From Bacteria to Bach and Back

By Wayne Brown

From Bacteria to Bach and Back

"Brains .. are composed of billions of idiosyncratic neurons that developed to fend for themselves, the brain's functional architecture is more like a fee market than a politburo hierarchy where all tasks are assigned from on high. The fundamental architecture of animal brains (including human brains) is probably composed of Bayesian networks that are highly competent expectation-generators that don't have to comprehend what they are doing. Comprehension - our kind of comprehension - is only made possible by thee arrival on the scene quite recently of a new kind of evolutionary replicator - culturally transmitted information entities: memes." - page 176

Among many implications flowing from this statement is the idea that our "minds" float in a sea of "culture". They are a virtual machine running the memes installed in the brain, simulating a small part of the affordances on offer in the culture we are born into. To put it another way, you cannot speak of "mind" without "culture".

Roughly speaking, this means that the "I" Domain (Working memory) can be thought of as interfacing with the "M" world without needing to get into the details of how the brain works. The first 175 pages "Bacteria to Bach" make this case in detail.

We can still make meaningful distinctions between memes - those that are readily accessed or even "installed" in the brain, those that are fresh, those almost forgotten, those available with a bit of casual research, those beyond the natural capability of the brain in question (IQ), those that don't make sense in a language "installed" in the brain and so on. The M-Domain is richly structured and complex but we don't need to muddy the waters by getting bogged down in the equally rich and complex structure of our brains: the statement above explains brains well enough for our purposes. We can make a lot of progress simply by talking about the memes we "know" or, to put it another way, memes that can be called into working memory and used as "things" or executed as "subroutines".

Other quotable quotes:

  • words are the DNA of cultural evolution" (p. 179)
  • Don't be afraid of a little metaphor; it won't bite you, but you should always make sure you know how to cash it in for unvarnished fact when you feel the urge (p. 189)

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