I s "thinking" a "computation"? If so, making a computer "think" should be a simple problem of engineering. Almost all popular movies featuring "intelligent machines" make this assumption. Sooner or later, machines with "out-think" us. What would be another way of seeing this? As a starting point, let me create an image of a "mind" as  local disturbances in meme space . I visualize this "disturbance" as typically not confined to a single brain, but more typically a "wave" spreading through connected minds. This is an evocative image but the word "meme" is itself a "meme" that suffers greatly from over-use and lack of rigor .  To make the idea more rigorous, I recommend " Surfaces and Essences " by Sandler and Hofstadter.  This gives a more close-up view of how humans "think" and it hints that the "computation" underlying thinking is the  analo...

Strange Order Of Things This is a hard review to write. In my opinion, Damasio is one of the greats when it comes to figuring out the secrets of "mind". I looked forward to this book. I reserved it from the library and when that was too slow, I bought the book. Damasio's approach is original and profound Sadly this particular book is flawed in so many ways I doubt it will have the impact it deserves.  The biggest problem is the " Fog Factor ". Great stretches of this book would be virtually inaccessible to all but the most determined reader due to run-on sentences, big words and tiresome repetition. It's just abominably written. The issue is compounded by the fact that Damasio seems to lose his thread of thought to ramble on in the final chapters about the sorry state of the world. Damasio is a brilliant brain scientist. As a commentator on world affairs, he has little of interest to offer. This is particularly disappointing since his general theory comes so...

The idea of the meme was invented by Richard Dawkins and hammered into its most robust form by Daniel Dennett. It is an extended analogy that claims that human ideas are somehow like genes and have their own process of evolution independent of the evolution going on in their "hosts", the human race. It's an attractive idea and it works well as a rhetorical device, especially the way that Dawkins and Dennett use it to attack religion as an infection of the brain. True believers in "memetics" claim that all of human thought is "infection" by memes - a strong claim that memetics is a fundamental explanation of mind. Memeticists claim that the brain is a "meme machine". The problem comes when you try to apply memes outside of the examples trotted out by the "founders". Personally, I can't figure out what a "meme" is. The old words of ideas, doctrines, theories and especially paradigm seem perfectly serviceable and don'...

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...

This talk introduces a recent book by Dennett, rehashing and updating his theories on the mind. I have the hard copy of the book on order. These comments refer to his summary of it delivered as part of the Google Talks series. It is much to Dennett's credit that, as he goes along, his ideas become more precise and articulate. His examples are more apt, his analogies closer to the "essence". He never seems to say, "I was totally wrong about this", but he does make progress - partly by not taking himself too seriously. It is much to Dennett's credit that he is rarely caught in an "argument" -- he sees an element of truth in almost everything, always putting his own ideas on the table without allowing opposition to get personal. This is good because he gets a lot of opposition. " Consciousness Explained " (1991) was a serious over-reach. Rather a mess that didn't come close to delivering on the promise in its title. Yet, in the interveni...

For those who still like memes, the reviews of this book on Amazon are worth reading.   The meme are a rhetorical device that can't stand up to the mildest of criticism.

Both scientists and pseudo-scientists feel the need to provide evolutionary "explanations" for whatever phenomenon they study. I fact, the explanations seem more elaborate for phenomena whose very existence is controversial. Memes are the poster child for this phenomenon. Sometimes, long diversions into evolutionary story telling seem like nothing more than an effort to "sound scientific". If the average person has any idea about evolution, he'd say it's about "survival of the fittest". In the back of his mind, he's assuming that evolution has produced an unbroken chain of more and more "fit" creatures, culminating in the most "fit" of all: man. Even "white" man. Even the Aryan race. Actually, "survival of the fittest" is circular, if "fit" simply means the ability to survive and pass on one's genes. The key idea of evolution is descent with variation. There are many reasons why some varieti...

The idea of a meme was introduced by Richard Dawkins in a final chapter of his popular 1976 book on genetics: "The Selfish Gene". Dawkins kicks around the meme idea with philosopher Daniel Dennett here . Even after 40 years, Dawkins still brings up the meme constantly, especially when he's talking about religion as a meme that "infects" the human brain. The word "meme" is now tossed around quite freely, almost a synonym for "idea", but usually confined to a "big idea" or at least one that is effectively communicated from person to person and somehow "survives" competition with competing ideas. Given " Surfaces and Essences " (S&E), we can immediately see that the meme is an explicit analogy with the gene. We can also ask if it's a very good analogy. Does it lead us to understand anything about ideas that we can't easily see without it? Does it mislead us to think that ideas have properties or behavior...

Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins share ideas on religion. The conversation is interesting because Dawkins is generally credited with the invention of the idea of the "meme" and Dennett is best known for making the idea more precise and useful. Interestingly, Dennett's grasp of evolution (and even memes!) seems to be more nuanced than Dawkins', even though Dennett is a philosopher and Dawkins' credentials are in biology. Dawkins focused originally on the idea that memes survived in a way analogous to evolution (In his preface to " The Meme Machine ", Dawkins admits that he's surprised that people took the idea seriously). The conversation struggles to keep this analogy going, trying to make the case that religion is a parasitic meme, surviving at the expense of the believer. It seems that Dawkins uses "meme" mainly as a rhetorical device -- part of his arsenal of weapons to attack what he imagines to be "religion". Dennett, on th...

I am particularly attracted to the idea of the "fractal", which is a scale-independent repetition of a theme. Nature seems to "discover" a few patterns then use them in endless patterns and variations. This is one of the building blocks of what is taking shape as a "theory of mind". To build a "super mind", it would make sense to design the largest scale of this mind in the cloud to tap the computational power of millions of volunteer machines (as in the cloud project to classify galaxies). However, perhaps this as already been done. At least to serve in my "thought experiment", Google may be enough. The "theme" that has me fascinated is the mapping of one brain state into another, using something similar to the Shrodinger Wave Equation. That equation describes the state of the universe in the "next instant" as a function of the state of the universe in the "previous instant". The mental equivalent would be...

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...

A wider and more optimistic picture of assimilation can be found here . The progress of human thought, including technology, depends on the individual being "assimilated" into the way society "thinks".

The premise of " Dragon Theory " is that we get "assimilated" into intelligent machines - social structures based on mechanical rules - thereby losing our fundamental humanity. The assumption of Dragon Theory is that this "assimilation" is a "bad thing", even a dangerous thing. Perhaps even a threat to the continued existence of human beings on the planet. On the other hand, I have a thread of reasoning in Diary of a Christian Skeptic  that recognizes that there is little or nothing in my personal "meme world" that doesn't come from other people, many of which can be identified by name. According to this picture, my mind is simply a kind of eddy, through which the memes of mankind flow. According to Zen, there are no borders to the individual mind. Properly speaking, the mind is infinite and contains "reality". The mind of a modern intellectual "contains" a lot more "reality" than the mind of an educat...

I think of brain waves  as the process of "re-hashing" memes in the brain. A "meme" corresponds to a fantastically complex pattern [1] of activation of neurons. Activation of these patterns can be observed outside of the skull due to electrical side-effects of neuron "firing". I envision a looping chain reaction of memes, some at a very low level (hardly qualifying as memes), such as the sensation of breathing and some much higher, such as a friend speaking to you. The wave frequency corresponds to the speed of "unpacking" one meme into another, or how fast one meme "reminds" you of another. It's important to think of the brain as active and dynamic rather than a static container of "knowledge" and a "soul" sitting around inside the head observing he world. The looping never stops. When we are conscious (Beta waves, about 15 to 40 cycles per second - Herz). this looping is consciousness.  As we think harder, the...

If we're lucky, the first person we encounter in our lives is our mother. We naturally generalize to recognize other moving shapes as like our mother but not our mother. We have all experienced the difficulty of calming a baby who refuses to accept the attentions of anybody but his mother. This leads me to a claim that may seem odd: We discover our mothers before we discover ourselves! But we are "hard wired" to assemble the meme of "self" pretty early. These fingers and toes are "my" fingers and toes. When you watch a baby, you can see this is a discovery , not a "brute fact". But the "hard wiring" of the motor cortex establishes a predictable link between the perception of the body and the ability to move around body parts. Thus is born "me" (the object in the world) and "I", the one who seems to "be me". One of our main jobs in the first two years of life is establishing an iron-clad link between ...

Computers model our minds in two ways. We are tempted to think of our own mental processes in terms of what we know about computers. Conversely, we attempt to implement our mental processes using computers. Over the last 50 years, these two processes have converged, providing us with a more robust analogy for human thinking while constantly improving our ability to implement human thought processes in silicon. The best model of "mind" is based on memes [1]. These are the "atoms" of the mind. For the purpose of this note, let me focus on two types of meme: category and behaviour. Computer programmers don't think about electronics or silicon [2]. They think about "objects" which are instances of "classes" (OOD-Object Oriented Design). Objects inherit from their classes the ability to "know" certain things and behave in certain ways (methods), especially the ability to communicate with other objects. A good computer program will imple...