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Review:The Meme Machine
Oxford Professor and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins launched the idea of the meme in 1976 his now famous book "The Selfish Meme" with these words: "when you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propogation in just the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell."
The meme was born, one of the most interesting and timely ideas in media and/or culture.
The idea that ideas are infectious is radical and controversial. To this day, prominent scientists like Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould argue that the meme is a "meaningless metaphor." Other academics (H.Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester) complain that memetics is nothing more than "cocktail-party science."
But the idea has taken hold, especially on the Net, where memes are launched every second and spread just like microbes. (If you want to see how memes work, study the recent writings about Weblogs, on Slashdot and elsewhere, and how the notion has spread electronically into the culture). Information viruses such as memes, wrote Dawkins, follow natural laws much like those governing the change and transmission of biological viruses.
Dawkins saw memes as a unit of cultural evolution. He considered ideas as replicators, working in the exact same way as microbiological organisms like viruses to do spread through the culture. Memes are transmittable, infectious.
Dawkins didn't have the Internet in mind when he coined the term, but new technologies like the Net and TV spread memes faster than was ever possible, elevating his theory.
Big techno-driven media are fusion meme machines: God is Dead, OJ was Framed, Video Games Turn Your Kids Into Killers, Kids Don't Need Parents, the Paparazzi killed Diana, Boris Yeltsin is crazy, a missile shot down TWA Flight 800. Monica and the dress was a nuclear meme.
But according to Dawkins and other memeticists, memes come in all shapes and sizes. They shape culture and politics, through movies, music, books, lectures and word-of-mouth.
In "Wired Style," author Constance Hale defines a meme as a "contagious idea," also as a "virus of the mind," or "unit of cultural inheritance." An especially infectious idea, she says, is a "viral meme." These replicating thoughts are to cultural inheritance what genes are to biological heredity.
When most people talk about memes, they are describing discrete units of knowledge, information, gossip, jokes, faiths. Memetics is the belief that just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.
In his smart, useful and very clear-headed book about memes - "Thought Contagion, How Belief Spreads Through Society" - Aaron Lynch took Dawkins' idea a step farther. In memetic evolution, he wrote, the hardiest ideas aren't always the most helpful but the ones that are simply the best at replicating.
Despite their growing popularity, memes remain controversial, and they just got more so. Susan Blackmore, a professor at the University of the West of England has elevated the meme to whole other plane - with the blessing of Dawkins, who has written a foreword for her new book.
In "The Meme Machine," (Oxford University Press, US $25), Blackmore argues that memes account not only for the evolution of culture but also for consciousness itself. The mind, she believes, is essentially a nest of memes. The mind is essentially -- and almost entirely -- a vehicle for virulent notions.
"Everything that is passed from person to person is a meme," writes Blackmore. "This includes all the words in your vocabulary, the stories you know, the skills and habits you have picked up from others and the games you like to play. It includes the songs you sing and the rules you obey. So, for example, whenever you drive on the left (or the right!), eat curry with lager or pizza or coke, whistle the them tune from "Neighbors" or even shake hands, you are dealing in memes. Each of these memes has evolved in its own unique way with its own history, but each of them is using your behavior to get itself copied.
Blackmore brings us laboriously to a final point of reference and conclusion, to the nature of the inner self, the part of us that is the center of our consciousness, that feels emotions and has memories, holds beliefs and makes decisions.
Some people call this the soul, or the spirit. Blackmore calls it the "inner self." Her argument is that this inner self is an illusion, a creation of relentless memes for the sake of their own replication.
It's nearly impossible to understand this theory, or how it squares with biology or genetics, let alone buy it. We don't just transmit memes, says Blackmore. Memes 'R Us.
This book is a sorry illustration of how to take a great idea and bury it under much more weight than it can possibly bear. Blackmore's writing is academic, dry and loaded with incomprehensible notions like the "memeplex," her memetic inner self. The book reads almost as if some 12-step therapist co-opted memes for her next group therapy session.
If Dawkin's original thesis was brilliant and simple, Blackmore's is impenetrable. In his foreword, Dawkins says he is "delighted" to recommend Blackmore's book, triggering a personal meme. He's a generous man.
