Edge

11Dec2014

Chiara Marletto constructor theory

Martin Rees Deep time and far future
Mahzarin Banaji Signal Detection Theory
Dan Sperber An epidemiology of representations

Chiara Marletto

Formulating Science in Terms of Possible and

Impossible Tasks
David and I have been working on this together for the past three years, and weve
been applying it to many different problems. So far, the two completed parts of our
trying out constructor theory to see whether it can solve problems are: a
fundamental theory of information within physics 1; and the constructor theory of
life2, which applies this new theory of information to a fundamental problem that's
at the boundary between physics and biology, and has to do with how certain
features of living things, such as the ability to self-reproduce very accurately, are
compatible with the laws of physics as we know them.
In these two cases, you can see how switching to this new mode of explanation
allows one to change the perspective and address the problems in a much more
effective way. These are two examples where switching to this new mode of
explanation makes all the difference.
Take information, for example. Information is something we use in our everyday
speaking; also we use it in physics a lot. For instance, we assume that information
has certain properties, e.g. that it can be copied from one physical system to
another. So far, we did not have a fundamental theory telling us what are the
regularities in nature that allow the existence of information in this sense. But
whenever we talk about information we refer to those regularities. We assume, for
example, that the laws of physics allow copy processes. In constructor theory you
can express these regularities, and this is what our theory does. Our way of
incorporating information in fundamental physics is by formulating what are these
regularities in nature that allow the existence of information.
To see how switching to formulating science in terms of possible and impossible
tasks is crucial to solving this problem, consider what happens when you try to
express precisely that something contains information. The fact that something
contains information has to do with the property that you can swap that thing with
something different. It is what philosophers call a "counterfactual property" of the
object. It has to do with what tasks you can perform on the object; e.g., that you
can swap it with something else.
If you think of a flag, it brings information only if you can swap it with a flag of a
different color and you can signal with the two flags. This idea was not expressible
in terms of initial conditions and laws of motion, but it can be expressed in terms of
possible and impossible tasks and as an intrinsic property of the flag, of the object.
This is an example of how switching to this mode of explanation can address a

fundamental problem in physics.

Then there is this other issue: we have been talking about classical information, but
we know that theres something more, what we have been calling "quantum
information." Its very interesting that in this constructor theory of information, you
can relate in an exact way the notion of quantum information to that of classical
information. In constructor theory, you have a unifying framework where you can
describe both and this is very promising.
For instance, we have been searching for realizing the universal quantum computer
for a long time now. One of the reasons why we have not yet succeeded in finding a
way to implement that is that we do not have a good understanding of how
quantum information is related to classical information. We did not have, for
example, an exact expression for that. Now, if we have a theory where we can talk,
in a unified way, about quantum information and classical information and there is a
way of relating the two exactly, there is the potential of understanding better what
are the properties of the universal quantum computer that we want to realize in the
lab. This could inform the search for the universal quantum computer.
Physically instantiated information is also very central to life in the universe, and
this is the other example of how constructor theory can address certain problems
that have been considered resilient problems for long.
If you consider something like a bacterium, physicists have been particularly
impressed by the fact that it is capable of performing tasks to a very high accuracy,
retaining the property of doing so againthis is very much like a car factory, for
instance; but the bacterium does this via another property, that is to say it can
construct a new instance of itself. And that is a property that is very specific to life
as we know it.
One might ask whether such entities like bacteria, that are fundamental to biology,
are compatible with the laws of physics as we know them, or whether they require
something more than those laws of physics. The laws of physicsquantum physics
and general relativityrefer only to elementary things like quarks, atoms, and so
forth. They do not contain self-reproducers, let alone accurate ones.
In fact, Wignerone of the pioneers of quantum theoryhad this problem, and he
proposed an argument according to which we should complement the laws of
physics with some new, designed ones to accommodate properties like accurate
self-reproduction in living cells. If you apply the tools of constructor theory to this
question: is an accurate self-reproducer, like bacterium, possible under the laws of
physics as we know themlaws of physics that do not contain the design of
biological adaptations? Not only do you see that Wigners reasoning was misled by

using the prevailing conception of fundamental physics, but you also see that
constructor theory, in which the idea of something being possible or impossible is a
natural statement, can address the problem very effectively. You can also use the
theory of information that I was describing before to tackle and solve the issue.
It turns out that yes, what the bacterium does is compatible with laws that dont
contain its design. The only requirement on the laws of physics for that to be
possible is that they allow for information in the exact, constructor-theoretic sense
that I was saying before: that they allow those interactions, copying like
interactions, to be possible. But these are copying-like interactions that are not
designed for a bacterium to undergo self-reproductionvery non-specific
interactions, elementary ones.
The key to the way a bacterium performs its own self-reproduction (under laws that
do not contain the design of biological adaptations) is the same as the key to the
way, say, a car factory constructs a car. In both cases there is a recipea bit of
informationthat has the ability of directing a construction process, of causing a
task to be performed because it contains the knowledge about how to perform it by
following elementary, non-specific steps. In the case of the bacterium, it is the DNA
sequence of the bacterium and, in the case of the car factory, it is the sequence of
elementary steps to assemble a car out of elementary components.
This particular kind of information, this recipe, can also have an exact
characterization in constructor theory, as knowledge: it is information that can act
as a constructori.e., an object that can cause transformations and retain the
property of causing them again. All these elements that I just mentioned
information, knowledgeare emergent things that, in the prevailing conception of
fundamental physics, would not have a natural expression because you would have
to talk about many atoms undergoing certain complicated transformation in some
phase space; while in constructor theory, they are natural objects. They are the
very elements by which the theory expresses itself. These are examples of how
constructor theory brings in conceptual 'devices' that are new to physics, so that it
can address problems that have been not solved so far. That's very promising.
What are the fundamental ideas of the prevailing conception of fundamental physics
that would be impacted by constructor theory? The first thing to say is that
constructor theory accommodates those things that the prevailing conception has
been handling very well, so its a proposal to go beyond that, but not to contradict
it. Yet it also has a radically different perspective on things because, as I said, in
the prevailing conception, the fundamental objects are the laws of motion and the
initial conditions of our universe. In constructor theory, on the other hand, the
fundamental objects are transformations that are possible/impossible, and the
explanation of why they are possible/impossible. It turns out that, under our laws

