Artificial Intelligence: What is Truth, What is Education?

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include topics such as AI. This entry discusses a facet of that discipline.

First, I would like to acknowledge that a number of people offered advice on this topic, and they generally know more than I do about philosophy and education. I would name them, but then I would want to have their approval, and I take ultimate responsibility for this text.

On October 22, 2025, I was a co-presenter of a talk at Winona State University to the informal AI Discussion Group along with Professor Malgarzata Plecka. I billed the talk as "The Reverse Turing Test." The basic thesis of the talk was not groundbreaking in the least: if you are trying to discern whether an academic text was generated by AI rather than written by a person, then one strategy is to check the footnotes and references. AI systems will sometimes fabricate references to articles that don't really exist. If a submitted paper has fabricated references, a reviewer can reject it not because it was generated by AI, but because it is a flawed paper. It was probably generated by AI, but that is almost beside the point.

As part of that talk, I digressed onto the philosophical issues pertaining to the situation. Namely, I touched on philosophical theories of Truth. In last month's entry for this blog, I compared "truth as factual accuracy" with "truth as loyalty." A friend of mine who is more familiar with these issues pointed me toward a philosophical position called "The Correspondence Theory of Truth." Does a given statement correspond to a state of affairs in the world?

I sent this paragraph to a philosophy professor:

Some schools of thought deprecate the belief that there is an external, objective, observable world at all, much less one that can be measured. I am reminded of the joke about the drunk at the bar during the philosophy conference who said, "Solipsism works for me, but that’s just one man’s opinion."

That professor pointed out that there are a variety of philosophical schools that don't fall into this dichotomy of "correspondence theory of truth" or solipsism. There are deflationist theories and pragmatist theories which still believe in the external world. Further, one can deny the existence of the external world without being a solipsist, such as in Bishop Berkeley's philosophy of idealism.

Circling back to factual accuracy, though, even if you don't buy a theory similar to the correspondence theory in general, it is neverthesless the case that a research library is part of a scholarly correspondence theory of truth. Even for scholars who cast a jaundiced eye toward the value of telling the truth, they do largely adhere to a different commitment to factual accuracy: within their own scholarly texts, they try to accurately quote and reference other writings.

For example, I have read a book by Melvin Pollner called Mundane Reason. Pollner develops a theory of ethnomethodology, which he then uses to question the existence of the objective, determinate world. Truth is socially constructed, and a community will develop a unitary world of social truth.

Even if I am a scholar who is a follower of Pollner or Bishop Berkeley, I will still adhere to a correspondence theory of truth in my production of my own scholarly texts. If I claim a quotation from one of their texts or a text that discusses them, I will make a citation that will correspond to the location of that statement in the objective, observable universe of texts managed by libraries.

These musings are relevant to a discussion of AI LLMs, because LLMs generally string statements together without worrying whether they are factually accurate statements about the universe of scholarly texts. ChatGPT will often just make crap up. Some commentators politely refer to made up quotes and references as hallucinations. Others rely on Harry Frankfurt’s definition and refer to the act of making up stuff, including references, as bullshitting. Some library researchers have created a metric for testing LLM systems called the Reference Hallucination Score. See citations below.

The scenario that we presented on October 22nd was this: a researcher has claimed to have authored a paper that was submitted to an academic journal. The editors of the journal have a policy of not allowing texts that are generated by AI. The basic justification for detecting AI-generated texts is that they should be identified and rejected. Why should they be rejected, though?

Obviously, if a student is assigned to write a paper without the assistance of AI, and the professor can show that the paper was generated by AI, that is a violation of the assignment. But if the paper is a genuinely brilliant and well-executed paper, perhaps an academic journal should consider publishing it, even if it is generated by an AI LLM. Of course, if the references in the paper are fabricated, then the paper is by definition flawed, regardless of who or what generated it.

During the discussion after the presentation, a professor argued that he uses AI LLMs so extensively that a text under his name is almost always a fusion of his own words and those of the AI LLM, and that he himself might not know which of the two crafted any one passage. The basic motive for detecting AI-generated texts is that human-generated texts are preferred. The basic point of the other professor's claim of blending is that the AI-generated text is superior to the human-generated text and should be utilized. Those two positions are not necessarily opposed to one another.

