In his instructive book From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel Dennett concludes a discussion with Steven Pinker on whether memes constitute essential ingredients of culture (Dennett) or not (Pinker).

Pinker claims that since culture is intelligently designed, it does not belong to Darwinian gene-driven evolution and is thus not part of evolution. For Pinker, evolution starts and ends with genes and brains. With Dennett’s painstakingly detailed analysis of the memetic world, supported by thought experiments, he comes to a somewhat surprising conclusion that culture and memes started as 100% bottom-up, not designed, but blind replication. Memes, like genes, mostly evolve in a Darwinian way. However, after occupying brains, memes gradually started to build up consciousness, and with that ability, they could design culture top-down intelligently.

This simplified version of Dennett’s argumentation opens the central question of this post and the point where I argue that Dennett falls short: whether human culture is reducible to neural activity.

Limitations of reductionism

Dennett, like almost all contemporary developers of the Darwinian tradition, is 100% reductionist. Although I had serious problems refuting reductionism from his point of view up to this point, Dennett’s latest elaboration of his intuition pump, arranged around the Library of Babel, finally gave me a clue.

Dennett Library of Babel, constructed on the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges’s story, is a vast tridimensional stack of all possible word combinations, including all misspellings, miss writing, and nonsenses possible. In such a stack of compiled memes, one would, in principle,»find« all books written so far and all possible future books.

At this point, Dennett victoriously claims that there is no difference between human and artificial intelligence. Even human intelligence could, in principle, scrutinize the whole Library and thus comprehend it since comprehension entirely rests on competence. With that, he postulates that the memetic world (the Library) is reducible.

Let us now explain where the catch is that Dennett does not see.

Time matters

The catch that proves human culture’s irreducibility lies in the future. Intelligence that would understand The Library of Babel would also »know« and understand all books that do not yet exist. It would know everything that will happen in the future. Such intelligence would be memetically immortal. Ultimate reducibility brings immortality by definition.

From here, it is pretty easy to conclude that as much as the mortality of genetic bodies makes their condition sine qua non for their evolution, the mortality of memetic hosts, brains within humans, defines culture as culture precisely because it is limited in time and space. It is because it is limited, culture evolves in limited time and limited space. The memetic world stays antifragile due to the fragility of memotypes (in the words of Nicholas Taleb). As much as the Library of Babel unlimited time/space dimension is reducible, human culture is limited in time and thus irreducible. As much as we live in the biosphere, we are not biosphere but phenotypes (parts of the biosphere). We live in the memetic world yet are with our memotypes “only” limited parts of that world. Furthermore, even if the biosphere or the memetic world were unlimited in space, they would still be limited by time.

Thanks to Dennett’s fallacy in this respect, I came to yet another argument against the possibility that artificial intelligence might replace human intelligence. While it is possible to imagine that memes will invade computers as they did human brains, it is precisely in the power of artificial intelligence to comprehend the Library of Babel that it cannot be memetically mortal in principle.

There is no culture in immortality

The death of Stanley Kubrick’s computer, H.A.L. 9000, from 2001: A Space Odyssey, is purely fictitious since it takes the A.I. of H.A.L. as limited in time and space. Memes invaded H.A.L. However, suppose they were unlimited in time and space. In that case, it might destroy part of itself, including humans, on that particular spacecraft, but it would live further in its unlimited time/space memetic environment. It would be antifragile in all respects.

As proved, it is not only the memetic/cultural realm that is irreducible. For the same reason as time limitation, if not space limitation, the physical and genetic (phenotypic) realm is also irreducible. With the words of Stuart Kauffmann, the physical realm is non-ergodic, thus irreducible as much as culture. (For that reason, humans can neither predict nor govern climate.)

God as Dennett’s blindspot

Let me conclude with speculation. What prevents Daniel Dennett from abandoning reductionism, which stays at the core of his otherwise magnificent work, from Branstorms (1981) to From Bacteria to Bach and Back (2017)? He shares this blindspot with an even worse case, Richard Dawkins. Both would do whatever is needed, even corrupt their otherwise exceptional intellectual achievements, to prevent God from entering their fitness landscape. In an entirely reducible world, the concept of God can come into play only as a fairy tale.

As proved, in a limited and thus non-reducible world, the concept of God comes as a necessary and even beneficiary meme that allows a culture to evolve. It represents necessary support as a representation of otherwise blurred time/space limitations.

As we all know, we need friction arising from limitations to move. Evolution rests on limitations. For that reason, evolution is not possible in a pure A.I. world. God is a meme that saturates the symbolic nature of time-space limitations. This saturation allows us to benefit from Darwinian memes to create a non-Darwinian top-down designed culture, a memetic world. The symbolic openness of a meme, “God,” culturally enacted in morality, enables us humans to live as biological and memetic creatures at the same time. Morality is the overarching memetic field that makes us human.