of physics, in order for any transformation to be achieved, knowledge must be

brought about in order to make a certain transformation performable to higher and
higher accuracy. Knowledge, which is a 'causal' kind of informationinformation
with a causal power that has the ability of remaining instantiated in physical
systemsis a highly emergent object and it cannot be handled in the prevailing
conception of fundamental physics, while in constructor theory it becomes one of
the central objects. It becomes fundamental because its the way accurate
transformations can be performed in a world where the laws of physics are simple
and do not contain any design of those transformations. Here is an example of a
change in perspective, and also an interesting take on the idea that humans are
knowledge-creating systems. One of the ways knowledge can come into the world
is by natural selection out of no knowledge. Another way is by humans creating it.
It turns out that in the constructor theoretic view, humans, as knowledge creating
systems, are quite central to fundamental physics in an objective, nonanthropocentric, way. This is a very deep change in perspective. One of the ideas
that will be dropped if constructor theory turns out to be effective is that the only
fundamental entities in physics are laws of motion and initial conditions. In order
for physics to accommodate more of physical reality, there needs to be a switch to
this new mode of explanation, which accepts that scientific explanation is more
than just predictions. Predictions will be supplemented with statements about what
tasks are possible, what are impossible and why.
One question might be how do you test constructor theory? Well, constructor theory
has a status that is that of underlying theories like quantum theory, general
relativity, and possibly others, maybe better ones. It's more fundamental than
those and it underlies them, and the way it does so is by being a theory of
principles. It expresses statements that are a bit like the principle of conservation
of energy, statements that constrain theories, so some theories are just
incompatible with constructor theory, with its principles.
As I said, constructor theory informs the experiments not in a direct way because it
doesnt make predictions directly, but it provides principles. Just like you would go
about testing certain principles such as the conservation of energy, you can in fact
indirectly test constructor theory by testing the theories that obey it.
One way it could be tested is this. Take one particular principle of constructor
theory, for instance, that of the interpretability of information, that has to do with
the very fact that information can be copied. That principle might imply that there
must exist certain particles, which we do not know yet about, but they are
necessitated for this principle to be obeyed by our best current fundamental
theories. This would be a way in which constructor theory could be tested because
then you could test whether or not such particles could exist. In other words, more

generally, the way you test constructor theory is just the way in which you test
principles.
Yes, it is a meta-level. The proposal is that science also contains that meta-level
and the principles of physics such as the principle of thermodynamics and some of
the constructor theory principles, are part of fundamental physics because there is
a way of testing them and because they inform discoveries of future theories, too.
Future theories must obey those principles, so that is how they are part of science.
Constructor theory is quite radical, so one might wonder what are the ideas in the
established way of doing physics that are threatened by constructor theory.
"Threatening" existing ideas is too extreme: rather, one criticises them. I see what
constructor theory brings about more like a supplement, or an improvement. But if
you want to consider what are the ideas that constructor theory would possibly
replace if it turns out to be effective, as I said, there is a tendency to consider
physics as applying to a narrow set of thingsparticles and elementary interactions
and so forthregarding a scientific explanation as valid only if it is expressed via
predictions. This is one of the reasons why part of the scientific community still has
problems with interpreting quantum theory, for instance. It is also part of the
reason why Darwins Theory of Evolution, for example, is not considered by some
scientists as a satisfactory scientific explanationbecause it does not predict the
existence of elephants at time t in the universeyet, it does explain how they come
about from simple initial things.
If constructor theory turns out to work, this narrow view of physics will have to be
dropped. This is something that reductionists are not very happy about. That is why
it is quite a challenge for David and me to show that there are scientific problems
that can be addressed by constructor theory, without resorting to predictions.
For example, in regard to this whole issue of what it means for information to be
part of fundamental physics: we have just come up with this proposal that what it
means is that there are interactions and regularities in nature which allow the
existence of information in the world. A way to go about in expressing those is by
using constructor theory. It turns out to be the only effective way because these
properties of nature, that we are conjecturing, are counter-factual properties, and
they must be expressed in terms of possible and impossible tasks rather than in
terms of predictions.
Another example is the mode of explanation of Darwins theory. In Darwins Theory
of Evolution you do explain the existence of the appearance of design in the world
without the existence of a designer i.e., without the existence of any intentional
design process. But you do not do so by predicting the existence of such entities,

because if you could predict them, say with some probability, that might mean that,
in fact, you have merely discovered design in the laws of physics. What you do is to
explain how it is possible that they can arise in our world given the underlying, nodesign, laws of physics.
That is a different perspectivethe constructor theoretic way of explaining things.
Von Neumann, when thinking about self-reproductionhe pioneered the idea that
self-reproduction must occur in two steps: by first copying what we call now the
DNA sequence coding for the organism, and then by executing the recipe that is
inside the DNA to construct a new instance of the organismdid not use the mode
of explanation by predictions in order to explain this. He used a computational
model to simulate this process. He had an understanding that this was a
fundamentally different question from one that you would answer by only making
predictions.
The bottom line is there is a whole set of issues, scientific questions, that cannot be
answered by predicting things only. One of the proposals that are implicit in what
David and I are doing is that it is necessary for physics to tackle those questions.
And therefore it is essential to go about and search for different ways of addressing
problems in fundamental physics. Constructor theory is a proposal for that.
We are also planning to apply constructor theory to other problems in fundamental
physics. One is this problem of how to make sense of probabilities in fundamental
physics. Probabilities have been a hard concept to pin down and they are
fundamental to a certain way of looking at quantum physics. Yet, quantum physics
is, fundamentally, a deterministic theory. One question is how does one connect the
testing of quantum theory, which one way or another relies on the idea of
probabilities, with the fundamentally deterministic structure of quantum theory?
This question has been tackled in different ways but there is still a controversy
about that, and we are hoping to apply constructor theory to this issue in order to
sort it out.
There is also this interesting object that is called a universal constructor, which is
something that can perform all tasks that are permitted by the laws of physics. It is
a bit like the generalization of the universal computer, but it does not perform only
computational tasks but also tasks on physical systems. The question is, is it
possible given the laws of physics that we know, and what is its minimal
instantiation? Is it very small or what? Those are questions that we are thinking
about as those to which constructor theory might make a difference.
Constructor theory was initially conceived as a generalization of quantum
computing. It turned out to be much more than that, but there is some very

