David Deutsch

I think that both those puzzles have the same solution: what replicates human memes is creativity; and creativity was used, while it was evolving, to replicate memes. In other words, it was used to acquire existing knowledge, not to create new knowledge. But the mechanism to do both things is identical, and so in acquiring the ability to do the former, we automatically became able to do the latter. It was a momentous example of reach, which made possible everything that is uniquely human.

the idea that memes are copied by imitating their holders’ behaviour is the same mistake as empiricism or inductivism or Lamarckism.

Nevertheless, Blackmore’s ‘meme machine’ idea, that human brains evolved in order to replicate memes, must be true. The reason it must be true is that, whatever had set off the evolution of any of those attributes, creativity would have had to evolve as well. For no human-level mental achievements would be possible without human-type (explanatory) memes, and the laws of epistemology dictate that no such memes are possible without creativity.

The beginning of creativity was, in that sense, the beginning of infinity.

have no way of telling, at present, how likely it was for creativity to begin to evolve in apes. But, once it began to, there would automatically have been evolutionary pressure for it to continue, and for other meme-facilitating adaptations to follow in its wake. This increase must have continued through all the static societies of prehistory.

The horror of static societies, which I described in the previous chapter, can now be seen as a hideous practical joke that the universe played on the human species.

Only the Enlightenment, hundreds of thousands of years later, and after who knows how many false starts, may at last have made it practical to escape from that eternity into infinity.

f a common fallacy – an argument by analogy about issues far less parochial.

he critical question about these statues is, Why were they all made alike? You see them sitting there, like Diogenes in their barrels, looking at the sky with empty eye-sockets, and watching the sun and the stars go overhead without ever trying to understand them. When the Dutch discovered this island on Easter Sunday in 1722, they said that it had the makings of an earthly paradise. But it did not. An earthly paradise is not made by this empty repetition…These frozen faces, these frozen frames in a film that is running down, mark a civilization which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge.

But it can also mean preventing things from changing – which can be almost the opposite meaning, for the suppression of change is seldom what human beings need.