The core of the problem is whether the human claiming authorship is actually the author of the work. Here I offer a modified definition of author, namely: the human is the author if that human is an authority on the content in the work, and the human takes responsibility for what it says. An AI LLM might have assisted with the wording, or even some of the ideas, but the human should have both a command of the content and editorial control of the final text. After all, human ghost writers have been around for millennia; this is not a new concept.

If a paper has fabricated references, then it is likely that the purported human author left the generation of the text entirely up to the AI system. The human might not understand what the paper says or what it contains. For a paper that is entirely composed by an AI system, the human is not the author of the paper under this definition.

If, on the other hand, the human is fully in control of the subject matter and is using the AI system as a tool to improve the final product, then that case probably falls on the acceptable end of the spectrum. That assertion of authorship, though, would involve actual work by the human.

For instance, if the AI system offers up references, the human would be responsible for actually tracking down those texts (and in the process verifying their existence), reading them, and establishing that they are relevant to the argument. This problem of AI-fabricated references is related to the long-standing problem that arises when human authors borrow citations from earlier human-written texts without verifying them. If the earlier paper has a mistake in the reference, that mistake will be perpetuated by later authors who fail to verify the reference and read the cited work.

You can even couch this discussion within a larger context of education: To me, the point of the university is 1) to educate students, 2) to expand the realm of knowledge through research and scholarship and creative works, and 3) to preserve that realm of knowledge and share it with the broader community.

Educating students can be thought of as the process of building neural networks. However, they are the biological networks made of actual neurons and located between the ears of the students, not neural networks located in massive data centers (which in the industry are sometimes called "multi-layer perceptrons"). If the students (or faculty members) rely solely on an artificial neural network, they are often not building the biologically-based neural network in their own brains, and we are failing to educate them.

A complicating aspect of today’s world is that AI is ubiquitous. One of the things our students—and our faculty—will have to learn is how to delve into AI systems to leverage their own knowledge while still retaining intellectual control and responsibility. ( "Delve" and "leverage" are two words commonly used by AI LLMs when writing prose—as are m-dashes.) That authorship requires work, and AI systems make it easy to skip the work and masquerade as the author. Worse, employers may require workers to give up their authorship to increase productivity (that is, increase the quantity of product, not its quality).

NOTE: None of the above text was generated by an AI LLM. It is all the product of the wetware inside my skull, plus the broader collective knowledge held by the community of people with whom I consulted and written texts which are part of my culture (and the product of cultural evolution).

Bibliography

Aljamaan, Fadi, et al. (2024). "Reference Hallucination Score for Medical Artificial Intelligence Chatbots: Development and Usability Study." JMIR Medical Informatics 12 (1): e54345. doi: 10.2196/54345

Hicks, Michael Townsen, James Humphries, and Joe Slater. (2024). "ChatGPT is Bullshit." Ethics and Information Technology 26: 30. doi: 10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

Pollner, Melvin. (1987). Mundane Reason. Cambridge UP.

CELC: Cultural Evolution and Stephen Jay Gould

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). This entry discusses that discipline.

When I was in college in the 1980s, I enjoyed the essay collections of the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. In the Summer of 2025, I was reediting my old book reviews that had originally been posted on WorldCat. I discovered that Gould's collections of essays are available as audiobooks on the platform Hoopla, a platform to which my public library subscribes.

I began listening again to the first collection of essays, Ever Since Darwin. Lo and Behold! Gould was arguing in favor of the concept of cultural evolution back in the 1970s, before even Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman published their seminal book Cultural Transmission and Evolution, which was published in 1981. At that time, Gould was arguing against the position of the school of Sociobiology. Its champion was E. O. Wilson, who published an influential book of that title.

For example, in Ever Since Darwin, Gould describes a scenario where grandparents in the Arctic will sometimes sacrifice themselves to help the young survive. In the sociobiology literature, it was hypothesized that there was a gene or combination of genes which were responsible for that behavior. Gould offers an alternative to the genetic theory for elder sacrifice: "The sacrifice of grandparents is an adaptive, but nongenetic, cultural trait" (256).