promising trait of this theory of information that we have constructed which could
be applied to understanding issues such as: what is the thing that makes a
quantum computer as powerful as it is? There is a controversy about this issue: Is
it entanglement? What sort of entanglement? There is also a difficulty at the
moment in expressing what entanglement means in terms of information-theoretic
concepts. Precisely because we have related exactly the properties of quantum
information to those of classical information, in the constructor theory of
information, there will be a possibility to address these questions on a more solid
ground.
More generally, we are searching for a quantum computer in too undirected a way.
We do not have a sophisticated theory about what to search for and what are the
features of quantum physics that we need in order to power the quantum computer.
Of course, we know how the quantum computer works, but that is different from
knowing what are the features of the quantum system that you must get "right" in
your lab in order for it to work as a quantum computer.
My guess is that the reason why we have not yet managed to find a viable
realization of a universal quantum computer is that we are lacking this broader,
more encompassing view of how quantum information works. In a way, constructor
theory is working towards improving on that.
As I said, it is a radical idea, and we would like to make it understood by the
scientific community. We would like to apply it to problems that have not been
solved so far, and show, by doing this, that it works. At the moment people are just
saying "It might work, lets see"
We are hoping to persuade the scientific community that this is a worthwhile
approach by showing that it can solve problems that could not be solved before.
That is what were up to now.
The theory is still in its first stage, so the short-term plan is to apply it to as many
problems as possible and show that it can make a difference. There are interesting
questions relating to for instance the origin of life, to the question of fine-tuning of
the laws of physics that could be benefitting from a constructor theoretic approach.
We have had some interesting comments from other groups in the world working
on these things, such as Paul Davies's group, saying that constructor theory seems
very promising in this regard. If it turns out to be working, then more and more
people will be using it. That is what we are hoping for.
I have had an unconventional path in physics. I am a theoretical physicista
quantum physicist. I studied in Turin; I got my masters there, in physical

engineering. Then I moved to Oxford for the DPhil (i.e., PhD) in quantum
computing with Artur Ekert and that is where I met Davidduring my DPhil. We
started collaborating on constructor theory, and since the collaboration was very
fruitful we decided to extend it after the DPhilso here I am. I am now working on
constructor theory together with David.
We are hoping that this will be fruitful and that we will be capable of delivering this
new theory of fundamental physics.

WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE

EVERYBODYS COGNITIVE TOOLKIT * 2011
Martin Rees
Former President, The Royal Society; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology &
Astrophysics, University of Cambridge; Master, Trinity College; Author, From Here
to Infinity
Deep Time And The Far Future
We need to extend our time-horizons. Especially, we need deeper and wider
awareness that far more time lies ahead than has elapsed up till now.
Our present biosphere is the outcome of more than four billion years of evolution;
and we can trace cosmic history right back to a "big bang" that happened about
13.7 billion years ago. The stupendous time-spans of the evolutionary past are now
part of common culture and understanding even though the concept may not yet
have percolated all parts of Kansas, and Alaska.
But the immense time-horizons that stretch ahead though familiar to every
astronomer haven't permeated our culture to the same extent. Our Sun is less
than half way through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it's got 6 billion
more before the fuel runs out. It will then flare up, engulfing the inner planets and
vaporising any life that might then remain on Earth. But even after the Sun's
demise, the expanding universe will continue perhaps for ever destined to
become ever colder, ever emptier. That, at least, is the best long range forecast
that cosmologists can offer, though few would lay firm odds on what may happen
beyond a few tens of billions of years.
Awareness of the "deep time" lying ahead is still not pervasive. Indeed, most
people and not only those for whom this view is enshrined in religious beliefs
envisage humans as in some sense the culmination of evolution. But no astronomer
could believe this; on the contrary, it would be equally plausible to surmise that we
are not even at the halfway stage. There is abundant time for posthuman evolution,
here on Earth or far beyond, organic or inorganic, to give rise to far more diversity,

and even greater qualitative changes, than those that have led from single-celled
organisms to humans. Indeed this conclusion is strengthened when we realise that
future evolution will proceed not on the million-year timescale characteristic of
Darwinian selection, but at the much accelerated rate allowed by genetic
modification and the advance of machine intelligence (and forced by the drastic
environmental pressures that would confront any humans who were to construct
habitats beyond the Earth.
Darwin himself realised that "No living species will preserve its unaltered likeness
into a distant futurity". We now know that "futurity" extends far further, and
alterations can occur far faster than Darwin envisioned. And we know that the
cosmos, through which life could spread, is far more extensive and varied than he
envisaged. So humans are surely not the terminal branch of an evolutionary tree,
but a species that emerged early in cosmic history, with special promise for diverse
evolution. But this is not to diminish their status. We humans are entitled to feel
uniquely important as the first known species with the power to mould its
evolutionary legacy.
Mahzarin Banaji
Psychologist; Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Department of
Psychology, Harvard University; Co-author, Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good
People
A Solution for Collapsed Thinking: Signal Detection Theory
We perceive the world through our senses. The brain-mediated data we receive in
this way form the basis of our understanding of the world. From this become
possible the ordinary and exceptional mental activities of attending, perceiving,
remembering, feeling, and reasoning. Via these mental processes we understand
and act on the material and social world.
In the town of Pondicherry in South India, where I sit as I write this, many do not
share this assessment. There are those, including some close to me, who believe
there are extrasensory paths to knowing the world that transcend the five senses,
that untested "natural" foods and methods of acquiring information are superior to
those based in evidence. On this trip, for example, I learned that they believe that
a man has been able to stay alive without and caloric intake for months (although
his weight falls, but only when he is under scientific observation).
Pondicherry is an Indian Union Territory that was controlled by the French for 300
years (staving off the British in many a battle right outside my window) and held on
to until a few years after Indian independence. It has, in addition to numerous
other points of attraction, become a center for those who yearn for spiritual
experience, attracting many (both whites and natives) to give up their worldly lives

