The Next Field of Templates

Life is organized by epistolution, but knowledge is stored in templates. What does this mean? A living system stays alive by adjusting itself to its umwelt in cycles of repair that distinguish between use and disuse, repairing the used parts and blindly mutating the disused parts. That is epistolution. But what does this process use to accumulate knowledge? Very complex knowledge has to be written somehow into the living system so that it is retained, and easily transmitted to other beings and to further generations.

The first such template was the gene…that is, the section of genetic material coding for a protein. This is the most basic unit of knowledge. The first organisms were geneless sets of self-organized oscillators, but gradually the process of natural selection favored self-organized entities that could transmit parts of their accumulated knowledge into the next generation, and the only molecule able to do this is a genetic molecule. So life accumulated genetic systems.

Rather, it would be better to say that any molecule that could do this becomes a genetic molecule. I say this because the Turing principle argues that anything that can exist in two binary states can become a universal computer, and any universal computer. given enough time and processing power, can simulate anything in the universe. So in principle any molecule that has for example a left-handed version and a right-handed version could become a universal computer, and the basis for a genetic system. But probably for parochial reasons of chance the molecules that evolved to serve the purpose were RNA and then DNA.

These bits of knowledge were all written in the same language, the language of RNA and DNA. This is because the entire point of knowledge is that it must be transmitted to grow, and the only way to participate in the larger field of transmission, thus gaining the greatest advantage, is to speak the lingua franca of the majority. So any rare genetic language that might have evolved at any point in time would have either become subsumed by the dominant language or gone extinct. This may be the source of some of the most interesting innovations in the mechanisms of genetic expression today. Perhaps this is why we have both RNA and DNA in our cells? There could have been separately evolved genetic systems at one time that converged and the progenitors went extinct. But the point is that eventually, all life became able to share genes universally in principle.

Make no mistake, in an epistolutionary world organisms are indeed trying to gain advantage. They are all intelligent. Not necessarily conscious, but intelligent. They are all trying to solve their problems, and transmissible templates are the best, and initially the only, vehicles to share solutions. Inheritance was initially very contagious, and it continues to be so to this day.

Our long legacy of horizontal gene transfer (an estimated 8% of our genes, for example, come from retroviruses) with other lineages of organisms demonstrates the truth of this point. Genes are not purpose-built for the lineage in which they occur, rather they are universal vehicles of organismic knowledge. Any gene from any domain of life will be recognizable to your cells. It may not always confer and advantage or contribute to cell function, but it will be interpretable in principle by your cell’s gene interpretation mechanism.

If you look at the above description, it becomes clear that the exact same process I am describing has taking place with regard to spoken and written human language. At first, these languages speciated and diversified, and each lineage of humans had a somewhat distinct dialect because of their isolation. But over the course of history, because language is a medium for the transmission of knowledge, these distinct dialects have converged, and now there is only an Anglosphere and a Sinosphere. Virtually everyone on earth who engages with modern commerce or politics speaks one of these two languages, and the vast majority of minor languages have gone extinct since the modern era began.

Increasingly, the English-speaking world is absorbing the Chinese-speaking world, and I propose that the proportion of native speakers of non-English languages who learn English at some point in their lives is still rising and will eventually reach 100%. This is not purely a result of colonialism or power relations, but a result of an inherent law of convergence that exists in the transmission of knowledge. We will all converge on the same memetic language eventually for the same reason that we all converged on the same genetic language...because the most widely used version is the most useful.

Our world of memetic transmission has undergone a light-speed acceleration in my lifetime. When I was born important messages were transmitted mostly by telephone and by printed media, through gatekeepers and institutions. Today the situation could hardly be more different. The devices in the pockets of even some of the poorest humans on earth are capable of transmitting messages in text, photo, audio, and video that are in principle as powerful in affecting the course of world events as the broadcast speeches of Xi Jinping. For example, the person who narrated the video of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis was able to lead the world to believe that Floyd was being murdered, and this event gave proof to those who wanted it that there was a worldwide conspiracy among police to oppress people of color. Riots and demonstrations erupted across the world, and some degree of policy change occurred in nearly every Western government.

