I don’t know much about memes, but I know enough to know that the “living” characteristics ascribed them are analogising. There is a difference between “Think of it like this” and “This is what it is”, as I am sure a student of parable would understand. But thank you for *explaining *it to me.
Actually, if you remember the thread in question, you quite massively mistook the claims of evolutionary psychology, so i’m surprised to hear you refer to them as “specific and clear” now.
But that’s exactly my point: the memes are passive. People decide what gets passed on and what doesn’t. Whether they are rational about their choices is beside the point (the meme that we’ve never landed on the moon persists despite all evidence to the contrary, for example). But, the reasons some memes are more likely to be passed on by specific individuals has more to do with their psychology and social background than the nature of the meme itself.
Here’s a task for you: explain the workings of a meme, without resorting to metaphor at any stage. Observable facts only. This can be done with respect to the actions of genes and organisms (it is my personal opinion that genes do not compete, either, but that’s a different discussion). If memetics is truly scientific, it should be doable for memes, as well.
The problem I see is that there isn’t any underlying mechanism currently. We use metaphor to say that they “compete” with other memes, and are thus “selected” and all that, which is fine as a general descriptor. But it doesn’t explain what is happening from a materialistic standpoint. We can point to mechanisms for genetic variation and resulting phenotypic variation; we can describe the process of natural selection, and in turn explain how a given phenotype comes to dominate in a population. But all we have right now are high-level analogs for the workings of memes.
Not necessarily: Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, wrote, “…Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.” I don’t agree with that, of course.
Fair point. From looking at the bit in question though, i’m not certain Dawkins is talking about memes “living” in terms of anything other than propagation; not really as along the lines of organisms such as fish and trees as suggested by the OP. And yes, i’m pretty much with you on that one.
Maybe. If the brain is deterministic and produces the same output whenever the inputs are the same, then exposure to any of a set of meme’s will cause the individual to propagate the meme.
If a meme can be considered a specific configuration of mental state (not at the neuron level, but at a higher level of function), then we should be able to describe it with math in the same way that a wave can be described with math.
In discussions like these I always get the feeling that people are making an unnatural distinction between “you” and “your ____,” in this case, “your ideas.” I’m going to provide some examples from Darwin’s Finch, but really anyone who claims that memes negate free will is doing the same thing.*
This raises the questions: what is doing the selecting, and by what mechanism? Saying something like
doesn’t help to clarify things. What are “people” and more importantly, what are “people” sans culturally transmitted information? Is there some centralized idea-evaluating structure in the brain? How does it evaluate without becoming an amalgamation of culture itself? Or are ideas stored diffusely without any central oversight? Is it possible that the storage algorithm itself manages to deal with conflicting ideas?
For example, in the old thread you stated multiple times that you do not believe that memes are subject to Darwinian evolution. But this conclusion is based entirely on information that you gained by cultural transmission. The ideas themselves are incompatible (i.e., that memes are or are not subject to Darwinian evolution), so why do we need an independent entity to determine this? What kind of process could such an entity use to evaluate ideas that wasn’t overwhelmingly based on previously evaluated ideas?
*On rereading this, I supose I should clarify that I don’t mean that Darwin’s Finch makes that claim about memes and free will. I mean that people on both sides of the memes issue seem to be doing the same thing.
No, they aren’t. Memes/beliefs/ideas, whatever word you wish to use affect the mind and behavior of the person that holds them. A brain isn’t a filing cabinet, full of passive, dead data. It’s alive, and every bit of data in it is part of living, active networks of neurons, all of which “try” to skew the brain their way. You might as well call a virus passive because it does nothing when sitting in isolation outside of a living organism.
I don’t think that our knowledge of the brain is good enough yet for that.
They are stored patterns in the brain, transmitted my external patterns made by humans. What’s so odd about that ?
Just like Darwin originally had for genes. That didn’t make him wrong.
You assume a choice-making entity that’s wholly separate from the memes, and thus can critically examine each and every single one and decide on its utility; I don’t see that at all – first, the structure of the meme quite clearly influences its likelihood for propagation; advertisers know all about that. Second, I don’t believe we’re even aware of the vast majority of memes we encounter, so what is it that’s doing the choosing and sorting? Some demon behind the scenes?
