than anybody else is the most important thing in life?
I don't see any hands.
In other words, unlike every other species on the planet, you have things that you think are more important.
That's because your head is full of memes.
If it weren't, you would be like every other living thing on the planet, and all of your energies would be for having more offspring.
You're making a face, Chris.
You don't like that?
I think he's doing the tautology in a way because you can describe that exact thing saying you're not solely constrained by your biological urges, right?
Because you're a cultural animal.
You exist in a cultural network and you have the ability to absorb culture and assign different meanings in your life, right?
I just talked about the exact same thing he's talking about without talking about Memes parasitizing my brain for their own purposes and reproduction, right?
And that's the bit like with Dawkins as well, that I feel a little bit too much viral imagery.
Yeah, I have a bit of a rebuttal to that too, because on one hand, at a very basic level, I endorse the general idea that people, lucky us, get to have all kinds of motivations rather than just trying to maximize the number of grandchildren.
Absolutely true.
But here's the thing.
Gazelles or lions are not trying to maximise the number of grandchildren either, no.
They're just doing what they do for reasons best known to themselves, but assuming they probably have some kind of internal life, just like we do.
Hours might be more complicated, more sophisticated.
Certainly, I'll concede to Dennett that it's contaminated, infected, influenced by all kinds of cultural transmissions.
But I'm agreeing with you, essentially, that take away all of that cultural mimetic stuff.
We still wouldn't be consciously trying to maximize the number of grandchildren.
So there's a bit of a flaw in his logic there.
He also makes a point that the environmental forces can be shaping of these evolutionary processes.
It doesn't have to be a selection pressure from minds or memes, like he says.
One could then say with complete rigor that it is the sea herself who fashions the boats, choosing those which function and destroying the others.
If it comes back, copy it.
That's natural selection.
It doesn't require any particular comprehension.
He's elaborating on the more basic point about cultural evolution, where you have cultural artifacts that may have been refined and optimized over a long period of time.
It could have happened through a process like lots of people building canoes, everyone sails their canoes and travels around Polynesia and stuff, and the ones who come back...
Those boats get to be copied by other people who want to make canoes.
But doesn't that seem a little bit like the switching of the perspective?
Ultimately, the boats which are better designed will be better at getting the people partners or resources or whatever the case might be.
So you can completely flip it to say it's either the memes or it's the individual humans.
Where the selective forces are acting.
And it's all down to the way that you frame things.
And Nilo's position is inherently more correct than the other, right?
I'm not sure what I think about that.
I mean, I think it's kind of true that if you accept his analogy, the ocean, it's the fitness function.
It's the thing that ultimately is driving the boat design.
The people are participating in that process.
They're the ones that built the boats and sail the boats.
Yeah, well, we'll write them how many boats are there.
The ocean is the fitness function, the people aren't.
Yeah, the ocean is the fitness function, but you don't have any boats that just, you know, the features of the ocean do not generate boats.
It's the people that generate the boats.
So you can talk about it being an environmental pressure that is selecting for certain kinds of artifacts that people might produce.
But, you know, the thing that we call a boat, you don't get it unless you have a creature that constructs cultural artifacts to travel on the sea.
True, but we have a whole bunch of proteins and biological machinery that reads the DNA and constructs things without which the DNA would be absolutely meaningless, right?
But things participated.
They're not what?
They're not boats.
They're not boats.
Oh dear.
I think he's just saying that you can have situations where boats get optimised and it's a trial and error process and there isn't an intelligent designer figuring out from first principles what's the best design of boat.
If you take today, we have 747s which get designed somewhat.
Like Polynesian boats might well have been, right?
Through trial and error and finding out which ones crash, I think everyone agrees that the nature of cultural evolution is that it's kind of exponential.
All of the increasing technological artifacts allow for faster development.
And you could frame the stuff that he's talking about as intelligent design, as various tools and processes and affordances that allow us to just speed it up further.
But it's still trial and error, search and evaluate, right?
That's the process that is getting sped up.
So I think that's a good alternative framing.
