Memes

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
41

Hello Everyone; new to this board. I’ve enjoyed reading all your posts.

I just have one question, largely rhetorical. What is it that is SO terrifying about acknowledging my ability to choose between whether I will read 2, 3, or 4 bedtime stories tonight to my 4 year old son? What is SO problematic about my having a choice of whether I decide to smile at the tired supermarket cashier? Or that I choose to be a little nicer to my wife? Or decide to give some money to charity? Or, for that matter, whether I put spicy or yellow mustard on my bread?

I cannot for the life of me understand what so many people apparently find so compellingly precious about this kind of fundamentalism—wherein it must be denied that I possess even the slightest eeny-weeny-teeny crumb of discretion, even to decide what my experiences mean to me (and to periodically revisit that decision as I go through life).

Why are we doing intellectual somersaults to “prove” the non-existence of something that obviously exists? Why is it so important to deny me even the tiniest measly little crumb of a consciousness, decision, will, geist, seele, soul, or whatever-the-heck-you-want-to-call-it? What is it that is so threatening about my having a little bit of choice? Why is it so precious that I can’t decide whether to treat people better, or, for that matter, to get a root beer instead of a coke? Do I really have to have a meme for every tiny little decision? How is that possible? Is it okay if I tell my memes to go jump in a lake?

It seems like this meme stuff is just dressed-up 16th century empiricism. What arrogant depravity. Do you really think that I have a meme that tells me whether to clip my toenails tonight? Have we gone beyond stupid and now are approaching insane? Why do we feel compelled to understand every tiny thing that happens in mechanistic terms? Where does it get us? Does the world get better for all this? Is it so that we can delude ourselves into believing we know how this nutty world works? Heck, we don’t even know why gravity or inertia works. Does the concept “meme” really explain anything better than the concept “consciousness”? Or have we merely exchanged an unknowable smart-but-unsophisticated ghost called “will” for an unknowable dumb-but-sophisticated ghost called “meme?” Does all this meme stuff strike anyone else as myopic, or even insane? Sorry if I went on too long. Best regards,

42

A lot of people seem to be hung up on this free will thing but I dont think thats a huge part of memetics. First of all I think memetics no more denies the presence of free will then evolution denies that theres a god. I dont think free will has ever been proven scientifically and have a hard time imagining how it would be. Denying the notion of self though is not some conspiracy of scientists, but part of a philosophical tradition going back to Buddha. Blackmoore the only memeticist I know of who thinks memes help to disprove the western notion of self is not a scientist like Dawkins but a philosopher.

43

Thanks for the reply. I guess I was thrown by this part of Cecil’s article: “[Both] Free will and the sense of self are illusions.”

Granted, self is one mighty thin concept, in any case. I think self does more harm than good.

But mind/will/Man is different. Daniel N. Robinson from An Intellectual History of Psychology: “Consciousness,” of course, has been legislated out of behaviorism since Watson, but this scarcely removes it from a real and knowable world. It is one of the quiet triumphs of the human mind that it can exhaust itself in attempting to refute its own existence." Best Regards,

44

I read that too, in “Hooking Up”, and I regarded his uneducated scorn particularly amusing, since he invokes the meme concept in the essay immediately preceding that one in the collection:

-Tom Wolfe, “Two Young Men Who Went West”

Wolfe invokes this image to describe how the corporate culture of Silicon Valley owes its debt to Intel’s Robert Noyce’s upbringing in Grinnell, Iowa, and spread from Intel to other San Jose tech companies. Seeing that, I can only describe his rejection of the meme concept in the following essay to be disingenuous at the very least.

We must remember that we live in priveledged times, when we have an actual physical construct to attach the concept of genetic inheritance to. For several decades, between the re-discovery of the work of Gregor Mendel and comprehensive study of the nuceus of the cell, science was forced to acknowledge that genetics worked without having a clue as to how it was accomplished within the organism. Genes, alleles, dominant and recessive traits were plainly at work, but DNA was not part of the equation for a while.

Which is exactly the state of affairs with memes. If the theory is sound, we must acknowledge that it works without yet knowing how, just as we believed all objects with mass exerted a gravitational pull for centuries before Einstein put forth the idea that mass curves space.

45

Just to register a teeny complaint, clarkc… if you found the posts so enjoyable, I wondered why yours degenerated into a tirade that drifts toward flaming?

However, I think you raised a couple of good points, and I hope they get some more discussion (what is the value of “empiricism” versus the alternatives, and what difference does it make whether or not there “is” free will).