"Thus, my criticism of Wilson does not invoke a nonbiological 'environmentalism;' it merely pits the concept of biological potentiality—a / brain capable of the full range of human behaviors and rigidly predisposed toward none—against the idea of biological determinism—specific genes for specific behavioral traits." (256-257)

Where I think Gould differs from proponents of evolutionary psychology is in the phrase "predisposed toward none." I believe that an evolutionary psychologist would say that we are predisposed toward some, though that predisposition might be overruled by cultural norms.

The question remains, how does Gould's vision of cultural evolution differ, if at all, from the vision Boyd and Richerson developed in the 1980s? In The Panda's Thumb, Gould's second collection of essays, he offers the theory that cultural evolution uses Lamarckian inheritance instead of just natural selection to transmit heritable traits. I am not sure that that idea has aged well, but I have to think about it more.

Philosophical Digression

Extremes of genetic determinism tend to be on the right side of the political/social spectrum (for example, Nazi theories of racial purity), and extremes of Lamarckian evolution tend to be on the left side of the spectrum (for example, Lysenko's purging of genetic research under Stalin). Gould's passionate rejection of genetic determinism and his suggestions of Lamarckian cultural evolution indicate, if any indication was needed, that he leans toward the left side of that one-dimensional political spectrum.

The word truth has many definitions. In my own musings on the nature of truth, I often think about two of those definitions. One of them focuses on factual accuracy. There is a whole school of philosophy that ponders how a statement about the world corresponds to a state of affairs in the world. That definition is related to the German word wahr or the related Latin word veritas.

With the rise of natural philosophy and the physical sciences in the 1600s, observation—as opposed to, say, contemplation—was given a privileged place in the discovery of knowledge. One could write whole libraries about philosophers such as Plato, St. Augustine, Hume, Kant, etc. and their relationship to factual accuracy and the existence of an observable world.

Another, very different definition of the word truth relates to group loyalty. Am I true to a cause, to my school, to my nation, etc.? This definition relates to the German word treu. In a social group, when a bully wants to assert dominance over others in the group, the bully might insist that the social truth is directly and obviously opposite to factual accuracy, such as when, in Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew", Petruchio insists that Katherina call the sun the moon.

To me, part of the point of some philosophical skepticism of the physical sciences boils down to an argument that scientific claims belong to the treu aspect of truth rather than the veritas aspect of truth. An extreme version of the philosophy that references Thomas Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions says that major scientific theories are like clothes fashions; they come and go, and one paradigm is incommensurate with its successor. The extreme version refuses to admit that scientific claims can be falsified.

I reject that argument in its pure form, but I hold to a slightly different claim that all statements purporting to be true have at least a little bit of treu. You cannot escape it. The best you can do is minimize it and guard against letting it dominate like a bully. Even in a situation where there is a clearly defined question about the world and a straightforward, accurate observation of the world that answers that question, even just deciding which question to ask adds an element of treu to the situation. For example, asking whether some of the change in the climate is caused by human activity has political implications, and studying the question might be taboo within some social groups.

The challenge to students of cultural evolution—where the stakes for treu are quite high—is to do careful and accurate work to find the veritas about how cultural evolution works. It is further complicated, because different theories of cultural evolution might predispose adherents to different philosophies of the nature of truth.

I like Gould's work in part because, though he is partisan in his promotion of his theory and its social implications, he spends most of his time reasoning over the evidence or pointing out the lack of it. He does not insist that we call the sun the moon, though he might be stubborn in his belief that genes cannot predispose human behavior.

Bibliography

Gould, Stephen Jay. Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. Norton, 1977.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. Norton, 1980.

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Post-Script

No part of this text was generated by an AI LLM, despite the frequent use of the m-dash.

CELC: Is Memetics Still Dead? Yes, Margaret, it's still dead.

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson) into my critical framework. This entry discusses that discipline.

Back in 2012, I wrote a review of the Susan Blackmore book The Meme Machine, which I entitled: "Memetics as a science is still dead." I adopted in that review the arguments made by Steven Pinker in his book, How the Mind Works. Pinker argued that the brain thinks thoughts like the stomach processes food: it is a machine that does things. The theory of memetics supposes that the brain is just fertile top soil in which memes can grow and replicate and compete against each other and undergo natural selection. (Granted, I am simplifying here for the purposes of ridicule.)