You don't necessarily have to make this nice distinction between intelligent design, maybe, and cultural evolution.
Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with your point about the trial and error point.
I think we actually agree on that, about the extent to which, you know, it matters.
Mixes it in at times, too, like with the Picasso examples.
And a good point that he does make about this towards the end is to point out that not all of culture is functional.
This is a problem that Brett Weinstein and many people don't seem to get.
He says this.
This is sort of high culture, and it's an economic model.
These are goods.
But human culture has a lot of other things in it which are not necessarily goods at all.
They're just features.
They're not particularly prized, but they survive and mutate and they travel along.
Yeah, it's so true, isn't it, Chris?
Like, the mistake that the simple-minded evolutionary psychology or even cultural evolution thing is that everything has a direct fitness-enhancing function and you just have to puzzle out what it is if it's not immediately apparent.
That's why...
You hear them coming up with ridiculous explanations for things.
I'm completely on board with you and Dennett, which is that an awful lot of them are arbitrary, like maybe useful, but arbitrary.
Like this phonetic set or that phonetic set was fine.
You could use either one.
Both perfectly good.
And many of them are just around because they happen to be around and are good at keeping themselves in circulation.
Yeah, so the general point is hyper-adaptionism in any of its many forms are shit.
And it's a mistake that lots of people make, right?
Like, just because bloodletting was around for a long time doesn't mean it actually was very healthy for people to reduce their blood when they were sick.
Yeah, we've done it on that one.
So, he comes around to his kind of key thesis at the end, and this comes in two or three parts.
Here's the first part.
So, we're now in the age of intelligent design.
Cultural evolution has become ever more top-down, ever more comprehending and self-comprehending, ever more refined in its search methods.
So as genetic evolution, thanks to genetically modified foods and Craig Venter and genetic engineering in general, is very much a matter of intelligent design of genes.
But I want to end by pointing to the age that we're now entering, the age of post-intelligent design.
So he is hinting at our ability to use tools like artificial neural networks, like genetic algorithms, like various simulation technologies to do speedy trialing of concepts and stuff without necessarily have to go through this long-winded...
cultural process of actually physically making them and then different people deciding they like this other one better it can all be sped up, man.
Yeah, and maybe this last point actually leads to the kind of issues that I was raising because I think what he's talking about, the post-intelligent design thing, is the dividing line that I was trying to draw badly earlier.
So listen to this.
It turns out that we can now harness evolution to do a lot of the design work for us.
Genetic algorithms were the first area in which that happened.
You probably use a computer device which is optimized by genetic algorithms.
Deep learning, the current bandwagon in artificial intelligence is a good example of this.
Evolutionary architecture.
Repurposing evolutionary dynamics to design things without it occurring in our minds, right?
We are utilizing the processes of evolution for our purposes, like you talked about computer programs creating virtual worlds and so on.
At a basic level, I generally like the concept and I think it's true and kind of cool, which is that, yes, we are products of genetic evolution, stupid, if you like, automatic processes of design.
We kind of do intelligent design ourselves and that we actually consciously attempt to innovate things and whatever.
And now, because we've got automation technologies, we can then harness those analogous, at least, automatic, mindless design processes.
To give things an extra kick along the road.
I do have one substantive point of contention here, I suppose, Chris, which is, I guess, similar to yours.
Like, certainly genetic algorithms is one method of automatic design.
But as he has said himself, there are lots of other...
Automated processes that we can use.
There's like simulation technologies and programs like Autodesk Inventor, which allow us to sort of trial physical objects without actually having to build them.
He mentioned the neural nets.
There's like a wide range of search strategies that we employ and they all have the common property with evolution of being automatic search techniques.
But that's where the similarities with biological evolution end.
But he's framing it as evolution, evolution, evolution, because he likes evolution.
And he doesn't.
We all like evolution.
But it's actually not entirely true, is it?
Yeah.
So this is your part to take issue with the tightness of the parallel way draws.
But the last clip he...
It's kind of elaborating on this point.