Also, to clarify my earlier co-evolution example: Let’s say we have a society where adherence to a certain dogma is rewarded, i.e. through social esteem. Those in high social esteem are more easily able to reproduce. The likelihood of adherence to this dogma is based on the character of an individual, thus, if character has a genetic determinant, genes that ensure the propagation of the society’s dominant memes are favoured.
I think this argument displays a certain lack of imagination. The concept that ideas compete- in the sense that more useful ideas outlast less useful ideas- and spread from person to person seems blindingly obvious to me.
And yeah, of course human choice and outside circumstances affect this. Guess what affects human choice and outside circumstances? Ideas. It’s a symbiotic thing.
I don’t think anyone is trying to say that a meme is alive in the exact same way that a bird is alive. It’s more of a useful metaphor for something we are just starting to think deeply about. Neuroscience, AI and related fields are so new that it’s a little absurd to suggest that they ought to have everything worked out exactly. We are in the “alchemy” stage, not the “million dollar drug company” stage of this stuff. Wait a hundred years and maybe we will have something more concrete for you.
Anyway, we don’t really have an exact handle on things like “matter” or “energy”, but you don’t seem to mind the ambiguity there.
I think the problem with memetics is that it creates an analogy that’s completely turned around. What it’s claiming is that an idea is like a gene. Well, how did we figure out what a gene is? Genetics was essentially invented between the discovery by Mendel of how characteristics were passed on and the discovery by Watson and Crick of DNA. What was discovered was that all that’s passed on from parent to child was information.
Before the discovery of genetics, there were a lot of paradoxes about reproduction. So there is a bunch of tiny little human bodies inside a women, and when a child is conceived one of them starts to grow. But does that mean that there is an even tinier little human baby inside the tiny little baby that will someday be her grandchild, and so forth ad infinitum? Do men have tiny little babies inside them? How does a child get the characteristics of both parents? Are the little babies torn apart and combined? Once it’s understood that all that’s transferred from parent to child is information and that information from both parents is combined, it becomes comprehensible.
So what memetics is claiming is that the movement of ideas is like the movement of genes. This is explaining a large complex system by a vastly simpler system that was discovered only by analogy from the large system. Passing around ideas is like passing around genetic information? Genes only are passed in a couple of ways, reproduction and virus gene-jumping. What’s the genetic equivalent of a book, of a movie, of a TV show, and of the Internet? We don’t learn anything new from the idea of memetics. Yeah, so ideas are passed around like genes, and genes are just information. So what?
Well of course there are good ideas and bad ideas and good ideas tend to outlast the bad.
But I hesitate to use the word “compete”, since it’s unclear to me in what sense ideas compete. How close do two concepts have to be before they compete?
Are our brains in some sense “full” of ideas, and therefore new ideas must push out others?
But the key question is, is memetics a useful or scientific abstraction? At this time, the answer is “no”.
But this is all very vague and not useful.
I might just as well say (indeed this is arguably a subset of memetics) that humans are in a symbiotic relationship with music. We create music, but also we enjoy music. It gives us pleasure so we help it “reproduce”.
But describing music as a separate entity in this way is a pointless metaphor.
That is exactly how the rest of memetics seems to me.
No-one’s claiming (I don’t think) that everything should be worked out exactly. But IMO, memetics is “a bunch of hooey” because it’s so vague at this time, it’s hard to see how it will ever be even formulated into a hypothesis, let alone an established theory.
In fact, I wonder why people are getting so fervently behind an idea that has yet to be formulated into a hypothesis. Does the concept of memes appeal to you?
We don’t have an exact handle, but we know enough about these concepts for them to play a useful role in many (all?) scientific theories. Clearly this is not the case for memetics.
First, show me the structure of a meme. Second, define a meme, such that we would be unaware of it.
All of which can be shown to be false simply by observing reality. Those in “high social esteem” tend to have fewer, not more, children. The low rungs of the social hierarchy are typically the ones breeding away.
