Not sure if this is a question or a debate, but could a meme be considered a pathogen, or even a disease, in a way?
I don’t think it’s arguable that some memes are harmful to their hosts* and the analogy of a virus has been used before. But I’m going further than just pointing that out - I mean that perhaps it’s time to look at at least some memes as being a public health issue, and for the medical profession to get involved. Obviously antibiotics would not work, but at least some memes ought to be treatable. There are even analogies with vaccination, both inactivated and attenuated types!
*I was inspired to start this by thinking about just what it is I find so objectional about Islam when most of its victims are Muslims
No. Diseases must be well-defined. Everyone in the relevant medical community agrees that lungs exist, and that there’s such a thing as lung cancer, for instance. But the concept of a “meme” is not well defined, and plenty of people in the relevant medical and research communities think that the idea of “memes” is ridiculous.
A meme is pretty well defined, read the selfish gene.
Of course there are edge cases about what is and what isn’t a meme, and 4chan/knowyourmeme type things that reduce it to internet phenomena don’t help either, but the concept itself is quite easy to grok imo.
Memes do not exist. At best the word is just a loose metaphorical name for certain sorts of social/communicative processes. At worst it is a word used by people who think they are clever because they understand (or think they understand) math or physical sciences* to conceal, from both themselves and others, their ignorance and lack of understanding of the social sciences and humanities, and to justify themselves in remaining ignorant.
*It may sometimes be used by people who understand, or think they understand, biology too, but most real biologists actually understand enough about how real genes and real evolution works to know that any analogies between these processes and the dissemination of ideas (and of all the rest of the loose collection of diverse types of cultural artifacts that get called “memes”) are extremely loose, vague, and mostly illuminating or outright misleading.
Incidentally, memes were not even meant to be analogous to viruses (or other pathogens), even by those (such as Dawkins) who invented and promoted the concept. They were meant to be analogous to genes. That is how the word was coined. Viruses and genes are quite different (though not totally unrelated) things. To conflate them is to take the woolly analogical thinking that is embodied in the original concept of meme and to render it even more vague and intellectually vapid by making a meme the social analog of some vague, non-existent thing that is a bit like a gene and a bit like a virus.
Memes are an analogy with genes, and as such, are not like genes in most ways. Like genes, however, memes reproduce and mutate. They have differential survival rates, which causes the meme pool to change over time. Their survival depends on the other memes in their environment, along with everything else they interact with. This much is true.
Disease/pathogen? It depends on your perspective. For example, are vows of celibacy harmful to their hosts? In the natural selection world, yes. But nobody thinks you’ve been harmed if you voluntarily forgo reproduction. In fact, I’d argue memes are so bound up in our identity, they are much closer to the mitochondria, eukaryotes and other organisms that teamed up and became the multicelled creatures we are now than an invasive parasite or virus.
Sure, some memes are diseases, such as suicidal tendencies. We call these mental illnesses. But this is from our perspective as biological entities. Frankly, I think it’s too early to assign roles like “pathogen” to memes. We’re still in the primordial meme soup.
Sigmund Freud wrote books explaining what the Oedipus Complex was. That didn’t mean that the Oedipus Complex was clearly defined or that it actually existed. The history of psychology is littered with bad ideas that became popular among certain groups and then withered away.
The problem with “memes” as I see it is this. Each human being has a consciousness, which is a system of immense complexity and no one knows what drives it. Ideas and memories can lie dormant in a person’s mind for years and then surface in the consciousness for no apparent reason. Mental inclinations can be resistant to conscious control to varying degrees. New ideas can emerge apparently from nowhere.
Viewing ideas as “units of thought” that can only exist or fail to exist within a certain individual leaves out these complexities. It leaves out what defines ideas as ideas, and what defines consciousness as consciousness.
No (the site itself is Sci-fi and they have pages on creatures with “dangerous memetic effects” but the general explanation is sound – they’re an analogy to genetics)