CONCEPT
Vicarious Selectors
Campbell's term for mechanisms — vision, language, culture, AI — that perform the trial-and-error of lower-level processes vicariously, at lower cost and higher speed, by trading breadth of search for efficiency of search.
A vicarious selector is any mechanism that performs blind variation and selective retention on behalf of another process, at lower cost. The eye is a vicarious selector for locomotion: instead of walking into obstacles to learn where they are, the organism tests the environment at the speed of light. Language is a vicarious selector for direct experience: instead of touching the fire to learn it burns, the child is told. Each level of Campbell's hierarchy of knowledge processes reduces the cost of variation — and does so, crucially, by constraining the variation. The vicarious, directed, efficient process explores a smaller space more thoroughly. The direct, blind, costly process explores a larger space. The hierarchy is a history of increasing efficiency and decreasing blindness.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Campbell's 1974 Evolutionary Epistemology identified at least ten distinct levels of vicarious selection, from nonmnemonic problem solving at the base through habit, instinct, visual perception, language, cultural transmission, and scientific methodology