The age-old question of how the mind works is a fascinating one. Yet researchers have been ignoring it strategically in the hopes of achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) through an ever larger repertoire of tricks (Deutsch 2012). But there is no way around explaining intelligence if we want to program it.

Here, I take the challenge head-on with what I call the neo-Darwinian theory of the mind. It simply states that minds create new knowledge through the neo-Darwinian evolution of self-replicating ideas. It builds on philosopher Karl Popper’s guess that knowledge evolves through alternating conjecture and criticism (1983), but considers…