10

to pursue the advancement of the spirit, to undertake bodily healing, and to invest
in good works on behalf of a larger community.
Yesterday, I met a brilliant young man who had worked as a lawyer for eight years
who now lives in the ashram and works in their book sales division. Sure, you
retort, the profession of the law would turn any good person toward spirituality but
I assure you that that the folks here have given up wealth and professional life of a
wide variety of sorts to pursue this manner of life. The point is that seemingly
intelligent people seem to crave non-rational modes of thinking and the Edge
question this years forced me to think not only about the toolkit of the scientist but
every person.
I do not mean to pick on any one city, and certainly not this unusual one in which
so much good effort is put towards the arts and culture and on social upliftment of
the sort we would admire. But this is a town that also attracts a particular type of
European, American, and Indian those whose minds seem more naturally
prepared to believe that unprocessed "natural" herbs do cure cancer and that
standard medical care is to be avoided (until one desperately needs chemo), that
Tuesdays are inauspicious for starting new projects, that particular points in the big
toe control the digestive system, that the position of the stars at the time of their
birth led them to Pondicherry through an inexplicable process emanating from a
higher authority and through a vision from "the mother", a deceased French
woman, who dominates the ashram and surrounding area in death more than many
successful politicians ever do in their entire lives.
These types of beliefs may seem extreme but they are not considered as such in
most of the world. Change the content and the underlying false manner of thinking
is readily observed just about anywhere the new 22 inches of snow that has
fallen where I live in the United States while I'm away will no doubt bring forth
beliefs of a god angered by crazy scientists toting global warming.
As I contemplate the single most powerful tool that could be put into the heads of
every growing child and every adult seeking a rational path, scientists included, it is
the simple and powerful concept of "signal detection". In fact, the Edge question
this year happens to be one I've contemplated for a while should anybody ever
ask such a question, the answer I've known would be an easy one: I use Green &
Swets Signal detection theory and Psychophysics as the prototype, although the
idea has its origins in earlier work among scientists concerned with the fluctuations
of photons and their influence on visual detection and sound waves and their
influence on audition.

11

The idea underlying the power of signal detection theory is simple: The world gives
noisy data, never pure. Auditory data, for instance, are degraded for a variety of
reasons having to do with the physical properties of the communication of sound.
The observing organism has properties that further affect how those data will be
experienced and interpreted, such as ability (e.g., a person's auditory acuity), the
circumstances under which the information is being processed (e.g., during a
thunderstorm), and motivation (e.g., disinterest). Signal detection theory allows us
to put both aspects of the stimulus and the respondent together to understand the
quality of the decision that will result given the uncertain conditions under which
data are transmitted, both physically and psychologically.
To understand the crux of signal detection theory, each event of any data impinging
on the receiver (human or other) is coded into four categories, providing a
language to describe the decision:

Did the event

occur?
Yes

No

Yes

Hit

False Alarm

No

Miss

Did the
received
detect it?
Correct Rejection

Hit: A signal is present and the signal is detected (correct response)

False Alarm: No signal is presented but a signal is detected (incorrect response)
Miss: A signal is present but no signal is detected (incorrect response)
Correct Rejection: No signal is present and no signal is detected (correct response)
If the signal is clear, like a bright light against a dark background, the decision
maker has good visual acuity and is motivated to watch for the signal, we should
see a large number of Hits and Correct Rejections and very few False Alarms and
Misses. As these properties change, so does the quality of the decision. Whether
the stimulus is a physical one like a light or sound, or a piece of information
requiring an assessment about its truth, information is almost always deviates from
goodness.

12

It is under such ordinary conditions of uncertainty that signal detection theory

yields a powerful way to assess the stimulus and respondent qualities including the
respondent's idiosyncratic criterion (or cutting score, "c") for decision-making. The
criterion is the place along the distribution at which point the respondent switches
from the saying "no" to a "yes".
The applications of signal detection theory have been in areas as diverse as locating
objects by sonar, the quality of remembering, the comprehension of language,
visual perception, consumer marketing, jury decisions, price predictions in financial
markets, and medical diagnoses.
The reason signal detection theory should be in the toolkit of every scientist is
because it provides a mathematically rigorous framework to understand the nature
of decision processes. The reason its logic should be in the toolkit of every thinking
person is because it forces a completion of the four cells when analyzing the quality
of any statement such as "Good management positions await Saggitarius this
week".

AN EPIDEMIOLOGY OF REPRESENTATIONS
A Talk with Dan Sperber [7.26.05]
CULTURE
How do the microprocesses of cultural transmission affect the macro structure of
culture, its content, its evolution? The microprocesses, the small-scale local
processes I am talking about are, on the one hand, psychological processes that
happen inside people's brains, and on the other hand, changes that people bring
about in their common environment for instance the noise they make when they
talk or the paths they unconsciously maintain when they walk and through which
they interact.
Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would somehow
imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox machine copying
contents from one mind to another. This is where I part company not just from
your standard semiologists or social scientists who take communication to be a
coding-decoding system, a transmission system, biased only by social interests, by
power, by intentional or unconscious distortions, but that otherwise could deliver a
kind of smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part company from Richard
Dawkins who sees cultural transmission as based on a process of replication, and
who assume that imitation and communication provide a robust replication system.

