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’.
Most people (except in Alzheimer's, etc.) don't run out of memory in the brain. If there's no scarcity for the space of ideas, why do they have to compete?
Since you’re a doctor, Erik, let me ask: is there a possibility Alzheimer’s could be explained in terms of bad software? Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like the prevailing view is limited to bad hardware.
Hmm never thought of that, interesting! I think since the disease involves continuous loss of brain volume, hardware decay seems like the best explanation.
In general I think it makes sense to speak of diseases in neurology (e.g. Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, stroke) as bad hardware and psychiatric disease as bad software. But it could very well be that some of those diagnoses are miscategorised.
Not a doctor. But it's not hard for me to imagine untainted memory but a script with an error such that it can't manage to look up the information.
Yeah that's definitely a possible medical condition, e.g. in psychosis or after having ECT. Don't think it's the best explanation for Alzheimer's though, where the loss of brain volume is so apparent.