The Robot’s
Rebellion:
Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin by Keith E. Stanovich
University of Chicago Press, ISBN
0-226-77089-3 358 pp, $27.50 £19.50 hb
In press for Philosophical
Psychology
(This is the version submitted to the journal. It may
be edited before publication)
Stanovich sets out to show how we human robots can –
in those stirring words that ended Dawkins’s classic The Selfish
Gene – “rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators”.
Along the way he explores the chilling implications of the Darwinian
view of life, urges us to accept it rather than fight against it, and
tries to replace the immaterial mind with a “soul without
mystery”. Although he doesn’t entirely succeed, and gets into some
interesting confusions about what people want of a self or a soul,
this is a wonderful book full of challenging ideas and lucid examples.
Stanovich describes the human situation in a way
that seems absolutely right to me, and yet is very rarely articulated
as clearly and starkly as this. It is this: we humans live in a world
driven by the competing interests of three kinds of entity – two
replicators and one vehicle. We are the vehicles; we are Dawkins’s
“lumbering robots”, built initially by the first replicator, the
selfish genes, in order to protect and replicate them, and then
infected with the second replicator, the selfish memes, in order to
protect and propagate them. In this we are unique on earth. We alone
are such efficient hosts for memes that they can construct a
world-wide culture using us as copying machines. And we alone “ are
the only robots who have discovered that we have interests that are
separate from the interests of the replicators” (p xii). It is this
knowledge that gives us both the motivation to rebel and the power to
do so.
The first step in that rebellion is to realise
the true state of affairs and its implications. Modern scientific
thinking, and especially that arising from the Darwinian view,
requires us to rethink such central concepts of folk psychology as the
soul, the self, free will, and personal responsibility. Yet, claims
Stanovich, folk psychology generally remains sealed off from
scientific insight, raising the spectre of a future in which an
intellectual elite understands the implications of the Darwinian view
and everyone else does not. The book traces out just what some of
these implications are and urges us to get used to them, however
uncomfortable they may be.
One is the “frightening purposelessness of
evolution” (p 7). Of course there is a kind of purpose – the
survival of replicators – but this is just the mindless playing out
of the evolutionary algorithm of copy, vary, and select. This is not
the kind of purpose most of us want in our lives. We want human
purpose, and even noble ideals, rather than the replication of
meaningless bits of information. Stanovich explains all this clearly,
but oddly he gets into some contradictions when he talks about the
vexed issue of progress. When writing about biological evolution he
adopts Gould’s extreme denial of any progress, or any sense in which
some forms of life are more complex or more designed than others. Yet,
when it comes to memetic evolution, having explained how memes are
just following the same evolutionary algorithm as genes, and in the
same mindless and selfish way, he claims that culture advances and
modern science progresses. I sense that we need to push these ideas
still further than he does if we are to understand what we mean by
scientific progress.
The concept of the leash is critical for
Stanovich’s account of the human condition. This concept comes from
E.O. Wilson’s famous claim that the genes will always keep culture
on a leash, but it has been challenged in the past by some theories of
gene-culture co-evolution and in particular by memetics.
Stanovich explains that for simple organisms the leash between the
genes and their vehicle may be very short. So, for example, the genes
of a bacterium may specify precisely how the cell is to behave in
given circumstances. But when vehicles become longer-lived and more
complex, their genes have to adopt long-leash strategies that give
their vehicles more autonomy. This is like the difference between the
control exerted by a driver sitting in her car, and the control
required for the Mars explorer; NASA engineers realised that, given
the time that signals would take to get to Mars, the robot had to be
given some generic goals, a flexible intelligence, and allowed to get
on with the mission itself. This is the sense in which we humans are
the robots of our genes, and are held on a very long leash.
One of the central themes of this book concerns
the important differences between disciplines, and how these relate to
understanding the conflicts between genes, memes and vehicles.
Sociobiologists, Stanovich claims, failed to see the divergence of
interest between the genes and their vehicles – they treated the
leash as being very short and the genes in direct control, when in
fact the vehicle is sometimes more like a Mars explorer run amok. More
recently, evolutionary psychologists have sometimes been guilty of the
same mistake, he says, and this could even thwart the robot’s
rebellion. As one example, he discusses the many varieties of human
rationality, with all its peculiarities and what look like errors of
reasoning. Evolutionary psychologists, he claims, often make the
mistake of seeing these errors as being adaptations to the environment
in which most of our evolutionary changes took place. So even if they
look like errors, they were actually designed to serve the genes. But
if the leash is really much longer, and the vehicle more like a Mars
explorer, then much of our behaviour may be serving the interests of
the robots, rather than their genes.