We're developing new tools for protein engineering and using them to create new and improved catalysts for carbon fixation, sugar release, for renewable polymers such as cellulose, biosynthesis of fuels and chemicals.
So the age of post-intelligent design, of evolutionary design, is now upon us.
Thank you very much for your attention.
The point I'd make here, Matt, that what he describes is also more limited.
That's still all tied into how we will harness various evolutionary algorithms to design things that will be useful for us for technology.
And it's unclear to me, if you have that kind of environment, how useful it is to think about it with the parallels to biological evolution because so many constraints would just...
All right.
Well, I'm going to take a big breath now and sit back and skip my sort of general feelings about Dennett, which is that I enjoyed this talk.
It was the kind of talk that sort of gets you thinking, going, oh, that's interesting, and sort of encourages you to take that sort of broader view and sort of see correspondences between different things that often live compartmentalised in different parts of our brain.
I think he was pretty careful in his facts.
We had a couple of niggling concerns, but they were reasonably...
I think it's interesting to think about that dichotomy between intelligent conscious design and automatic design.
I think it might be more interesting, instead of just sort of restricting it to genetic algorithms or stuff that's analogous to Darwinian evolution, it's probably more interesting to contrast sort of intentional manual designing of things with more general class of automatic search.
Routines, of which genetic algorithms are just one.
I think it's plausible to sort of reject the kind of intelligent design, automatic distinction, and say, hey, actually, what you're talking about as intelligent design is really just kind of a sped-up or a virtualized version of basically search and evaluate.
And that's fine too.
So for me, none of these are deal killers.
It's kind of good.
It's a kind of good lecture for me in the sense that it just encourages us to discuss these kind of distinctions and makes you think, doesn't it?
Makes you think.
Yeah, so listeners will...
Probably hear a version of this, which is 50%.
However many hours you've suffered, we will have edited down substantially this episode.
And part of that is because these people like Dennett and others like him, whereas with many of the other gurus, we're focusing on the rhetorical techniques that they use to build their arguments and whatnot.
Denna is primarily laying out an argument and it encourages you to engage with it, you know, if you find it stimulating and that kind of thing.
So we end up dealing with the actual substance of his arguments, which are interesting, whether or not, you know, they're completely right and whether or not me or Matt agree.
But that should be a clear difference.
And it tends to happen when the gurus that we cover are more substantive.
It happened with Taleb.
It happened with Robert Wright.
It even happened with Anthony DeMello, right?
Although there was more rhetorical maneuvers there.
But I think that's something of an important distinction.
And I did like this talk, even with the various nitpicky stuff that we covered.
And I do think he's a good speaker and presents things in an interesting way.
So I wouldn't have a hesitation recommending...
Daniel Denner, as somebody, if people wanted to spend an hour thinking about ideas, compared to people like Brett Weinstein, this stuff is much more closer to actual, useful, interesting information.
In fact, I think it is interesting, useful, academic-level information.
I think Denner is a good guru.
You don't have to agree with him.
But he definitely does, at least for me, make your thing.
I think professionals, right?
If you're, I don't know, if you're a cultural theorist or a philosopher or whatever, you'll have all kinds of more advanced nitpicky objections to Dennett, I'm sure, than a couple of lay people like me and Chris would have.
But a lot of people go to this kind of material just like I did on YouTube because, you know, they're looking for an hour of intellectual stimulation and you can either eat something that's...
Total junk food.
We can eat something that has some nourishment in it.
I think it's uncontroversial to say that Daniel Dennett, as opposed to most of our subjects, is not junk food.
So good job, Dan.
Well done.
Bad job, boss, for being concise.
But maybe we are.
After our magic of editing, maybe we sound more coherent and concise.
I would decode myself as far too incoherent during this episode.
You know, your patience is appreciated.
And it's only fair that we get to do people that we like and find interesting and can geek out on from time to time.
Our evaluation actually comes through in how we talk about it.
Because like you said, Chris, there isn't much that is like obviously factually wrong or rhetorically manipulative here.
So you are left with engaging with the substance of the argument and with someone like that or many other people.
