If our culture had been frozen in 1500, would we be better off today? Why do we think our descendants in 2500 will look back on us with any less skepticism than we look back on chattel slavery and the Spanish Inquisition?
Most of those living in 1500, looking into a crystal ball, would be horrified by what our world has become. Women voting and owning land! A black man as president! Homosexuals out in the open! From their perspective all of those changes are horrifically maladaptive.
Transpose all of the above by 500 years I struggle to see why we are different. We're just the latest step in a long chain, the future of which is unknowable to us.
We do already have evolution (and cultural evolution) widely described as being "optimization processes". There is a "fitness function" - which is equivalent to a "utility function" in economics - which is broadly speaking - to increase the probability of having distant descendants. Selection processes optimize this function using genetic algorithms - or sometimes memetic algorithms. There are multiple optimization targets - and this is also similar to optimization in economics.
This sentence is a little garbled: "Then natural selection applies to the act consequences of the individuals and communities who have made such choices."
I think I know what you meant, but it would be good to fix it.
In other words, conspicuous discussion of one’s own neuro-divergent children has a plausible basis only cloaked in rational explanation - logically, why they are better than your children. The actual reasoning is a subtle bet on the increased value of the abstraction.
"And we are replacing religions that ask us to accept specific claims with weak evidential support, with ideologies that make fewer factual claims and embrace more abstractly described goals."
You lost me there. Why do you think that? Can you give examples?
The first major distinctly Western ideology that I know of was Pythagoreanism, and the second was Platonism. Both had maximally abstract goals, no factual claims (unless you count axioms or "authentic" phenomenological convictions as facts). Plato claimed his goal was "social justice" or "the Good", and it was the extreme abstraction of this goal, plus his bag of rhetorical tricks, which let him repurpose it for his real goal of political power. And this is pretty much where we are today.
I don't even know how to count factual claims. The distinctive thing about Western ideologies is that they have a small number of axiomatic claims, and a huge superstructure of derived claims. Asking how many claims an ideology makes is like asking how many claims Euclidean geometry makes. Five, and an infinite number, are both correct.
It isn't obvious to me that Christianity makes more factual claims than today's political movements. The number of claims ranges from so many that you couldn't enumerate them unless you spent your entire life doing nothing else (Catholicism), to none (Unitarian Universalism); but generally they have a handful of claims you must agree to to be accepted as a member, and a much larger number of claims you're expected to agree with to be a member of the priesthood. Few of these are factual claims; most are unverifiable, meaningless metaphysical claims. Same for Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. You can be accepted as a Muslim just by repeating one sentence. Whereas today's "left" and "right" both make a large number of factual claims; and the left will cast you out if you disagree with a single one of them, or even if they can't point to any claim you disagree with them about, but you reserve the right to disagree with future claims. (Personal experience.)
It seems to me that the West has spent 2,400 years bouncing from one version of Platonism to another, and a timeline of their rise (Pythagoras, Plato, Jesus, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Unitarianism, Romanticism, Hegel, Marx, Theosophy, Modernism, Nazism, Post-modernism, Social Justice) has no obvious trend in abstraction or number of factual claims.
Robin, your analysis of abstraction's role in cultural evolution is thought-provoking. I wonder if our focus on optimization and abstract goals (from economics and game theory) might cause us to overlook how culture persists through embodied practices and participatory experiences rather than just explicit reasoning. Traditional cultures maintained coherence not only through optimizing abstract goals but through shared participation in practices that created meaning without requiring analytical understanding. Perhaps the most adaptive cultural systems integrate both abstract principles and embodied wisdom rather than privileging either alone?
May well be true, but more examples (rather than abstract description!) would make this more convincing.
In particular, I’m not certain that abstractions are much more misunderstood than concrete things, though sometimes they are (eg anti-capitalists who can’t define capitalism)
What if drift is good?
If our culture had been frozen in 1500, would we be better off today? Why do we think our descendants in 2500 will look back on us with any less skepticism than we look back on chattel slavery and the Spanish Inquisition?
Most of those living in 1500, looking into a crystal ball, would be horrified by what our world has become. Women voting and owning land! A black man as president! Homosexuals out in the open! From their perspective all of those changes are horrifically maladaptive.