The shift from internal cellular templates to external ones was slow, and it happened in only one species. Every species on earth can, in principle, share in the knowledge that is presented in the library of DNA codons. That language has reached its ultimate point of equalitarianism. This does not mean that each organism has equal power, since each organism has its own unique umwelt. It just means that in principle any organism can read and use the knowledge it can gain access to through gene transfer. Whether or not it is wise to do so is a separate question. It would be possible today, through CRISPR, for me to add any sort of genes to my genome that I chose from any species on earth. Some of these genes might have deleterious effects, so I would be best advised to wait until we have more understanding of the consequences. But in principle my cells can read the genetic news left behind by any other organism on earth.

This is not so with the memetic language. Any organism that that is not able to read the (mostly English or Chinese) news somehow has been left behind in the global explosion in memetic knowledge. On the other hand, any organism that is able to read it can participate in the technological process, and the resulting expansion of opportunities for all people. This means that any person, no matter how ignorant, participates in a sort of equality of knowledge, because they are connected to the broad global give and take of knowledge somehow, and there is no way of predicting in advance how significant any particular transmission of knowledge may turn out to be. A video cellphone message originating with a fruit-seller in Tunisia may ignite the Arab Spring, for example.

I use the term “people” here in the Deutschian sense. I think Deutsch may have been the first to recognize that the ability (at some stage of life) to participate in the transmission of memes is the critical requirement for general personhood, and that this is independent of intelligence. He insists, correctly I think, that any general superintelligence will be intrinsically bound to the morality of people, because it will be a person. This is correct, because it will have to become a person (share our sensibilities) in order to become generally intelligent. And this obviously applies to the superintelligences among us today, the people who are significantly smarter than you or I. These people tend, if anything, to be more morally sensitive and aware than other people. So there is no path to an immoral general superintelligence.

This does not mean, on the other hand, that all people share equally in the fruits of knowledge. Some organisms, by virtue of their history and the history of their lineages, are better able to capture knowledge and use it increase their own opportunities and those of others. We belong to a lineage like this with respect to genetic knowledge. Our particular genetic knowledge allows us to have developed the capacity to build the Earth’s second template system, the memetic system, which is the first one to be transmitted outside the body, and at the speed of light.

My basic assumption is always that all trends in the living world are accelerating geometrically today because of the expansion of memetic knowledge, that is roughly according to Moore’s Law. So what is the next form of knowledge? Life has discovered how to share genes, and then it has discovered how to share memes. What will be the next, geometrically more powerful, domain into which knowledge transmission will migrate? My guess is that the next explosive domain for knowledge transmission will be, oddly, from an external back into an internal form. I believe the next domain of templated knowledge transmission will be in the domain of memories.

If you consider that we are even today, in Michael Levin’s lab, for instance, uncovering the mechanisms of epistolution and how it leads to gene expression and growth and development, we can easily imagine that with a further few years of geometric growth the technology to understand how our memories are formed and held will be perfected. At this point the ability to translate memories from one organism to another will be not only a possibility, but a moral imperative. We will be driven by our need to empathize with one another to require each other to share memories, biologically as well as memetically. We will migrate beyond merely telling each other in our own words about our experiences. We will begin to give each other the experiences themselves. This will be a profound expansion in the knowledge-sphere commensurate with the profundity of technological change happening at this late date in history. This also means that there will be virally infectious communicable experiences that all humans on earth will want to have. And they will all find ways to share these core experiences.

This will be a further step in the evolution of the person, and of life in general, toward equalitarianism and away from individualism. Creativity and the ability to generate different communicable experiences will be preserved. Creativity is the engine for this system of knowledge, just as the ability to generate different proteins or different words was critical to the success of the systems of knowledge creation that have already occurred.But remaining morally and experientially isolated from the rest of humanity will become increasingly less tenable. We will all have our own experiences, but we will interpret them through the shared lens of many, many communal experiences that will serve as templates, just as today we interpret our own lives through the shared templates of language. This will be a threat to those who wish to remain isolated in their memeplex silos, but for moral reasons these boundaries will eventually dissolve.

This does not mean that we will be conscious that the boundaries are dissolving. Today, most people are unaware of moral progress and see around them, and see only the destruction of the values they hold dear. Those values are in fact being destroyed, because better values are taking their place. Solutions destroy worse problems but beget better problems, which lead us to better solutions. This feeling of vertigo may continually intensify for all I know. The only remedy is to be aware that the process of equalitarianism is driven by communicable knowledge, and that process is profoundly magnifying for us the beautiful creative opportunities of life. The effects are what those in another era would have called “freedom.”