It's reasonably nuanced.
And if you've got an issue with it, those issues are kind of pretty abstract and nuanced too.
And he actually has a response as well.
I'm sure he does.
I'm sure he could wipe the floor with us and he would probably clarify a whole bunch of stuff.
But, you know, that's an indication that it's someone that's pretty substantial.
Yeah, because we are so substantial ourselves.
So, on that note, we turn now, Matt, to...
Now, this isn't a review of reviews, but I want to make one thing clear to people.
That's not gone away, because some people were lamenting that on the subreddit, and I have seen various funny reviews.
So don't stop giving nice, funny reviews for the podcast.
It may very well return.
This is a limited series about the wisdom of Michaela.
And some people also express concerns that isn't this bullying Michaela to focus on what she says?
And I think I would like to clap back at people.
This is the tyranny of low expectations.
Why treat Michaela any different than any of the other Brett Weinsteins or what?
What's the difference with Makila?
I wonder what the difference is that makes people more uncomfortable.
It's also why I feel slightly more uncomfortable in the critique.
But I will say, Matt, that there's a reason that I suggested to do this.
And these clips from this week, I think, will help make it clear why I thought this was a good idea.
So let's hear what Makila would be doing if she wasn't doing podcasting.
If I wasn't creating podcasts, what would I be doing?
So what I currently do is I spend probably 60% of my time, maybe 70% of my time managing my dad's brand.
I started the social media.
Dad started his own YouTube channel way back in the day and Twitter.
Everything that he's doing, I've set up a team and oversee that team.
That eats up most of my time because he's doing so many different things and I want to make sure people experience him online like he is in real life.
There was a lot of misinformation to counter.
I also managed PR.
So that's mostly what I do now.
So first, Jordan Peterson's online persona, that very stable, carefully manicured presentation, which is not at all just reactionary garbage at every news headline and a skin as thin as wafer bread.
For any criticism.
That is carefully, you might think that's organic.
No.
Carefully managed and cultivated by Michaela.
To her credit, no?
Oh, that is amazing.
But Chris, I really want to know, like, is it all Michaela?
Those tweets?
Like Jordan Peterson's online persona?
Is it really?
No, it's not.
It's obviously him because, you know, there are all those times where he said he's promised not to tweet.
And he's going to only let his team tweet and they'll check.
And it's obviously he's addicted and he has very clear issues with self-control.
But I think Michaela is the one, you know, fielding which interviews and stuff he does and getting annoyed with people for asking critical questions and that kind of thing.
Yeah.
It's hard to detect any positive or more professional contribution there.
No.
So that's one thing, right?
First of all, she, not me, claims credit for Jordan Peterson's online behavior.
So that in itself deserves extreme condemnation.
But it goes on.
So what other kind of things that she's involved in?
And then...
We're starting this Peterson Academy, which is launching next year, which is massive and I'm insanely excited about it.
That's where I'll be also filming my podcast.
So we have a studio.
We're going to be bringing professors in from all over the world, top professors, to film eight-hour lecture content to put on Peterson Academy.
We're building in a social media element that's kind of like Reddit and Instagram.
People will be able to DM each other and form study groups and watch lectures and comment on the lectures and take notes.
There isn't an app.
We're going to be launching late next year.
So I'm spending a good portion of my time managing that project.
Hmm.
So Peterson Academy.
That's something that's coming out.
And Michele again is claiming ownership of.
And how did that description strike you?
What's wrong?
Anything wrong with that?
Is that good?
Well, I don't know.
It sounds like there's a family business involved in building the Peterson.
Empire.
The brand, the social media spaces, the online learning materials, the monetization of all of those things.
I don't know, Chris.
What's wrong with that?
Well, just, you know, if only there was some software or some sites where people could take courses in university topics and, you know, that they would have access to lectures, maybe they could pay.
And get certificates for completing the courses.
They could do assignments.
There could be message boards.
Like, you know, this is a great idea that they've had, which is, you know, oh, but wait, haven't I heard of, is there something called a MOOC?