Humans are two kinds of thing, Blackmore has concluded: meme machines and selves. Having read this several times, I have no idea what it means. Or why anybody would care.
It's almost impossible to pay attention either to media or the Web and not believe in memes and memetics, whatever the academics say. Ideas are infectious, and they do move through the culture like viruses. In a way, columns, posts, software programs, even flames are memes - they spread precisely like viruses, and they do replicate as units of cultural evolution.
Anybody on the Net sees this almost everytime they get online.
Technologies like TV and the Net have given memes powerful new ways in which to travel and replicate. That makes them significant, a social, business and political tool as well as a cultural idea. Memetics do affect all of us, and ought to be taken more, not less, seriously.
But books like "The Meme Machine" will have the opposite effect. Memeplex theory in this form is loopy, not revealing or penetrating.
Blackmore has taken an important idea and made it obtuse, almost ridiculous. Anybody interested in the idea would do a lot better to get Dawkin's landmark The Selfish Gene or Lynch's blessedly excellent, clear and direct study (published last year by Basic Books, $US 26) of contemporary memes, and how they affect politics, media, culture and thought.
If you still want the Blackmore book, pick it up at Amazon.
Dawkins 1976 book is "The Selfish Gene" not "The Selfish *Meme*" in which he introduces the term and concept meme. For another essay on this subject -- http://www.atl.ualberta.ca/downes/threads/column05 2599.htm
Check this out and see if this meme can
be turned into a GNU interpreter of rebol...
http://www.rebol.com/nutshell.html
Gee, I thought memes were always a lame idea and bad popular science. I guess if you are so impressed then I must have been wrong. I'm glad, however, that there is a kind of popular science/philosophy so extraordinarily bad that even you reject it.
Arguing that consciousness is an illusion caused by a mass of memes is like arguing that the body is an illusion caused by the viruses and bacteria that inhabit it. To the contrary, consciousness is the medium in which the memes thrive, not their byproduct. Consciousness is the constant which underlies all our thought and action. It is certainly not an illusion.
hey! is that a mime-meme?!
.... OTOH; isn't mimeing about memes?
Now I see what all the fuss is about Katz's articles. I haven't read the book yet, but this review sounded like it was written after about 6 beers and a heated postmodern argument.
Someone should write (in the style of Hoffstatder) an essay in which The Tortoise and Achilles push and pop their way through the recursive world (or meme) of the science of memes. Somewhere in this world, one would find a lot of very Chomskian ideas, as well as influences from Frued, Marx, Turing, Lynch, and Dawkins. However these ideas might "only" be memes and not actually "part" of memetics. (suddenly, a great big boom)... Whoops, it looks like we popped right out of memetics and into a meme, but does that mean memes exist?
Humans have problem with reasoning informally when there's lots of recursion. (the meme often known as) Memetics suffers from this problem.
Maybe we should stick to phonographs.
plus if Meme's were existant in most people, the delusion called GOD would NOT exist. See how stupid people are?
actually you have that backwards. god would exist. god its self would be classified as a meme. plus considering the fact that the existence of meme's also implies a lack of free will then that inturn implies a higher power. maybe you should try reading a book once in a while instead of fooling around with your computer so much.
I will call it...mini-meme!
I read this book a few weeks ago, and enjoyed it. However, I didn't fully agree with the author on all her points.
:-).
I disagree with Mr. Katz about the clarity of the text. I found it quite lucid, on a par with most popular science authors such as Dawkins, Gould and Dyson.
The first 3/4 of the book is an excellent introduction to memetics. There is little new here, but it offers clear, well illustrated examples of memes in action.
There is some justification for Mr. Katz's accusations of ``psycho-babble'', but this only occupies the last few pages of the book. At this point the book loses its informative, academic approach and descend into something like a pseudo-Buddhist rhetoric on inner peace and enlightenment (no, not the X WM
The last quarter, when not ``babbling'', develops a powerful model of consciousness which prove as useful for explaining the way we think as any of the existing models. On the way to this Dr. Blackmore explores suggestions as to how memes, and hence sentience, may have developed, and uses the theory of meme/gene co-evolution to offer explanations for many human characteristics.
Overall, 8/10.
as minds are considered the foodsource of memes as opposed to their vehicles (any form of media).
