Fabric of Reality Book Club
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.I don't think a gene has problems. It does not have ideas.
A gene doesn’t have problems in any conscious sense, but it always faces the problem of how to spread through the population at the expense of its rivals.
Maybe that answers your question, Erik.
How could we integrate that vision with Popper's definition (paraphrased): a tension, inconsistency, or unmet explanatory demand that arises when a theory clashes with observations, background assumptions, or rival theories, thereby calling for conjectural solutions and critical tests.
The rival theories and clashes sound like competition between genes – or more precisely, between the theories those genes embody.
Basically, genes contain guesses (in a non-subjective sense) for how to spread through the population at the expense of their rivals. Those guesses are met with selection pressure and competition.
Yeah, thanks! Are ideas also guesses of how to survive in the mind and across substrates, or is there more to ideas?
In the neo-Darwinian view, any replicator’s primary ‘concern’ is how to spread through the population at the expense of its rivals. This view is what Dawkins (IIRC) calls the gene’s eye view, and it applies to ideas as much as it does to genes. Any adaptation of any replicator is primarily in service of this concern.
So I think the answer to your question, “Are ideas also guesses of how to survive in the mind and across substrates …?”, is ‘yes’.