Memes have squat to do with biological reproduction. They affect social evolution - indeed, they are typically defined to be units of cultural evolution. Memes, i.e., ideas, are what allows society to exist at all.
I would, indeed, call a virus passive. But I wouldn’t argue that viruses are alive, nor would I try to argue that our thoughts are alive.
And, again, you must resort to anthropomorphism: these data “try”. There is no “try”.
Here’s the thing: mechanism-less hypotheses are rejected in science, and rightly so. Without a mechanism, you have no explanation. Without a plausible explanation, you have no science. There’s nothing to falsify. Mechanism-less explanations are little more than “just so” stories.
Nothing odd about it. But nothing particularly interesting about it, either. So we have these things called “ideas” or “memes”. So what?
But Darwin knew how low-level reproduction had to work in order for natural selection to work. He was able to make predictions. What predictions arise from memetics?
First, what is meant by “any of a set of memes”? What is a meme, and what isn’t?
Second, what if the brain isn’t/ deterministic?
So if we “should” be able to do so, have we done so?
I think we’re arguing at cross purposes here. It’s one thing to say ‘we don’t really know enough about how ideas/memes work for it to be a useful scientific theory’ and another to say ‘memetics is hooey’. I’ll agree that yes, it’s an unfortunately vague idea, and not one that I’ve seen any large amount of scientific exploration of. But that doesn’t make it hooey - just not proven. I’d put it on par with ideas like string theory - interesting if true, but not something anyone’s confirmed. I’d certainly love to see some actual experimentation with memetics.
The point is this. Are you saying that memes[ideas, if you prefer] don’t compete*? I simply cannot think of any way in which to argue that they don’t. Or is your issue solely with the idea that memes are alive? I, for one, don’t think I’d call them alive, per se. I do think they replicate and compete in a similar fashion to organisms, but then so do viruses, which IFAIK are not considered alive. And that’s the key issue of memetics, the only really essential point - ideas replicate and compete.
*in the sense that every person does not agree with or care about every idea they come across.
Means that (assuming deterministic brain function, etc.) there are a set of meme’s such that if any one of those meme’s is introduced to the brain (via some form of communication) it will result in the actions of that brain communicating the meme to other individuals. There is probably a larger set of meme’s that will not result in this.
Either way, I don’t think a human is actively doing anything, it is passively reacting according to the laws of physics along with everything else in the universe, which results in information being transmitted from one brain to another when exposed to certain other information.
IANA meme-ologist and IANA mathematician and IANA neuro-scientist, just a poster on the internet, so bear with me, I may even completely contradict the “official” meme line of thinking, but here goes an attempt:
IMHO ISTM, a meme could possibly be described (maybe?) as:
In addition to those 3 items there needs to be some criteria for indicating that the set of functions representing the meme are related as opposed to just random collections. How to describe that I have no idea.
Then I give up because I can’t even grasp how to think about our brains and how they process information if they aren’t deterministic. Although, if someone explained to me how it could work, then I would re-evaluate if I think the meme thing fits in with that model and start posting again.
I seriously doubt it. But how do you make progress if the only things you try to do are the things you already know how to do? Seems like you have to start somewhere.
My position in this debate is that, in the same way we give names to humans and rivers, even though both are continuously changing the molecules that make them up, the notion of studying meme’s and their natural tendency to move from brain to brain due to their specific nature, is valuable even if the meme is merely a specific configuration of mental state.
I don’t recall Dawkins saying that memes account for 100% of culture. After all, someone has to invent them, and they don’t necessarily evolve from an original meme in the way that all genes can be traced back to that original bit of DNA. I’ll give you that absolute memetics isn’t true, but that isn’t Dawkins’ view. As for the involvement of self, I wonder how much self is responsible for you not being able to forget a song for a while.
Genes “care” that they get reproduced, not for the survival of the host. Ask any salmon or male black widow spider. Memes can do the same. The meme of Christianity was spread in part by the deaths of those who held it. I don’t want to get into free will here, but don’t you agree that at least some memes can be spread by subconscious decisions? (As in "I just had to email you this joke.)
