In today’s AI era, I revisited the once-hyped concept Gene and Meme, the idea that we are vehicles driven by these two replicators, who care less about the vehicle’s (ours) own well-being (meaning) but thrive for mere replication.
A book called “The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin” came highly recommended during my exploration. It argues “we may well be robots, but we are the only robots on earth who have discovered that fact. Only by recognizing ourselves as such, we can begin to construct a concept of self-based on what is truly singular about humans: that they gain control of their lives in a way unique among life forms on Earth—through rational self-determination.”
I discovered two different but noteworthy thoughts from the book’s Goodreads reviewers:
Reader Mikloshttps://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4167615-miklos: “ To summarize, the implications for Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection and the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 20th Century really hasn’t sunk in to the public consciousness and that our autonomy is really not ours. Vehicle/Driver analogies are used to explain how genes, memes, market forces, and faulty heuristics distort our perception of being in the driver’s seat, when in fact we are being controlled by the above-mentioned processes. The goal of the Robots Rebellion is to use rationality (instrumental, meta-) to subvert such processes, bring them under more analytical control, and decide for us how to proceed with a specific course of action”.
Reader Blair called the book “the reductionists(‘) rebellion against Darwinism,” which he doesn’t buy in. In Darwinism, Blaire believes “we evolved through a long chain of organisms starting with bacteria. Worse, evolution is not even about improving animal bodies; it is driven by selfish genes trying to copy themselves. We are a random outcome of a process that is mechanical, mindless and purposeless, nothing but a gene copying robot. We are staring into a “Darwinian abyss” that dissolves every traditional concept of purpose, meaning and human significance.” However, Blair claims “..we are made of mindless atoms, but that does not make us mindless. This is the fallacy of reductionism. Evolutionary theory is a physical description of the development of life. It is useful for explaining that we are made of repurposed parts that don’t always work as if we were intelligently designed for today’s world. But it can say nothing about concepts such as purpose and meaning, which emerge from the complexity of our mind.” Blair reduces the robot’s rebellion down to fundamentalists’ rejection of evolutionary, “because they think it will rob their lives of meaning. (The author) worries about evolutionary knowledge being confined to an intellectual elite while his apocalyptic framing only contributes to this polarization.” More reviews on this book here