The theory of cultural evolution argues that recent human evolution has been strongly driven by a gene-culture coevolution. That raises the question: is cultural evolution simply memetics by another name?

The answer is no, they are not the same. And, to repeat myself, memetics as a science is still dead. Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson even wrote an article skillfully rebutting the idea that they were the same. They argue that proponents of memetics labor under five major misunderstandings about cultural evolution.

One major difference between the theory of cultural evolution and the theory of memetics is that cultural evolution posits that individuals actively want to learn and adopt cultural knowledge. It's not that our brains are fertile top soil for the meme that can out-compete other memes. We seek out and imitate prestigious other members of our community, and we adopt the cultural traits of those we esteem.

Years ago, I enjoyed reading essays by Stephen Jay Gould where he criticized religiously-based creationism. What I noticed was that he would use the frontal attack on creationism, an easy target, to make a back-handed attack on sociobiology at the same time. He would criticize creationism, but he would then end with something along the lines of, "and sociobiology is just as bad, but going the other way."

It turns out that the article cited below has a similar double attack. The authors criticize memetics, which is an easy target, but then they criticize some critics of memetics as having a bad model of cultural evolution going the other way. They then try to articulate a superior model for cultural evolution between the two misguided extremes. In this way, the article is quite entertaining and informative. They even score debating points against Steven Pinker, whose criticism of memetics so inspired me decades ago.

In their conclusion, they argue that the misunderstandings of the memetics debate all stem from "a tendency to think categorically rather than quantitatively" (133-134). We like to place things in simple categories, and the process of cultural evolution is much more complex than can be characterized by a simple category.

Henrich, J., R. Boyd, and P. J. Richerson. (2008). "Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution." Human Nature, 19(2), 119-137. doi:10.1007/s12110-008-9037-1 For a copy at Harvard, Click Here.

CELC: Adding Cultural Evolution to ELC: How does my earlier theory of ELC1, ELC2, and ELC3 hold up?

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism (ELC). When I began my work on ELC, the foundation of my approach was the theory of biological, genetic evolution through natural selection. I have recently begun to subscribe to the theory of cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). Metaphorically, I have dug a new theoretical basement, and I want to shift my ELC edifice from the old foundation to the new one. Will it fall over? Will it have to be rebuilt?

In my blog entry of July of 2025, I announced that I had begun shifting my thinking away from traditional evolutionary psychology and more toward the school of gene-culture coevolution. One question that arises is: Does this new focus alter my previous theory of evolutionary literary criticism? The short answer is: Not much.

I have in the past argued that there are three different versions of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC) (for example, in my blog entry of January of 2025). In short, the second and third types of ELC are already fairly compatible with this new framework of cultural evolution, and the first can be adjusted.

ELC1: To quote my January, 2025, blog entry, the first version of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC1), examines "elements of a literary work that relate directly to the reproductive fitness of the characters. That can relate to both their individual fitness (don't get eaten by the alligator) and group fitness (fight bravely in battle so that your group prevails over its opponents)."

The first half of ELC1 specifically deals with non-socially-constructed forms of biological fitness, like having children. Henrich's cultural evolution theory argues that the strongest force on genetic evolution of modern humans has been cultural evolution. Still, one cannot completely dismiss biological reproductive fitness in one's analysis of genetic evolution, so that aspect of behavior should not be completely eliminated from ELC1. This half of ELC1 can remain with some adjustments.

The second half of ELC1 deals with group fitness. I was using the multilevel selection theory of David Sloan Wilson to frame my understanding of group selection (Sober and Wilson, 1998). Henrich would argue that much of what drives group selection is not genetic evolution but cultural evolution. Still, Henrich's theory continues to focus on group mechanisms such as the role of altruistic punishers to enforce behavior by others in the group. What is different is that the behavior which is enforced does not need to be directly specified by genetics. It is controlled by cultural learning. It can be any set of social norms, rather than just prosocial, group-enhancing behavior. Different sets of cultural practices do come into competition with one another, but the intergroup competition is not solely driven by violent conflicts, such as warfare. See chapter ten of Henrich's book The Secret of our Success (citation below), for a discussion of the forms that intergroup competition can take.