46

Interestingly enough, the Meme theory was only a small chapter at the back of Dawkin’s book. The fact that it took off, and then spread, says something, doesn’t it? Susan Blackmore, as well as Daniel Denett the Philosopher, has really enhanced the understanding of meme theory (which doesn’t, by itself, have anything to do with free will, simply why some ideas take off and are “copied” more than others), while others, such as skeptic Martin Gardner, have been noted critics.

As my valentine’s day gift to you, I give you the London Times editorial mentioning memes:

"…evolution can’t be blamed for Valentine cards, can it?

It certainly can. Just as genes propagate themselves, so do ideas. Humans are always creating new artefacts and ways of doing things. Most get lost, or never take off, but a few are copied. These human creations are called memes, and are passed between us in the same way that viruses spread by becoming parasites.

Take the evolution of the humble Valentine’s card. One of the earliest cards was supposedly sent in 1415 by the Duke of Orleans, to his wife, while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, centuries after St Valentine became the patron of love. Someone probably saw this, copied the idea, and so began to spread the meme.

Leap a few hundred years and we saw the result: our newsagents shelves began to groan with cards. The sickly ones sold and the tasteful ones didn’t. The yucky cupids and wide-eyed kittens found buyers and the rest were left on the shelves. Next time, the shop knew just what to order and the factories now churn out yet more copies of the yuck.

It’s one evolutionary process piggy-backing on another. Those cuddly kittens appeal because our emotions were designed that way. Love makes us feel soppy, and the parasitic memes exploit that soppiness — living off our big brains and our romantic natures.

This is why we endure the Valentine’s virus year after year. And there’s nothing we can do to stop it. The memes are out there, evolving faster and faster on the mobiles, faxes, e-mails and web we provided for them. We are just the lumbering robots who can’t resist helping them along. "

47

Come on now, this is just silly. I think that all reasonable people can agree that our individual identities are made up of cultural influences, and that our personalities (and capacity to make decisions) are the sum total of our individual experiences within that framework. Why create yet another make-believe academic discipline to beat that rather simple idea to death? It is this kind of pedantry that gives the Liberal Arts majors of the world a bad name.

48

The point of memetics is not that it changes are idea of what ideas are but instead to change our idea of what they do. The main insight of memetics is that ideas must obey the principles of natural selection just as genes do. This raises countless new questions and potential answers. The possibilities are as full of potential as when Darwin pointed out the natural selection present in the animal world and gave birth to modern biology.

49

I don’t mean to be rude, but I still think this is dumb. We (as individuals and as collective bodies) try things. The good ideas (the ones that seem to work out) we keep. The bad ideas we forget about. What is so earth-shaking about that? Memetics? Hee hee.

I admit that there appears to be a superficial similarity to the concept of natural selection there, but so what? Next thing you know people will be suggesting that “The Matrix” is “a really, really, deep philosphical movie”.

Oh… wait…

50

The point may be why do bad ideas persist and spread. I don’t just mean socially bad ideas like Nazism but biological bad ideas like Shakers being against sex or Jones’ cult idea of a nice after dinner drink.

51

I would suggest that neither of those ideas actually “spread”. They were confined to their own little communities and died with those communities.

Besides, all that requires for an idea to catch on is for some portion of society to find it useful. Like the Nazis.

52

So everything. If ideas follow the same pattern as the darwinian algorith found in life. It means we can theoretically at least begin to chart there progress and to a limited extent their history. It means we can gain a deeper understanding of how the mind works and what it means to be human. You might as wlel say “so what” to Darwin. Were there any immidiate practical applications of evolution other then to piss off a whole bunch of christians? If ideas follow natural selection then that represents a truth long ignored that is enough to make the idea worth pursuing.

53

The idea of memes is that ideas will spread even if they are harmful, as long as they spread faster than they cripple the individuals spreading them. The anology with viruses is obvious.

54

And that is my point. All of this is painfully obvious, to the point of silliness.

Memewarrior suggests that this is an idea that has been long ignored. It seems to me that people have always understood this concept. It just took a few academic types to give it a funny name, write a few books, and get tenured positions in their philosophy departments.

OK. Enough said. Thanks for being patient with me. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to get back to that paper I am writing on aesthetics. My thesis is: “People eat food because they are hungry.” I am hoping to expand that idea into a book.

55

[QUOTE=Billowen]
And that is my point. All of this is painfully obvious, to the point of silliness.

