of “as ifs.” In his
Book of Why (2018), Judah Pearl cites as an example of a counterfact a figurine carved from the tusk of a mammoth 40,000 years ago—the “Lion Man” as a fantastic cross between man and animal (Pearl and Mackenzie 2018, pp. 34-5).
Pearl identifies three rungs on the ladder leading to knowledge of causes: “seeing,” “doing,” and “imagining.” On the first rung are animals and computers, which learn through association (Ivan Pavlov spoke of conditioned reflexes here). On the second rung are early humans who intervene in events, use tools, and act according to a plan rather than simply imitating, and children who experiment and learn from experience. Finally, on the top rung are “counterfactual learners” who “can imagine worlds that do not exist and infer reasons for observed phenomena” (Pearl and Mackenzie 2018, p. 28).
The evolution of meanings began as mixed selection but continued as choice (cultural election, to use a Latin term). Unlike cultural selection, cultural choice is an evolutionary variation of meanings, achieved by the alternation of generations not of humans, but of meanings. At this stage, the development of meanings gets independence from the development of the human body. Meanings cease to be an extension of the human organism and become a substance external to it. From the object of biocultural co-evolution, man transforms to its subject, taking on the function of denying facts, generating counterfacts and accelerating their selection. The evolving ability to deny the facts raised human understanding to reason. Nikita Moiseev called this the transition “from the strategy of nature to the strategy of reason” (Moiseev 1990, p. 223). If mixed selection was a joint action of the forces of nature and culture, then choice is a purposeful human action. Choice is both an action and a result of an action, that is, the choice between counterfacts is itself a (counter)meaning.
In his lecture course Understanding Complexity (2009), Scott Page makes a fourfold distinction between systems in which diversity is the result of selection and systems in which diversity is the result of choice (Page 2009, p. 14):
● The size of the jumps: selection proceeds in small jumps; choice can occur in large jumps: in the evolution of living things, an elephant and a tiger cannot be crossbred, but in the evolution of meanings they can;