This conflict of interest becomes more
interesting, and the concept of the leash less useful, when the second
replicator is brought into play as well. And here is one of the great
strengths of the book – that Stanovich takes seriously, as so few
people do, the replicator power of memes. As he points out, memes are
selfish replicators that get on in the world by using us to get
themselves copied. We can then be witting or unwitting hosts for these
memes, accepting some and rejecting others. Here he explores the
difference between those memes we adopt unreflectively, such as the
religious memes of our childhood indoctrination, or the fashion memes
of our teenage culture, and those we reflect on before accepting.
These might include theories we evaluate, games we try out and enjoy,
or moral principles we reflect on and adopt as our guide.
So now we have three players in the game; three
sets of interests that potentially control our behaviour. The genes
have given us TASS (the autonomous set of systems), including
responses to hunger, thirst, and sexual stimulation as well as
in-built preferences and peculiar methods of reasoning. The memes have
given us all kinds of new behaviours, beliefs and desires, including
positively harmful ones like martyrdom and warfare, as well as useful
ones that increase our intelligence and reasoning power. And then
there is us, the vehicle, the robot, that has its own agenda to
survive and be happy and fulfilled.
Towards the end of the book Stanovich explores
some important moral issues, and how they relate to the three main
players. In particular he points out that we cannot always side with
one replicator or the other. In many cases we do, and should, side
with those rational responses that override TASS, such as trying to
eat less fat and sugar, or suppress a natural desire to stare at
people who look strange or deformed. But he gives the opposite example
of Huckleberry Finn, who wants to help free his slave friend Jim. In
this case we want him to follow this gut TASS reaction based on
empathy and friendship, rather than heeding the memes of his
indoctrination. However, Stanovich argues that in this case the memes
that make the boy feel guilty were unreflectively acquired. With
greater analytic ability, and more effective critical memes at our
disposal, we can rebel against both genes and unreflectively acquired
memes.
This leads to peculiar paradoxes and the truly
difficult question of whether there is some ultimate neutral stand
point from which to evaluate memes. Stanovich says not, and describes
the whole enterprise as a kind of bootstrapping process in which we
restructure our own goal hierarchies and try to achieve rational
integration.
But who or what is doing this, and who or what is
it all for? Throughout the book, Stanovich sides with the vehicle. We
humans are the vehicles of these two replicators and it is as vehicles
or robots that we must rebel. Yet he recognises that what most people
mean by “I” or “me” is not the vehicle at all, but some sort
of mythical inner self or soul. Believing in this, we shrink from
anything that does not put human consciousness at the centre of the
action. So number 1 in his list of “creepy facts” is that “There
is no “I” in the brain who is aware of everything going on and who
controls everything.” (p 252) and “no immaterial ‘mind’
where consciousness occurs and there your ‘self’ makes
decisions” (p 209). He goes on to add that since our brains were
built by subpersonal replicators with their own interests, “the
purpose of your brain is not to serve the ‘I’” (p 253).
If this is so, then we must throw out the myth
and live without it, but I don’t think that Stanovich has
successfully replaced the myth of self with a “soul without
mystery” as he claims. His conclusion seems to be that, without the
false notion of self, there are only replicators and vehicles in the
game. The robot’s rebellion means the latter using its powers of
reason to rebel against the former.
But why? I am left confused. I agree with the
analysis of genes, memes and vehicles; I agree that there is no
neutral standpoint from which to evaluate memes; I agree that the
inner self or soul is a myth. But why then should I (whatever that is)
side with the vehicle? Or – put more neutrally – why should all
this rational cognitive reform side with the vehicle? One might
instead argue, rationally, that human vehicles are the scourge of the
planet and so prefer to put the whole ecosystem first. Or one might
conceive a desire for humans to survive as long as possible and so put
human genes before any individual vehicle. One might believe that the
memes of great science and literature are more important than any
genes or vehicles of any species. There are many possibilities once
you give up centering the world around the myth of an inner self.
This is why I ended my own book on memes with the
words “there is no one to rebel.”, for once you truly give up the
notion of an inner self, the implications are profound. Stanovich has
done a great job of describing the human condition, and written a
fascinating book, but I think the implications of his ideas go even
further than he admits.
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