ELC2: Again, to quote my January, 2025, blog entry, the second version of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC2), examines "the ways in which the literary work shows that storytelling itself is an adaptive behavior. This 'storytelling as adaptive' perspective relates to the philosophical framework of viewing the world as a social construct." This version of evolutionary literary criticism is already compatible with the theory of cultural evolution. Henrich might say that the behavior among humans which is ultimately adaptive is cultural learning. Storytelling is just a proximate mechanism for some forms of cultural learning.

ELC3: Finally, the third version of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC3), examines "ways in which valuing a storytelling tradition can signal membership in a social group, which benefits the reader's group identity. This version of evolutionary literary criticism sees the story as an object within an adaptive context." This version again is compatible with the theory of cultural evolution. The literary text is a vessel holding some of the collective knowledge of the social group. We treasure literature because humans have evolved to want to learn and preserve cultural information, even if that information does not seem to have a rational function or immediate purpose.

Ironically, the theory of cultural evolution from Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich is more compatible with my three versions of evolutionary literary criticism than the more traditional theories of evolutionary psychology. My theory is morphing into Cultural Evolutionary Literary Criticism. Goodbye ELC, hello CELC.

Bibliography

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "Confederacy of Dunces and Evolutionary Literary Criticism." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted January 1, 2025. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2025/01/

Leighton, H. Vernon. "Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted July 1, 2025. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2025/07/

Sober, Elliott and David Sloan Wilson. Unto Others: the Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Harvard UP, 1998.

Another Single Case Test of Two AI LLMs: Infinite Jest and Steven Pinker

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics like AI chatbot testing. This blog entry is another one that gives a case study of AI testing.

A friend of mine introduced me to the writings of Steven Pinker thirty years ago. Pinker’s groundbreaking The Language Instinct was published in 1994. This summer, I have been enjoying David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, which was published in 1996. I discovered in the footnotes to the novel (yes, this thousand page novel has footnotes) a humorous reference to Steven Pinker.

I mentioned this fact to my friend a couple of months ago. He decided to query ChatGPT, to see if it could retrieve accurate information about the reference. As usual, ChatGPT was full of poppycock. I decided to run two queries in ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, respectively, and Gemini returned accurate information. Below are the two test queries and their results in the different services.

Q1: In the novel Infinite Jest, what event causes the MIT language riot of 1997?

1.A. ChatGPT said:

In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, the MIT language riot of 1997 is caused by a public lecture on the theoretical implications of the Incandenza family's "samizdat" film [VL: not true]—a film so entertaining that it renders viewers completely catatonic due to their inability to look away or stop watching. [The fictional film in the novel that causes viewers to become catatonic is sometimes referred to as "the samizdat," but its formal name is "Infinite Jest." But a discussion of that film is not what causes the riot.]

Specifically, the riot breaks out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when a linguistic theorist gives a talk about the film's potential effects on communication, semiotics, and the limits of language. The lecture attracts radical theorists and academics, many of whom have divergent and extreme interpretations. The confrontation between competing linguistic camps escalates into chaos, culminating in what becomes known as the MIT language riot. [This is vaguely true with no names or specific details.]

The event is one of many satirical moments in Infinite Jest that lampoon the excesses of academia, the fragmentation of intellectual discourse, and the cultural obsession with entertainment and theory.

1.B. Gemini Said:

In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, the MIT language riot of 1997 is attributed to a public debate between Steven Pinker and Avril M. Incandenza (Hal Incandenza's mother) on the political implications of prescriptive grammar. This debate occurred during a convention of the "Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts" and is credited with helping to incite the riots. [VL: Accurate.]

Q2: Is Steven Pinker mentioned in the novel Infinite Jest?

2.A. ChatGPT said:

Yes, Steven Pinker is mentioned in Infinite Jest.

David Foster Wallace references Pinker in a tongue-in-cheek, satirical manner as part of a broader critique of academia and intellectual culture. In one passage, Wallace refers to a linguistics professor with “hair like Steven Pinker” [VL: not true] — a nod to Pinker’s famously voluminous hair and his prominence in the field of linguistics and cognitive science.