13

Introduction
Dan Sperber is a French anthropologist who has focused on the more cognitive,
more naturalist, approaches linked to evolution. "For a long time," he says, "my
ideas were not very well received among anthropologists. Theyve been discussed a
lot, but I found myself spending too much time with my fellow anthropologists
arguing the basics of the field rather than moving forward in research. I got
involved in linguistics, experimental psychology, philosophy of science, evolutionary
biology, and lots of fascinating topicsand continuing also the conversation with
anthropologists. Anthropology is a discipline that has been in crisis all my life."
Dan Sperber's parents were both eastern-European Jews; his father, Manes
Sperber, a famous novelist, was born in Galicia, grew up in Vienna, then moved to
Germany. He met his mother, who came from Latvia, in France in the 30s . Manes
Sperber was a Communist, was very active in the party, but left the party at the
time of the Moscow trials. Sperber was born in France. "That's my culture," he says.
"I am French. Still, there are French people who are much more French than I am.
They have roots as they say, but the image of roots has always made me smile. You
know, I'm not a plant."
The reason he gives for having become an anthropologist is that he was raised an
atheist. There was no god in the family. His father, Manes Sperber, was from a
Jewish family, had refused to do his bar mitzvah, and he transmitted zero religion
to his son, but at the same time, he had deep respect for religious people. There
was no sense that they are somehow inferior. This left the young Sperber with a
puzzle: how can people, intelligent decent people, be so badly mistaken?
Sperber is known for his work in developing a naturalistic approach to culture under
the name of "epidemiology of representations", and, with British linguist Deirdre
Wilson, for developing a cognitive approach to communication known as "Relevance
Theory". Both the epidemiology of representations and relevance theory has been
influential and controversial.
He is also known for his early work on the anthropology or religion, in which he
tried to understand, in a generalist manner and in a positive way (i.e. without
making them into idiots), why people could be religious. He took part in classical
anthropological studies but he also argued from the start that you have to look at
basic innate mental structures, which, he argued, "played quite an important role in
the very possibility of religious beliefs, in the fact that, more generally, beliefs in the
supernatural fixate in the way they do in the human mind, are so extraordinarily
catching".

14

Sperber's "catchiness", a theory he has been exploring for a generation, connects

with Malcolm Gladwell's idea of a "tipping point". "I've never met Gladwell, " he
says, "but when his book came out, many people sent me the book, or told me to
read it, telling me that here's the same kind of thing you've been arguing for a long
time. Yes, you get the kind of epidemiological process of something gradually,
almost invivibly spreading in a population and then indeed reaching a tipping
point. That's the kind of dynamic you may find with epidemiological phenomena.
Still, I don't believe that Gladwell or anybody else, myself included, has a
satisfactory understanding of the general causes of the dynamics of cultural
distribution.
" Now, if I could just write with the slickness of Gladwell, and coin one of his bestselling titles such as Blink! or The Tipping Point. . . but I guess I would also have to
give up trying to convey much of the hard substance of my work. Oh well..".
Edge is pleased to present "An Epidemiology of Representations: A Talk with Dan
Sperber".
-JB
DAN SPERBER, Directeur de Recherche au CNRS, Paris, is a French social and
cognitive scientist. He is the author of Rethinking Symbolism, On Anthropological
Knowledge, and Explaining Culture. He is also the co-author, (with Deirdre Wilson)
of Relevance: Communication and Cognition.
Sperber holds a research professorship at the French Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, and has held visiting positions at
Cambridge University, the British Academy, the London School of Economics, the
Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,
Princeton University, the University of Michigan, the University of Bologna, and the
University of Hong-Kong.

[DAN SPERBER:] What I want to know is how, in an evolutionary perspective,

social cultural phenomena relate to psychological mental phenomena.
The social and the psychological sciences,when they emerged as properly scholarly
disciplines with their own departments in the nineteenth century took quite
different approaches, adopted different methodologies, asked different questions.
Psychologists lost sight of the fact that what's happening in human minds is always
informed by the culture in which individuals grow. Social scientists lost sight of the
fact that the transmission, the maintenance, and the transformation of culture

15

takes place not uniquely but in part in these individual psychological processes. This
means that if what you're studying is culture, the part played by the psychological
moments, or episodes, in the transmission of culture should be seen as crucial. I
find it unrealistic to think of culture as something hovering somehow above
individuals culture goes through them, and through their minds and their bodies
and that is, in good part, where culture is being made.
I've been arguing for a very long time now that one should think of the evolved
psychological makeup of human beings both as a source of constraints on the way
culture can develop, evolve, and also, of course, as what makes culture possible in
the first place. I've been arguing against the now discredited "blank slate" view of
the human mindnow splendidly laid to rest by Steve Pinkerbut it wasn't
discredited when I was a student, in fact the "blank slate" view was what we were
taught and what most people went on teaching. Against this, I was arguing that
there were specific dispositions, capacities, competencies, in the human mind that
gave rise to culture, contributed to shaping it, and also constrained the way it can
evolve so that led me to work both in anthropologyand more generally in the
social sciences,which was my original domain, and,more and more, in what was
to become cognitive sciences.
In those years, the late 60s, psychology was in the early stags of the cognitive
revolution. It was a domain that really transformed itself in a radical manner. This
was, and still is, a very exciting intellectual period in which to live, with, alas,
nothing comparable happening in social sciences, (where little that is truly exciting
has happened during this period in my opinion). I wanted the social sciences to
take advantage of this revolution in the study of cognition and I've tried to suggest
how this could be done.
How do the microprocesses of cultural transmission affect the macro structure of
culture, its content, its evolution? The microprocesses, the small-scale local
processes I am talking about are, on the one hand, psychological processes that
happen inside people's brains, and on the other hand, changes that people bring
about in their common environmentfor instance the noise they make when they
talk or the paths they unconsciously maintain when they walkand through which
they interact.
Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would somehow
imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox machine copying
contents from one mind to another. This is where I part company not just from your
standard semiologists or social scientists who take communication to be a codingdecoding system, a transmission system, biased only by social interests, by power,
by intentional or unconscious distortions, but that otherwise could deliver a kind of