Isn't their website Coursera?
Okay, Chris, yeah.
See, this is the funny thing.
I just take all that for granted that they would never do that kind of thing, obviously, because they're creating that bespoke.
And they could never do something like contribute a course to Coursera because that would make them just another course on Coursera.
It's got to be a whole university, an institution.
It's got to be this thing that is branded, that is a closed ecosystem.
You know, it's like these people.
Which gurus was it that was going to be making their own social network or was that Trump?
I don't know.
Well, a bunch of them, I mean, sort of did.
Trump did do that, but also you had Dave Rubin do the locals thing, right?
And actually, I think Jordan Peterson has his own social network called ThinkSpot, wasn't it?
So he did make it.
I don't think it's quite competing with Twitter or whatnot yet, but you can imagine a Peterson app for university.
And which kind of people would contribute their time to do an 8th series lecture?
I think you're going to get much more of the caliber of, like, Jonathan Paggio than you are going to get, like, Franz Duvall or something like that.
And it just, it fits in with the whole thing that the Peterson clan has, that education is broken, but, you know, you can just instead...
Imbibe all the ideas that we have collected and curated, and that will be instead of a university education.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's kind of the same as the Andrew Tate stuff you were telling me about.
It's kind of, there's differing levels of severity or toxicity, but ultimately what it boils down to is a kind of like a little club slash cult where you can be this charismatic.
It's a source of information and people need to pay above-market prices to sit at your feet.
And this creation of a Peterson family business just seems...
I think I'm getting numb to it now, Chris, because it just seems so obvious to me.
Of course they're doing that.
Yeah, and you might say, well, they're just setting up.
Like, you know, it's just they don't have such grand aspirations.
And to that, I would say...
I think we can transform education.
I think we can make education accessible to everyone.
I think we can start to fight back against the massive scam that is particularly American universities.
The amount of money that students are charged to take courses from ideologically possessed professors, to leave them with a degree.
That doesn't lead to a job.
To teach them that capitalism is evil and the reason they're in debt and don't have a job is because of capitalism and corporate greed, even though they just overcharge for a university degree you can't use.
It's just a, it's such a scam.
And so I think it would be really funny to get professors from like Oxford and Cambridge and Stanford and U of T and MIT and these massive universities.
Really top-notch professors and then produce really beautiful courses.
Try to make the courses entertaining because you can learn from podcasts.
You don't have to sit in a stuffy classroom and learn from a professor anymore.
You can learn from podcasts now.
So why can't you get a degree from education you can learn from that's entertaining online?
Like, why can't you do that?
You should be able to do that.
This is great.
That's right.
She's reinvented MOOCs and all of those online things.
And there's a slight, you know, like the notion that all those professors from those top universities that employ them to teach their courses, they won't care, of course, if they go and create bespoke content for Peterson Academy.
Like just when Steven Pinker, for example, On the University of Austin or, you know, whatever Barry Weiss is, like Texas alternative.
IDW University was named.
And then quickly walked back that affiliation when it came out that the school was issuing things about how it's the new form of education for the 21st century and the old university system is tired, as endorsed by Steven Pinker.
Well, I didn't quite say that.
So it's that.
And also, universities are, especially in America, It's been long remarked on the exploitative nature of the fees and all that kind of thing.
But the Petersons are not fighting back against that.
They're going to charge whatever the price is.
It'll probably be too much.
And then at the end of it, are you going to get a degree or something that somebody recognizes?
No!
You're going to get something that is of absolutely no value that you could get for free by auditing a MOOC.
Yes, that's the thing.
That's the thing.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the final thing I'll add to that, it's funny, the statement where if you want a course that's not taught by an ideologically captured professor, come to Japan.
It's so funny.
But they don't think they have any ideological slants.
Impressive.
It is impressive.
I'm sure what they'll be charging is more than free, which is the price you can pretty much get what they're offering, which is, you know, like a purely online, casual, yeah, YouTube, Coursera, MOOC type offering.
Actually, you know, it's a sin.
We all should be probably studying for free undergraduate courses, Chris, because they're great.
