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 pu...

\ Quick and dirty definitions, to be clarified as we go along: R Refers to the "real world" . Accepted wisdom is that we have no direct access to R.  It turns out that we actually do have quite a good access to the R domain - the M/R interface, also known as "Science". For the individual, the I domain is tiny compared to the vastness of both M and R. However, with effort and training, it is possible for the individual to open a tiny peephole into R - at least so far as to put to rest the notion that R does not exist at all - that it's all an illusion. M refers to "meme space" or the entire set of ideas, actual and possible. For example, all of Science exists in M, uncomfortably with all religions, past, present and future. It is everything we know, could know, or think we know, possibly including all those things that may be conceivable by some alien intelligence or even "God." M happily accommodates all the wrong ideas and the opposite of ev...

Roger Penrose is a guy who has a way of asking good questions and providing controversial answers. On page 20 of his monumental survey of applied mathematics, " The Road To Reality"  he explains an interesting theory about three "worlds": R*:The "real", physical world of "stuff" and phenomena, which he (quite reasonably) takes to exist apart from the other two worlds; M:The world of ideas - what I call the "meme space". In principle, this is all the theories, observations, direct or indirect perceptions that could ever be made by the human mind; F:The world of forms, mathematics and logic. While he contends is that each world "maps"  completely  to the others. In principle at least, each world can be explained in terms of the other.  But he allows us to imagine that the mapping is incomplete. It is the incompleteness that interests me: There may be aspects of reality that are "illogical" or cannot be described by mat...

Roger Penrose is a guy who has a way of asking good questions and providing controversial answers. On page 20 of his monumental survey of applied mathematics, " The Road To Reality"  he explains an interesting theory about three "worlds": R*:The "real", physical world of "stuff" and phenomena, which he (quite reasonably) takes to exist apart from the other two worlds; M:The world of ideas - what I call the "meme space". In principle, this is all the theories, observations, direct or indirect perceptions that could ever be made by the human mind; F:The world of forms, mathematics and logic. While he contends is that each world "maps" completely to the others. In principle at least, each world can be explained in terms of the other.  But he allows us to imagine that the mapping is incomplete. It is the incompleteness that interests me: There may be aspects of reality that are "illogical" or cannot be described by math...

The "R" meme is the most powerful and widely-shared meme: that there is a "real world out there" independent of our minds. This is the intuitive insight that is denied or at least challenged by "Idealism" [1]. Denial of R turns out to be a powerful " intuition pump ". We imagining that the "real world" does not exist at all, and it's "all in our minds". This is a rather strong denial of Idealism, since an Idealist would, I think, admit that the real world exists -- just that we can't know anything about it other than what pops up in our minds. At the risk of spoiling the plot, the view of this blog is that the brain can be thought of as a fantastically complex and specially-constructed knot that intimately ties the mind M to the world R. This connection is so intimate that it is, in practice, impossible to say where mind ends and world begins [2]. In effect, this frames "Idealism" as a discussion about a dis...

You can think of a "meme" as an shared "big idea".  The main thing about a meme is that it is shared between minds (2) - the more minds the better. The idea is that memes compete with each other and survive at the expense of their "hosts", who are "infected" with memes, such as (Dawkins' favorite example), religion. Late in life, Dawkins still pushes this idea and it still gains some traction. There is an attractive analogy between genes and memes, spelled out explicitly when Dawkins introduced the idea [1] and swallowed up by "Surfaces and Essences" as just another example of analogy making -- perhaps one that doesn't get to the "essence" of the phenomenon of "ideas". In this blog, I will use the word "meme" sparingly to refer to basic powerful ideas such as the "Self", "Reality" and "God". It turns out that we don't get very far by thinking of these ideas as ...