Memewarrior suggests that this is an idea that has been long ignored. It seems to me that people have always understood this concept. It just took a few academic types to give it a funny name, write a few books, and get tenured positions in their philosophy departments.
QUOTE] No using words like always is the silliness. Until Darwin published his origin of species there was no detailed accoutn of natural selection leading to evolution. Until the Selfish Gene theory was advanced there was no proper understanding at what level that natural selection actually occured. From those two understandings the classification of the meme naturally arose. The point I’ve been trying to make is that while ideas are the stuff of memes the word idea does not convey the same information as meme. ‘Meme’ implies the process by which the idea arose and the environment it inhabits. Darwinian evolution didnt change what constituted an animal and memetics does not change what constitutes an idea but it changes the way we look at them. Obviously this concept, that ideas undergo natural selection, is not obvious because well informed individuals have disagreed with it on this board.

56

OK. You got me. I made the mistake of using the word “always” and assuming that the reader would know what I meant. I guess I should have said “beginning in the time period in which human beings had created language and thus had the capacity for abstract thought”. Judging by what I have seen here, a capacity for excess verbiage seems to go hand and hand with this concept of “memes”.

I don’t see any individuals on this board, “well-informed” or otherwise, in disagreement on the idea that some ideas survive and others do not. The disagreement seems to be whether way too much is being made out of such a simple (and I repeat) obvious concept. Speaking only for myself, I think that this is a made-up academic discipline designed to fill anthropology journals and does a disservice to genuine scholarship.

One last thing. If the Memetites (or whatever) want to play with this idea, that’s cool. But please… do you have to bring Darwin into it? The “legitimacy by association” ploy is one of the most well-worn of the logical fallacies. Of course Darwin’s contributions to the field of biology were important. But we are not talking biology, and “Natural Selection” is, at most, a metaphor for your position. You are making the same mistake as Herbert Spencer and the “Social Darwinists” when you invoke that term.

57

Isn’t the meme just a take-off on the seme?

So this is just derivative semiotics. No Darwin really necessary.

Peirce proposed a very similar thing and it was called semiotic.

58

No the disagreement with you seems to center on whether its obvious. The disagreement with others has centred on whether memes qualify for natural selection, which is not the same as whether some ides survive and some do not. I was having a much more interesting debate with Darwin’s Finch over whether meme’s met the criterion for natural selection. He at least was arguing with an understanding of what memetics meant and a familiarity with the literature that contrasts with your hostility to writings on the subject.

Speaking for myself i can tell you your conspriacy theory is ill-informed and bespeaks your lack of reseacrh into the subject. Richard Dawkins the man who coined the term and gave birth to the subject has hardly written anything on the subject after the last chapter of “the Selfish Gene.” He occasionally writes a word of support for it here and there in his other works but has purposefully left the fleshing out of the project to other minds. I myself have no stake in memetics other intense curiosity at the prospect of a new paradigm in scientific thought.

I have never claimed that Darwin supported memetics, as of course such a notion is anachronistically absurd. I have a few times pointed out during your arguments that your claims against memetics would apply equally well, or rather equally poorly against Darwins arguments for evolution. Sometimes a new discovery about something, in Darwin’s case biological life and in memetics case ideas, won’t tell us anything different about what that thing is but about how that thing operates I might just as well have used Copernicus for an example.

No seme as defined by Peirce: “By a Seme, I shall mean anything which serves for any purpose as a substitute for an object of which it is, in some sense, a representative or Sign.” This clearly lacks the key insight of memetics that ideas are replicators subject to natural selection.

59

You know, you are right about one thing. I am ignorant of the research on this topic. I guess it is because it seems so obviously lacking in anything that could be called substance that I feel no need to look into it. The difference between a “meme” and a gene is that genes actually exist. They are not metaphors or mere concepts. They have substance and weight. These are the things that drive natural selection. The “meme” therefore, is nothing like a gene, except in the metaphorical sense.

Look, all I am saying is that you are basically talking about the concept of culture and its influence upon the individual. The idea that a culture frames the mind of the individual and limits their “thoughts” is as old as Comte, Jung, and any number of historians, sociologists, and psychologists.

Thanks for the replies though.

60

Memes do have substance and weight. They exist inside human minds. If ideas had no corporeal presence how could you have them? The intracacies of the human mind being what they are I cannot point at any particular part of the brian and call it a meme anymore then Darwin could point at a gene. It is not hard to imagine though that one day we will see how memories are recorded and held in the human mind and thats the only substance I require. None of the thinkers you mention treated as a unit of natural selection akin to genes.