There's millions of them out there.
The bad news I've got for Michaela Peterson is that that market of undercutting, if you like, universities with their exorbitant fees and classes and all that stuff, but non-credentialed.
I'm sorry to break it to her, but that market has been done.
That exists.
What doesn't exist is the conservative Spread.
Spin, yeah.
Somehow I think if it takes shape in any form, it'll be a bit like this University of Austin thing where you won't find courses on chemistry.
You won't find courses on conventional academic subjects.
You will find courses on how to combat anti-wokenness or something.
Or metaphors and meaning in the Old Testament.
Don't provoke me.
18 parts on finding meaning.
So, yeah, yeah.
And Jonathan Pajot on the Exodus and so on.
So, well, that's...
So, that was the wisdom of Makila for this week.
And, you know, I'm just saying, I think it's worth recognizing the ambitions.
And there's a lot of rhetoric at play there in Makila.
She's not just...
Influencer with minor ambitions.
But Chris, when you pitched this segment to me, as the wisdom of Michaela, I was expecting tips, like Michaela's tips for living your best life and stuff.
See, that was also part of the lesson from Michaela, Matt.
Don't be such a sexist bigot.
You were expecting Michaela to have these kind of flippant Womanly interest, but no, she's a substantial critic.
I was expecting it based on the title of the segment, The Wisdom of Michaela.
That's what I...
Well, I don't know.
For me, it was obvious that she would have these bigger things going on, perhaps because I'd already listened to the content.
But yeah, so there we are, you and all the other listeners.
Look at that, okay?
Your expectations were smashed.
This is a moment for you to reflect on your biases and to understand that, yes, Michaela has big plans and she may revolutionize education next year.
So, tough.
You have to live with it.
We're all joining Peterson Academy.
Throw out your degrees and get rid of your ideologies and sign up.
All right.
Very good.
Thank you, Chris.
Thank you, Michaela.
Thank you, Daniel.
Last thing, Matt, very last thing.
Last thing.
Shoutouts, Patreon, people.
We'll do it.
And then we'll all be on our way and let people recover.
Their minds can return to the state they were originally in.
So this week, just a couple of shoutouts because there's so many systems to get Patreons and they're all...
They're all conflicting.
But there's some people I think deserve shoutouts.
And I'm not sure that we've covered all of them before.
So I'm going to hit a couple of them this week.
And I'm going to go from Galaxy Brain Gurus backwards.
So first of all, we have Benjamin Ashcraft.
We have Chris.
That could be a lot of Chris.
We have Bradley G. Wall.
DanLev151.
Alex Anderson, Loki, and Stephen Keenan.
Oh, sorry.
Stephen Keenan's a revolutionary genius.
Rob Leslie Jr., he is a galaxy brain guru.
So, thank you one and all.
For some of you, it might have been a long time coming.
That's all I'm saying.
Thank you for your patience.
We tried to warn people.
Yeah.
Like, what was coming?
How it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
And revolutionary geniuses, Matt, for this week.
We have Julia Vitamaki, Christopher McLaughlin, Jeff Fitch.
We have Michael Nelson and Seb Cadimus.
Revolutionary geniuses, one and all.
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
It is stunning.
Last but not least, the conspiracy hypothesizers.
And here we have TSD 3141.
We have Emma.
We have Andrew Goff.
We have Ryan.
And we have Kieran Mullen.
Excellent.
Conspiracy hypothesizers.
Hypothesizers.
It's a great start.
Move on to theorizing when you can.
Or not.
That's fine.
Hypotheses are fine.
We've established that.
Seconded.
Seconded.
I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions, and they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like, when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
We will, indeed.
Yes.
Yes, so Matt, it's been a long day of decoding for us, so we'll be during a little break for our brains to recover from these high-level ideas.
But you know, while you're doing that, important for you to note the disk, accord the gen, keep an eye out for those agents of repression and state-mandated brain control.
Okay, that sounds like good advice.
I will.
Stay well, and I'm going to go recover from this marathon session.