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smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part company from Richard Dawkins
who sees cultural transmission as based on a process of replication, and who
assume that imitation and communication provide a robust replication system.
A good part of my work has been to study, in large part with British linguist Deirdre
Wilson, the mechanisms of human communication and show that they're much
more complex and interesting than is generally assumed, and much less
preservative and replicative and more constructive than one might think:
understanding involves a lot of construction, and not just reconstruction, and very
little by way of simple replication.
When you are told something, the simple view of what happens would be: 'ah!
These are words, they have meaning,' and so you decode the meaning of the word
and you thereby understand what the speaker meant. A more realistic and, as I
said, also a more interesting idea is that the words don't encode the speaker
meaning, they just give you evidence of the speaker's meaning. When we speak we
want our audience to understand something that's in our mind. And we have no
way to fully encode it, and trying at least to encode as much as possible would be
absurdly cumbersome. Linguistic utterances, however rich and complex they may
be, cannot fully encode our thoughts. But they can give strong richly structured
piece of evidence of what our thoughts are.
From the point of view of the audience, a speaker is providing rich pieces of
evidence, which we interpret in a context of shared background knowledge, drawing
on the common cultural, on the local situation, on the ongoing conversation, and so
on. You construct a complex representation helped by all these different factors.
You to end up with something which will have been strongly guided, sometimes
guided in an exquisitely detailed manner, by the communication, by the words used
by the speaker, but which end up being a thought of your own, relevant to you, a
recognition, to begin with, of what the speaker meant, from which you extract what
is relevant to you.
We're not that interested when we try to comprehend what others say, in getting in
our minds a copy of what they had in mind, we're interested in getting that which is
of use and of relevance to us, and we see what others are trying to tell us as a
source of insight and information from which we can indeed construct a thought of
our own. The same is true of imitation; rarely are you concerned when you imitate
other people's behavior in copying them exactly. What you want when you see
others doing something that you think is worth doing, for instance, cook a souffl,
it's not to copy the exact gestures and the exact souffle that you saw, with its
qualities, and also maybe its defects, your goal is to cook a good souffl, your good
souffl. The goal of these partly preservative processes of communication and

17

imitation is not to copy per se, but to take advantage of information provided by
others in order to build thoughts of our own, knowledge of our own, objects of our
own, behaviors of our own, for which we take part of the responsibility. The process
is constructive in that sense.
Communication is a very broad notion one should ask whether it makes sense to
look for a general theory of communication, given that the notion covers such a
variety of processes processes of communication among machines; biologists
talk about communication among cells; by animal communication biologists mean
also unitentional deception as when the viceroy butterfly has wings mimicking the
pattern found on the poisonous monarch butterfly, so as not to be eaten by
predator birds, and so on.
All these form of communication and many others are communication in a very
broad sense where some informationin some broad sense of information toois
provided by one device or organism, and is used by another. There are some
commonalities linked to this general definition of communication, and indeed,
Shannon and Weaver for instance were interested in such a very basic notion. But if
we think of communication in biological terms, it is not clear that we have the
subject matter of a useful general theory. Think of locomotion. How much can you
get from a general theory of locomotion, even sticking to the biological domain and
leaving aside artifacts, airplanes, cars, bicycles. I doubt that there is much to get
from a general theory of locomotion that would cover fish swimming, birds flying,
snakes crawling, us walking, and so on.
If you're studying human locomotion, then you look at the specific organs, the way,
for instance, we do it, why we do it, what evolutionary pressure have selected our
particular way of doing it. Even moremuch morethan human bipedal upright
walking, human communication is very special, it's quite unlike the communication
you find in other animals. Not just because of language, which indeed has no real
equivalent among other species, but also because of another reason which is also
quite remarkable but that has not been stressed, and on which Deirdre Wilson and I
have been doing a lot of work, namely that if you look at human languages as
codes which in a sense they undoubtedly are they are very defective codes!
When say, vervet monkeys communicate among themselves, one vervet monkey
might spot a leopard and emit an alarm cry that indicates to the other monkeys in
his group that there's a leopard around. The other vervet monkeys are informed by
this alarm cry of the presence of a leopard, but they're not particularly informed of
the mental state of the communicator, and they don't give a damn about it. The
signal puts them in a cognitive state of knowledge about the presence of a leopard,
similar to that of the communicating monkey here you really have a smooth
coding-decoding system.

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In the case of humans, when we speak we're not interested per se in the meaning
of the words, we register what the word means as a way to find out what the
speaker means. Speakers meaning is what's involved. Speakers meaning is a
mental state of the speaker, an intention he or she has to share with us some
content. Human communication is based on the ability we have to attribute mental
state to others, to want to change the mental states of others, and to accept that
others change ours.
When I communicate with you I am trying to change your mind. I am trying to act
on your mental state. I'm not just putting out a kind of signal for you to decode.
And I do that by providing you with evidence of a mental state in which I want to
put you in and evidence of my intention to do so. The role of what is often known in
cognitive science as "theory of mind," that is the uniquely human ability to attribute
complex mental states to others, is as much a basis of human communication as is
language itself.
I am full of admiration for the mathematical theory of information and
communication, the work of Shannon, Weaver, and others, and it does give a kind
of very general conceptual framework which we might take advantage of. But if you
apply it directly to human communication, what you get is a mistaken picture,
because the general model of communication you find is a coding-decoding model
of communication, as opposed to this more constructive and inferential form of
communication which involves infering the mental stateof others, and that's really
characteristic of humans.
I have been developing my own approach to culture under the general heading of
"epidemiology of representations". The first thing to do, of course, is to take away
the negative connotation of epidemiology it's not the epidemiology of diseases
epidemiology is the study of the distribution of certain items or conditions in the
population. One can study the distribution of particular pathological conditions, but
you can also study the distribution of good habits, or thoughts, or representations,
artifacts, or forms of knowledge.
I'm not assuming that culture is good I don't want to have a cultural
epidemiology to be on the side of the angels, as opposed to medical anthropology
on the side of the demons. What's I like about epidemiology is that it's the one
social science that is truly naturalistic in studying what happens in populations,
typically in human populations, and it explains the macro phenomena at the level of
population such as epidemics, by the aggregation of the micro processes both
inside individuals and in their interaction. I believe that the cultural and the social in
general should be approached in the same manner.

