The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: EvoLit

 A few of Dennett's ideas are still confusing to me.  Despite our extensive class discussion, I still do not fully understand memes.  I am not sure if culture can be measured or divided into units.  Units are supposed to be very basic, so that measuring is easy and logical.  How can one begin to measure culture?  Memes seem so indefinable to us because culture is.  We had an easier time envisioning memes as a tune or phrase rather than a cultural movement, which makes sense because larger cultural movements are so much more complicated.  In other words, I can much better explain how a classmate ended up humming Lady Gaga than say the revolutions happening across the Middle East.

Thursday’s discussion led us to talking about the concept of substrate neutrality. When we first began discussing what this idea of Dennett’s could possibly mean, I had a difficult time wrapping my head around his belief. I took it to mean something that could be used with an algorithm because, regardless of the substrate, the same process will occur. We then applied this concept to the tennis tournament example Dennett provided. The substrate would be considered the players of the tournament and they are neutral because no matter what, there will be a winner. Even if it is a competition between a novice and an expert, it could still be considered substrate neutral. I'm not a support of this concept of substrate neutrality.

In discussion on Thursday I strongly disagreed with the idea that every possibility in the world already existed, with the idea of a Library of Babel. I don't disagree because I want to believe that each of us matters, that we are important and meaningful in the universe. In fact, I believe the opposite: we're all much less significant than we can hope to understand, given the magnitude of the universe. I still disagree with the idea that every possible outcome is cataloged in a Library of Babel because that Library is still a foundational concept that isn't in keeping with the theory of evolution.

In class on Thursday we tried to find agency in a world of algorithms… a daunting task. At one point, as we struggled without an answer, Miranda gave a sly smile and suggested that we should just not think about it. She said that prior to taking this class, she didn’t think about it and her life was fine. Although I agreed with this initially, I think that argument may only be one made from frustration so I’d like to make the case against it. 

 For all I think memes are problematic, I can see why it would be useful for Dennett and Dawkins to employ them. If one wants to trace cultural development, it's helpful to encapsulate certain cultural traits as "building blocks" in order to follow their development across history. I have to say, I'm even pretty intrigued by the idea of boiling an element of culture down to its most basic elements. In Professor Dalke's discussion group on Thursday, we tried to discuss the meme of LOLcats, and started breaking it down to its basic elements (a picture and a mispelled, somewhat incongruous caption) to see how it managed to spawn other, similar trends (ie. Advice Wolf, Hipster Ariel, etc.).

 From our conversation Thursday on randomness and it's impact on life, I'm still not convinced that it really matters.  Regardless of whether or not our lives are completely determined, we'll never know, so why even talk about it?  We can answer this by saying that it's more comfortable to know that we have a purpose or that we don't have a purpose, but the thing is that we'll never know.  Why not just drop the conversation all together.  For those who want to think they have control then that's what they'll believe and those who like things determined will believe that.  Then you will have the group of people who don't really think about it, and they won't be forced into a conversation.

 My friends, right off the bat I can tell you that a human is worth more than 57 cents. The amount it costs to purchase one strand of DNA, only 20 nucleotides long, totals around 8 dollars. Imagine then, how much it would cost to synthesize a strand of DNA encoding an entire protein or genome.

  I have spent the last two weeks trying to convince myself that an algorithm with a random step produces a different outcome than pure randomness does.  However, after much thought I am only partly satisfied with the explanation I have generated, and thus am seeking further clarification. In the most basic sense, to me randomness implies that any outcome can occur.  Think of a board (like a checkerboard) where a space may either be colored red or black.  If the coloring was random any pattern could emerge, it could be all black or red, it could be checkerboard, or it could have no distinguished pattern at all.

 Dennett caught my attention when he discussed what we as humans saw as the point of life. A life of exploring, learning new things is not exactly the way Mother Nature sees it. Instead he mentions that,  "a life of sleep is as good a life as any other and in many regards better --- certainly cheaper --- than most (p.340). Now that I believe is a great motto to live by considering the lack of attention many of my peers seem to pay to the subject of sleep. Wouldn't be interesting if our bodies worked similarly to bears and other mammals that hibernate all winter? Now that would be an interesting experiment, could we sleep through winter? what kinds of changes would our bodies go through?