The Robot's Rebellion Summary

The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwinism is a cognitive science based book by Keith Stanovich that was created to show that humans are able to attain a “rational self-determination while still accepting all of the evident implications that come with the genetic revolution and Darwinism”. While humans always took thought that they were making decisions based on self-preservation, Stanovich states that we are persuaded to make decisions for the betterment of our genes. Due to morality and cognitive psychology a more thorough understanding can be given to the theory of the Selfish Gene affecting human rationality and morals. Stanovich states that one of the main threats to the human autonomy is our genes. All living organisms, in this theory, are used as carriers of genetic replicators, with their main goal of existence to biologically multiply, and according to this, the gene promotes its own survival before any other organism. Stanovich first questions how much …show more content…
A meme can also be called a cognitive bias. It is “an idea, behaviour, style or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture”, and is another basis of our moral standards (Blackmore, 2000). Dawkins himself coined the term meme, and did so in The Selfish Gene. He defined it as a big idea that competes for dominance in a tough environment — an idea that, like a catchy tune or a good joke, ‘propagates itself by leaping from brain to brain’. By using our memes to help us with decision making, we are supposed to be able to address the gene problem, but this is not foolproof as memes are also full of sources of errors because of their biases and need to be confirmed before they are used. In this way, between the emotional memes and the logic based rationality principles, humans base their decisions off the Feeling vs Principles talked about in