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Of course I'm not the only one to do that, a number of people, mostly coming from
biology, like Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Marcus W. Feldman, E.O Wilson and Xharles
Lumsden, Richard Dawkins, Bill Durham, Robert Boyd, and Peter Richerson, have
developed different conceptions which in this broad sense are epidemiological, or,
another way to put it: they are forms of "population-thinking" applied to culture.
You take what happens at the population level to results from the microprocesses
affecting individuals in the population. Dawkins, who is particularly clear and simple
in a good way in his approach, offers a contrast to my approach.
For Dawkins, you can take the Darwinian model of selection and apply it almost as
is to culture. Why? Because the basic idea is that, just as genes are replicators, bits
of culture that Dawkins called memes are replicators too.
If you take the case of population genetics, the causal mechanisms involved split
into two subsets. You have the genes, which are extremely reliable mechanisms of
replication. On the other hand, you have a great variety of environmental factors
including organisms which are both expression of genes and part of their
environment , environmental factors that affect the relative reproductive success
of the genes. You have then on one side this extremely robust replication
mechanism, and on the other side a huge variety of other factors that make these
competing replication devices more or less successful.
Translate this into the cultural domain, and you'll view memes, bits of culture, as
again very strong replication devices, and all the other factors, historical,
ecological, and so on, as contributing to the relative success of the memes.
What I'm denying, and I've mentioned this before, is that there is a basis for a
strong replication mechanism either in cognition or in communication. It's much
weaker than that. As I said, preservative processes are always partly constructive
processes. When they dont replicate, this does not mean that they make an error
of copying. Their goal is not to copy. There are transformation in the process of
transmission all the time, and also in the process of remembering and retrieving
past, stored information, and these transformations are part of the efficient working
of these mechanisms.
In the case of cultural evolution, this yields a kind of paradox. On the one hand, of
course, we have macro cultural stability we do see the same dish being cooked,
the same ideologies being adopted, the same words being used, the same song
being sung. Without some relatively high degree of cultural stabilitywhich was
even exaggerated in classical anthropology, the very notion of culture wouldn't
make sense.

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How then do we reconcile this relative macro stability at the cultural level, with a
lack of fidelity at the micro level? You might think: if it's stable at the macro level,
what else could provide you this macro stability apart from the faithful copying at
the micro level? It's the only possible explanation that most people think of. But
that's not the only one, and its not even a plausible one.
Dawkins himself has pointed out that each act of of cultural transmission may
involve some mistakes in copying, some mutation. But if that is the case, then the
Darwinian selection model isunlikely to apply, at least in its basic form. The problem
is reconciling this macro stability with the micro lack of sufficient fidelity. The
answer, I believe, is linked precisely to the fact that in human, transmission is
achieved not just by replication, but also by construction.
If it were just replication, copying, and there were lots of errors of copy all the
time, then nothing would stabilize and its unlikely that the selective pressures
would be strong enough to produce a real selection comparable to the one you see
in biology. On the other hand, if you have constructive processes, they can
compensate the limits of the copying processes.
What happens is this. Although indeed when things get transmitted they tend to
vary with each episode of transmission, these variations tend to gravitate around
what I call "cultural attractors", which are, if you look at the dynamics of cultural
transmission, points or regions in the space of possibilities, towards which
transformations tend to go. The stability of cultural phenomena is not provided by a
robust mechanism of replication. It's given in part, yes, by a mechanism of
preservation which is not very robust, not very faithful, (and it's not its goal to be
so). And its given in part by a strong tendency for the construction in every
mind at every moment of new ideas, new uses of words, new artifacts, new
behaviors, to go not in a random direction, but towards attractors. And, by the way,
these cultural attractors themselves have a history.
Dawkins, of course, is only one of the people who have proposed new ways of
modeling cultural evolution. He's important because he brings it down to the
simplest possible version there's a great merit in simplicity. He sees cultural
evolution at the same time as being analogous to biological evolution, and as being
an evolution almost independent from biological evolution: it has just been made
possible by the biological evolution of homo sapiens, which has given us the mind
we have, and which, so the story goes, makes us capable indeed of endlessly
copying contents. We are supposed to be imitation machines, meme machines to
use Susan Blakemore's phrase, and this explains that.

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Dawkins, in a strange way, presents something very similar to the blank slate view
of the mind. The blank slate view, as I was taught it in anthropology, says the
human mind is capable of learning anything whatever content would be provided
by culture can be written on the blank slate. Well, the general imitating machine
does more or less the same thing. It's capable of imitating just whatever type of
content it is presented with, and the relative success of some contents against
others, has to do with the selective forces. The idea that the human mind is such a
kind of universal imitation machine is hardly better psychology, in my view, than
the blank slate story.
Others, E.O Wilson and Charles Lumsden, Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson, have
asked to what extent the evolved dispositions that both constrain and make
possible culture are, in return, affected by cultural evolution itself so as to yield a
kind of gene-culture coevolution. Instead of having two evolutionary scenarios
running in parallel, one biological evolution, the other cultural evolution, you get
some degree of interaction, possibly a strong interaction, between gene and
culture. The general idea has got to be correct. The details, in my opinion, are still
very poorly understood.
For a variety of reasons, I believe that memes are not the right story about cultural
evolution. This is because in the cultural case, replication is not very successful in
explaining cultural stability. I also believe that among the factors we need to take
into account to explain cultural attraction of which I was talking before, are evolved
aspect of the human psychology. The one type of scholarship and research that has
to be brought into the picture, in my view, is evolutionary psychology, as defended
in particular in the work of Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Steve Pinker and taken up
in more critical ways by a growing number of developmental psychologists and of
philosophers. To understand culture, we have to understand the complexity of the
psychological makeup of human beings. We have to go to really deep psychology,
understood both in a richly cognitive manner and with a proper evolutionary
perspective, to put start explaining cultural evolution. We need a representation of
a human mind that's complex in an appropriate manner, true to the empirical data,
and rich enough indeed to explain the regularities the, stability, and the variability
of culture.
This is them a different story, but its still a Darwinian story. It's a Darwinian story
in the sense that it's an application of population thinking, which tries to explains
the macro phenomena in terms of a micro processes and properties, and which
doesnt assume that there are types or essences of macro cultural and social
things. Macro regularities are always the outcome of distribution of micro features,
evolving all the time.