You also seem to be asking for the structure of a non-physical thing. We can hardly give the structure of consciousness, which we agree exists - how can we give the structure of a meme?
But, but, I’ve been breeding them! When you cross pollinate ideas you get new ideas with variations and characteristics never dreamed before! Sure some are weak and die, but some are extra strong, dontcha know? I’ve got a new line of hockey mom lisptick. That’s right, lisptick: you apply it to a blood sucking politician, it makes them lisp and they are then harmless outside a major metropolis.
But on a more serious note, when I was a young man, I went to college. And like many young men in college I wanted to learn what was hip. So I read Robert Pirsig’s Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. And what I discovered was It’s just a metaphor! An interesting conceit. The Intertubes only popularized whooshing, it did not invent whooshing. You, my son, have been whooshed. Not that meme’s as an organic life form sucking off your brain energy isn’t an interesting conceit. You were supposed to be polite and discuss, not get angry and think Bluto was being serious.
I guess the best I can do here is that the meme is the underlying idea, and its structure is how it’s expressed – you can certainly sell an idea through its presentation; for instance, if the idea is ‘I should buy X’, portraying X in an attractive light will likely prove more efficient than merely stating ‘you should buy X’. Note that this is distinct from merely convincing somebody they need X; efficient advertising is more subtle than that, working best when you pick up a product without knowing to ever have heard of it.
Generally, though, ‘imperfectly copyable information’ is a perfectly valid definition of ‘meme’, in my opinion.
For most people, their style of clothing might be such a meme – generally, they won’t be exactly ‘aware’ why they dress a certain way they do, but nevertheless they’ll dress quite similarly to whatever social group they belong to. Actually, this works for any ‘likes’: music, books, politics, every other fad. And yes, this was perfectly obvious before anybody ever thought about memes, and it’s probably not necessary to invent the concept to discuss meaningfully about that phenomenon, but it does offer a quite concise and effective alternative language for this discussion.
True for most modern societies, but what about those where ruling elites where allowed a harem of women of their choosing? But I’ll grant you that my example was perhaps a bit too abstract to be meaningful.
Something a bit more concrete might be the spread of the ability to process lactose in Western European cultures with a long cattle raising history, as opposed to the lack thereof in East Asian societies.
I don’t have much stake in memetics, truth be told. But I think it’s useful, and to completely dismiss it out of hand might be a bit rash – if nothing else, it provides a convenient shorthand for describing how decisions are reached, fads are spread, cultures develop, and perhaps even how culture shapes our biology. It might even be capable of shedding a little light on how that elusive consciousness thing works, and why we even have it. Generally, I see the greatest use in explaining why we do things that aren’t necessary, beneficial, or even of any consequence.
It’s just academically unpopular because it’s deemed pop-sci, an amusing example of memes acting at cross purposes.
Half Man Half Wit writes:
> For most people, their style of clothing might be such a meme – generally, they
> won’t be exactly ‘aware’ why they dress a certain way they do, but
> nevertheless they’ll dress quite similarly to whatever social group they belong
> to. Actually, this works for any ‘likes’: music, books, politics, every other fad. And
> yes, this was perfectly obvious before anybody ever thought about memes, and
> it’s probably not necessary to invent the concept to discuss meaningfully about
> that phenomenon, but it does offer a quite concise and effective alternative
> language for this discussion.
This is the usual argument that other people’s tastes are unconscious, while our tastes, the tastes of intelligent people like us, don’t follow fads. How do you know that people aren’t making conscious choices when they decide how they dress and choose music and books and decide on their political choices? How can you distinguish what is a conscious choice and what is an unconscious one? Why do you want to say that your advocacy of memetics is a conscious choice and not just another following of fads? And if what you’re advocating is just following fads, in what sense is it making a rational argument to us that we should believe in it? And if it’s not being rationally argued, why should we bother to listen to it? If the idea of memetics isn’t being rationally argued at all, shouldn’t we just unconsciously absorb it?