Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

400 LOSING OUR MINDS TO DARWIN
Searle ends up denying William Paley's premise: according to Searle, nature
does not consist of an unimaginable variety of functioning devices, exhibiting
design. Only human artifacts have that honor, and only because (as Locke
"showed" us) it takes a Mind to make something with a function! 14 Searle
insists that human minds have "Original" Intentionality, a property
unattainable in principle by any R-and-D process of building better and better
algorithms. This is a pure expression of the belief in skyhooks: minds are
original and inexplicable sources of design, not results of design. He defends
this position more vividly than other philosophers, but he is not alone. The
hostility to Artificial Intelligence and its evil twin, Darwinism, lies just
beneath the surface of much of the most influential work in recent twentiethcentury
philosophy, as we shall see in the next chapter.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Evolution of
Meanings
CHAPTER 13: When generate-and-test, the basic move in any Darwinian
algorithm, moves into the brains of individual organisms, it builds a series of
ever more powerful systems, culminating in the defiberate, foresightful generation
and testing of hypotheses and theories by human beings. This process
creates minds that show no signs of "cognitive closure," thanks to their
capacity to generate and comprehend language. Noam Chomsky, who created
contemporary linguistics by proving that language was generated by an
innate automaton, has nevertheless resisted all evolutionary accounts of how
and why the language automaton got designed and installed, and has also
resisted all Artificial Intelligence attempts to model language use. Chomsky
has stood firm against (reverse) engineering, flanked by Gould on one side
and Searle on the other, exemplifying the resistance to the spread of Darwin's
dangerous idea, and holding out for the human mind as a skyhook.
CHAPTER 14: In chapter 8, 1 sketched an evolutionary account of the birth of
meaning, which will now be expanded and defended against the skeptical
challenges of philosophers. A series of thought experiments building on the
concepts introduced in earlier chapters shows not just the coherence but the
inevitability of an evolutionary theory of meaning.
14. Given Searle's position on this, one would predict that he should be utterly opposed
to my analysis of the power of adaptationist thinking, as presented in chapter 9. He is. I
don't know whether he has expressed this view in print, but in several debates with me
(Rutgers, 1986; Buenos Aires, 1989), he has expressed the view that my account is
exactly backward: the idea that one can hunt for the "free-floating rationales" of evolutionary
selection processes is, in his view, a travesty of Darwinian thinking. One of us has
unintentionally refuted himself; the identity of the victim is left as an exercise for the
reader.
1. THE QUEST FOR REAL MEANING
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a radier scornful tone,
"it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so
many different tilings."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—
that's all."
—LEWIS CARROLL 1871
There is no topic in philosophy that has received more attention than
meaning, in its multifarious manifestations. At the grand end of the spectrum,
philosophers of all schools have grappled with the ultimate question of
the meaning of life (and whether or not this question has any meaning). At
the modest end, philosophers of the contemporary analytic school—
sometimes called "linguistic philosophy" by outsiders—have subjected the
nuances of the meaning of words and whole utterances to microscopic
scrutiny, in a variety of quite distinct enterprises. Back in the 1950s and
1960s, the school of "ordinary language philosophy" lavished attention on
the subtle differences between particular words—the differences between
doing something "deliberately" or "intentionally" or "on purpose," to cite a
famous instance (Austin 1961). This gave way to a more formal and systematic
set of investigations. Which different propositions could you mean
by uttering such sentences as
Tom believes that Ortcutt is a spy.