The mention is brief and more caricature than critique, but it fits with the novel’s dense tapestry of cultural, academic, and intellectual references. Wallace often peppers real-life figures into Infinite Jest to lend texture to the world, blur the lines between fiction and reality, and satirize the intellectual elite. [VL: Vague statements that could have been written by a student who didn't read the assignment.]

2.B. Gemini said:

Yes, Steven Pinker is indeed mentioned in Infinite Jest. He appears in the novel's filmography, specifically in a documentary titled "Union Of Theoretical Grammarians In Cambridge." This documentary features interviews with participants in a public debate between Steven Pinker and Avril M. Incandenza (Hal's mother) on the "political implications of prescriptive grammar." This debate is famously credited with helping to incite the MIT language riots of B.S. 1997. [VL: Accurate.]

Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. This blog entry relates to the theory of cultural evolution which is persuasively argued by Joseph Henrich.

The whole point of trying to tie literary criticism to evolutionary psychology is to try to develop a framework for studying literature that is built on the most accurate model for describing human psychology and social behavior. Scholars in the humanities often take an attitude that is dismissive of scientific knowledge. I have borrowed the Calvin Thomas's term antiphysis to describe this attitude. I interpret antiphysis as anti-physics, or anti-science. Evolutionary literary criticism takes the opposite approach.

I do not want to diminish the problems with making any serious claims to scientific knowledge. Many critics of science study and emphasize perfectly valid concerns. At the same time, I don't want to make too much of the problems with scientific knowledge, which is what the antiphysis crowd does. Some critics dismiss science entirely. Others don't dismiss it entirely but minimize its legitimate claims.

What are some claims that I consider established scientific facts? For one, genes exist. The phenotype of an organism is in fact related to its genotype. Another big one: the laws of thermodynamics hold throughout the universe. Entropy happens. Because of entropy, if present trends continue, in the long run, all action will cease.

Central to this effort to add some scientific knowledge to the discussion of literature is the question of human nature. What can we say scientifically about human nature? That question immediately pulls the ponderer into the maelstrom of politics about what we want humans to be. Robert Sapolsky entitled a chapter in his book Behave, "Hobbes or Rousseau?" as a shorthand for disagreements over human nature. This topic is fraught with sharp disagreements ...

Back to cultural evolution. Two years ago, I listened to the Audible version of the book The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution ... by Joseph Henrich (2015). I think his approach, which is descended from the ideas of Boyd and Richerson (not Richardson), offers a better foundation of how the human mind has evolved than the approach of many other evolutionary psychologists. I have not yet fully studied the book in detail, so anything I would say would be general in nature.

However, Henrich neatly shows that many of the theories that form the basis of evolutionary psychology are insufficient to explain how we humans invaded nearly every terrestrial ecosystem on the planet even before we developed modern industry, or even agriculture with its domestication of species.

Henrich demonstrates the inadequacies of many thinkers toward whom I am partial: for example, Tooby and Cosmides and their reliance on general intelligence, Steven Pinker and his theory of many mental modules, and David Sloan Wilson and his focus on prosociality through multilevel selection. Henrich further shows that Robin Dunbar's "social brain hypothesis" does not explain our success. Instead, he builds his theory on the foundation of "cultural learning."

Here is a statement in the book that summarizes its thesis: "The central argument in this book is that relatively early in our species' evolutionary history, perhaps around the origins of our genus (Homo) about 2 million years ago, we first crossed this evolutionary Rubicon, at which point cultural evolution became the primary driver of our species' genetic evolution" (57).

The point is that humans distribute the storage of information which is important to our survival across the collective brain of a culture rather than in any one individual human's brain. Because of that cultural knowledge and collective intelligence, our human nature is to prefer following the practices and customs of our social groups over following the path suggested by our personal experience and what seems to be our own immediate self-interest.

If this strong drive to embrace culture is true (and it seems that it is), then naive versions of evolutionary self-interest do not provide an adequate foundation upon which we can analyze the themes and mechanisms of literature. The process of literature is all about creating and preserving stories that the listeners/readers of that literature deeply value, which creates a shared sense of community. If putting a premium on cultural learning over genetic self-interest is how human mind's are built, then analyzing literature strictly from the framework of genetic self-interest should be woefully inadequate.