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In this Darwinian story however, instead of causal processes in culture as split

between robust replication devices and a variety of selection factor, we have a
much more promiscuous form of causality. Cultural causality is promiscuous.
Constructive processes always interfere with preservation processes. So we need to
build models different from standard Darwinian models of selection, in order to
arrive at the right way to draw on Darwinian inspiration with regard to culture, that
is, we must generalize Darwin to the cultural case, rather than adjust it in a way
which twists the data well beyond what is empirically plausible.
~~
The idea of God isn't a supernatural idea. If the idea of God were supernatural, then
religion would be true. The idea of God, the idea, the representation of something
supernatural is not itself supernatural. If it were, then we would be out of business.
Precisely what we're trying to explain is, to quote the title of a book by Pascal
Boyer, the naturalness of religious ideas, explain, in other terms, how these ideas
of the supernatural can occur in the natural beings we are, in human brains and
minds and culture, and have the kind of success that they have, in spite of the fact
that you can't explain them in the way that you explain so many human ideas, such
as ideas that are acquired through experience of the things they are about.
We humans have ideas about plants and animals because we experience plants and
animals in a special way with the brain we have. We don't experience God, or
goblins or witches, because there are no such things. Nevertheless, we have rich
complex ideas about them, a richness in many ways comparable to the ideas we
have about plants, animals and the natural things around them.
How is that possible? The issue is what makes these kind of ideas psychologically,
cognitively attractive "catching", such that they stay with you in your head and
you may want to communicate them and to guide your behavior on their basis. And
also: which of them, among all the unrealistic unsupported ideas that are possible
in infinite variety, are going to be so "catching" as to achieve cultural success, in
the manner of the many religious ideas that has been around for centuries?
It's not like any blatantly false idea will somehow make it to a cultural success
far from it. Most of them don't stand a chance. What's special about ideas of the
supernatural? I argued long ago that it had to do with the fact that they are rooted
in our cognitive dispositions, in the way we approach the natural world. Instead of
departing from our commonsense ideas so to speak at random, they're like direct
provocation they have always an aspect of going directly against what should be
the most intuitively obvious.

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So for instance it's part of our common sense knowledge of of living forms, that an
animal cant be both a dog and a cat, but the supernatural is full of creatures like
dragons that typically belong to several species simultaneously. It's part of our
common sense knowledge of the physical world that an entity cannot be in two
places simultaneously, but ubiquity is a distinctive trait of supernatural beings. It's
kind of again commonsense, in our commonsense psychology which we deploy in
everyday interaction with one another, that one's visual perceptions are limited to
what's present in front of one's eyes. Supernatural beings typically can see the
past, the future, and things on the other side of earth. So supernatural beings are
kind of provocations to commonsense. They are really deeply counterintuitive.
That's an idea I suggested a long time ago and that Pascal Boyer has developed
and enriched in a remarkable fashion, and which I think is one of the cognitive
ingredients that helps explain the success of religious ideas. Of course, it's only one
little fragment of a kind of complex picture.
~~
I started as an anthropologist. Precisely because they were more cognitive, more
naturalist, more linked also to evolution than most, for a long time, my ideas were
not very well received among anthropologists. Theyve been discussed a lot, but I
found myself spending too much time with my fellow anthropologists arguing the
basics of the field rather than moving forward in research. I got involved in
linguistics, experimental psychology, philosophy of science, evolutionary biology,
and lots of fascinating topicsand continuing also the conversation with
anthropologists. Anthropology is a discipline that has been in crisis all my life.
When I started the crisis was linked to the end of the colonization. Anthropology
had developed during the period of colonization, as a kind of ancillary science for
colonial enterprise. At the same time so many anthropologists were actually active
in anti-colonialist movement, and that was also one of the reasons I came to
anthropology. But, the decolonisation, anthropology lost this kind of historical and
sociological context. Anthropologists in the 60s, 70s, were asking about their
political role, about whether or not we were on the right side.
Anthropologists started studying themselves and trying to reflect on their own
situation. It was a kind of reflective anthropology, which had a number of
interesting aspects. I certainly don't think it was useless although it became a bit
obsessive. Parallel to these developments, were the post-structuralist and then
post-modernist movements in the humanities and the social sciences, the
development of cultural studies, and many anthropologists felt at ease in these
movements.

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This produced a new kind of discourse, taking the study of other cultures as much
as a pretext as a subject matter to be investigated in a standard scholarly manner.
Again, some of the products of this appraoch are of genuine interest, but on the
whole more harm has been done than good. While this was happening, others, in
part in reaction against this turn toward the literary in anthropology, moved on the
contrary toward a more naturalistic anthropology. They became interested in social
biology, in biological anthropology.
What you find now in anthropology departments is that people can't talk to each
other. Some universities have now had two anthropology departments. So
anthropology is stilll in crisis, even if it is not the same crisis. You can look at such a
crisis from an institutional or from an intellectual point of view.
Universities as we know them emerged in the nineteenth century and unerwent
major changes, in particular after World War II. It does not make sense to project
this short past into an indefinite future. In fact, universities are evolving,
transforming themselves beyond recognition. The biggest changes are will be due
to new communication technology. There is also now a big and blatant gap between
the structure of departments in universities, which have to do with institution of
transmission of knowledge, and which seem to define stable domains such as
psychology, anthropology, sociology, and the real ongoing research which is
structured in new ways in the form of creative, or dynamic, research programs,
that may fall within a traditional discipline, or, more often, across several traditional
disciplines. Depending on the productivity of such dynamic programs, they are can
go on for ten years, 20 years, 30 years, or more.
It is these dynamic research programs that interest me; I've been involved in
several, and that's what I find to be intellectually exciting. When we say
anthropology is in crisis we're talking about anthropology as defined by academic
institutions. And it doesn't matter. It deserves to be in crisis; it deserves to explode,
let it do so.

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