Transpose all of the above by 500 years I struggle to see why we are different. We're just the latest step in a long chain, the future of which is unknowable to us.
Change can be adaptive, but drift is change not aligned with adaptive pressures.
Why expect "adaptive pressures" to be a good thing? Social media has lots of "adaptive pressures", and people hate it.
We do already have evolution (and cultural evolution) widely described as being "optimization processes". There is a "fitness function" - which is equivalent to a "utility function" in economics - which is broadly speaking - to increase the probability of having distant descendants. Selection processes optimize this function using genetic algorithms - or sometimes memetic algorithms. There are multiple optimization targets - and this is also similar to optimization in economics.
Yes, it is a kind of optimization, but can. be much noisier in individual cases.
This sentence is a little garbled: "Then natural selection applies to the act consequences of the individuals and communities who have made such choices."
I think I know what you meant, but it would be good to fix it.
Changed.
In other words, conspicuous discussion of one’s own neuro-divergent children has a plausible basis only cloaked in rational explanation - logically, why they are better than your children. The actual reasoning is a subtle bet on the increased value of the abstraction.
"And we are replacing religions that ask us to accept specific claims with weak evidential support, with ideologies that make fewer factual claims and embrace more abstractly described goals."
You lost me there. Why do you think that? Can you give examples?
The first major distinctly Western ideology that I know of was Pythagoreanism, and the second was Platonism. Both had maximally abstract goals, no factual claims (unless you count axioms or "authentic" phenomenological convictions as facts). Plato claimed his goal was "social justice" or "the Good", and it was the extreme abstraction of this goal, plus his bag of rhetorical tricks, which let him repurpose it for his real goal of political power. And this is pretty much where we are today.
I don't even know how to count factual claims. The distinctive thing about Western ideologies is that they have a small number of axiomatic claims, and a huge superstructure of derived claims. Asking how many claims an ideology makes is like asking how many claims Euclidean geometry makes. Five, and an infinite number, are both correct.
It isn't obvious to me that Christianity makes more factual claims than today's political movements. The number of claims ranges from so many that you couldn't enumerate them unless you spent your entire life doing nothing else (Catholicism), to none (Unitarian Universalism); but generally they have a handful of claims you must agree to to be accepted as a member, and a much larger number of claims you're expected to agree with to be a member of the priesthood. Few of these are factual claims; most are unverifiable, meaningless metaphysical claims. Same for Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. You can be accepted as a Muslim just by repeating one sentence. Whereas today's "left" and "right" both make a large number of factual claims; and the left will cast you out if you disagree with a single one of them, or even if they can't point to any claim you disagree with them about, but you reserve the right to disagree with future claims. (Personal experience.)
It seems to me that the West has spent 2,400 years bouncing from one version of Platonism to another, and a timeline of their rise (Pythagoras, Plato, Jesus, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Unitarianism, Romanticism, Hegel, Marx, Theosophy, Modernism, Nazism, Post-modernism, Social Justice) has no obvious trend in abstraction or number of factual claims.
Robin, your analysis of abstraction's role in cultural evolution is thought-provoking. I wonder if our focus on optimization and abstract goals (from economics and game theory) might cause us to overlook how culture persists through embodied practices and participatory experiences rather than just explicit reasoning. Traditional cultures maintained coherence not only through optimizing abstract goals but through shared participation in practices that created meaning without requiring analytical understanding. Perhaps the most adaptive cultural systems integrate both abstract principles and embodied wisdom rather than privileging either alone?
Even "embodied wisdom" will be passed on at some level of abstraction.
May well be true, but more examples (rather than abstract description!) would make this more convincing.
In particular, I’m not certain that abstractions are much more misunderstood than concrete things, though sometimes they are (eg anti-capitalists who can’t define capitalism)
> Having our goals be specified at more abstract levels makes sense in a world that is changing more rapidly
Do you think there has been less cultural drift in societies that are/were less industrialized over the last few hundred years?
I have started calling it HI or HI Generated. It is a kind of superpower that doesn’t place upper limits on your abilities
“Can you fly that thing?”
“Not yet.” (Matrix 1999)