In my own thinking, I have supported the idea promoted by David Sloan Wilson that prosociality evolves through the group selection component of multilevel selection. Cultural evolution takes a different angle on the problem of prosociality. We humans depend on the collective knowledge of our cultures to survive. In order to amass the cultural knowledge necessary for cultural evolution, we have to be prosocial. The mechanisms of the group selection theories of Bowles and Gintis and E. O. Wilson can be rather red in tooth and claw (or spear and hand axe). The cultural evolution of Boyd and Richerson (and Henrich) might be less necessarily violent. Perhaps Bowles, Gintis, and Wilson lean more toward Hobbes, while Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich lean more toward Rousseau. I am not yet sure; I am still working on it.

My advice: If you want to pursue evolutionary literary criticism, study Henrich and his cultural evolution hypothesis and try to incorporate it into your framework for approaching literature. I currently think that this theory offers a more solid foundation for understanding human nature than the other, competing evolutionary explanations. That is, study Henrich if you want to interpret our works of literature using the most accurate theory regarding the nature of those organisms who are creating and treasuring the literature in question. (In the humanities, that's a big if.)

Solaris #6: Csicsery-Ronay's perspective on the Chaosphere

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics. This blog entry relates to a different topic.

My current research interest is the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I will not yet post my overall thesis for the project, but I am learning things along the way which are tangential to my thesis and which I can share.

Article discussed: Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. "Modeling the Chaosphere: Stanislaw Lem's Alien Communications." In N. Katherine Hayles (Ed), Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. (U. of Chicago Press, 1991), 244-62.

Last month, I discussed an article in which Istvan Csicsery-Ronay discussed his views on the political context within which science fiction operates and where Lem's work fits into that context. This month's topic is another essay by Csicsery-Ronay, one that is fifteen years older than the essay I discussed last month. This essay discusses three Lem texts: Solaris (1961), His Master's Voice (1968), and Fiasco (1986).

Csicsery-Ronay studies Lem's theme of the inability of humans to communicate with aliens. To Csicsery-Ronay, Lem's major theme in his later work is the problem of "carousel reasoning," in which the thinker cannot escape from the logical system in which the premises and conclusions are trapped. Csicsery-Ronay calls this bubble of circular reasoning the chaosphere.

For the humans, the goal is to break through the chaosphere to have true knowledge. The humans have two possible paths in this attempt: either to build a system of order that is all encompassing or to embrace randomness as a way to escape the limitations of ordered models. (This choice almost sounds like Thomas Pynchon's theme of order versus chaos, order, which is associated with the death instinct and chaos, which is life-affirming.) The effort to communicate with aliens is a metaphor for a dialectic between order and chaos.

Csicsery-Ronay argues that Lem's three alien contact novels grow increasingly toward a postmodern perspective. In Solaris, the world-ocean can reach into the minds of the humans on the station and create visitors who reflect some of their inner memories and feelings. Attempts to understand the enigmatic ocean generate a large scientific literature of Solaristics, but it goes nowhere. The breakthrough of the chaosphere is effected by the world-ocean, and it is achieved by the visitor-Rheya.

In His Master's Voice, the focus is on what appears to be a message from aliens. One cannot be certain that it is actually a message. Perhaps it is a message from the universe itself. It is more postmodern than Solaris, because it presents the problem of knowledge as a problem of language. Is the text a text? Was there a sender?

Csicsery-Ronay sees Fiasco as completing the depiction of carousel reasoning. In this novel, both the humans and the aliens display an "aggressive self-consciousness" (259). There is no wise alien who is superior to humans and whom the humans cannot harm. Instead, contact degenerates into war and the destruction of the aliens.

I have not read the latter two Lem novels, so I have no opinion about Csicsery-Ronay's interpretation of them. As for Solaris, Csicsery-Ronay insists that "the uncertainty Visitor-Rheya creates cannot be resolved" (252). He sees two mutually incompatible readings: first, a romance of contact with a superrational alien, and second, "an ironic, self-deconstructing satire of it." For myself, I don't think they are mutually incompatible. The contact with the wise, all-knowing alien is consistent with the inability of the humans to actually understand that contact. The alien of Solaris seems to understand us, even if we cannot understand it.