This is wrong.
Minds are considered environments for memes in memetics, not a foodsource or a vehicle.
I'd recommend Thought Contagion myself, although many people derided it. It's a good introduction, but it is true that there was little in way of hard data.
Don't forget Thought Contagion as another fairly popular book on the subject.
What I found interesting about the memetic theory was the possible role it plays in shaping population growth.
Taboo's on things like:
* masturbation
* homosexual sex
* oral sex
* celibacy
* birth control
* abortion
And traditions like
* marriage
* circumcision
* Prostheticizing
* mass worship
increase the likelihood of having many children.
That ideas alone can be used to increase growth in the idea by fostering not just growth in the idea itself, but growth in the population that has the idea in the first place is interesting. So you would expect a Mormon that has 6 wives, that has a taboo against birth control, where it is unthinkable to have any sex other than vaginal sex, that goes to church at least once a week to enforce these ideas, that sends his children to teach the gospel and thinks celebacy is ludicrous and instills all of his beliefs into his children to eventually have a larger group of decendants to that, of say, a part-time christian that had 2 children and stopped there and doesn't really attend church that much.
And there is evidence indicates that it's true. If the Amish continue reproducing at the rate they are, they are going to outpopulate the general populace, simply because they MUST have more children to make up for the taboo on modern machinery.
Put two babys alone in an environment void of external. Put two babys in an environment void of external contact and minimal care. Then observe them when they are adults. You will find they are conscious of the other person and are mentally fit. They will have some form of communication to express food, mainly pointing at it. Its just instinct which i am sure will be observed by humans and not by some lower species. And when they want something they will grunt- the beginining of quantification "more is not the same as none".
Are they any less of a person because they dont have external contact. Or are we any more of a person then them for having things like the web.
The very existance of mathamatics and linguistics is an argument against memes-you take a look at them they are based in quantications, and fact-nothing else. Which means our minds are more based on relationships not on external ideas. Its not what good and bad means(this would be a meme) but the percieved levels of change between good and bad. Percieved differences is what we decide to act on. Its how we are wired.
Take your taste sense, you can tell the infinite levels of taste. Im sure that a reward is someting sweet and shit in your mouth taste bad. We can further explore our taste sense by cooking new food. With memes your saying the taste of shit being bad is aquired.
With memes you are saying that we have quantifable number of ideas and when we them all we can't generate original thought. I say we generate thought as a function to handle gradiants in perceptions.
So I think that memes are a bunch of bullshit-think it out for yourselves
I lost all respect for Skeptic when I discovered that their official stance on religious beliefs is that of complete neutrality. They don't believe in UFO's, they don't believe in Sasquatch, they don't believe in the Easter bunny, but it may be possible that a super intelligent being created adam and eve and that a global flood engulfed the Earth less than 5,000 years ago.
Wimps.
try giving that excuse to the police when they ask if you touched your neighbor's 13 year old daughter.
>your mind is no longer in control, just a slave robot to someone else's selfish desires.
I've heard of that...it's called WORK. The boss selfishly wants to keep their own job, so you slavishly do what they tell you to.
"Ads up in the subway
are the work of someone trying to please their boss,
and though the guy's a pig,
the only thing he wants
is to please somebody else."
-They Might Be Giants
phenomenon.
All religions have a moral system and a cultural system. Meme's isn't any more of a religious belief than mathematics is (although math has at time been part of religious beliefs) because it lacks those two elements that are essential for a religion.
If meme's are a religious belief, detail the moral code of meme belief. I'll detail the one for christianity, judiasm, and islam since those are actual religions.
The congregated microbes are an illusion caused by the way an even larger number of atoms congregate.
Carl Sagan said that he was not an atheist, because he had seen no evidence to convince him that God does not/can not exist. I would imagine this to be neutrality. Does this make him some sort of wishy-washy skeptic?
The true skeptical stance is complete neutrality
on EVERYTHING. They don't 'not believe' in UFOs,
they just demand concrete proof. If there was
concrete proof of a UFO, they'd believe. Same
with God, or any other unprovable concept. If
there was some kind of concrete proof of God's
existence, they'd accept it. Same with Sasquatches, or astrology.. they're being
completely consistent. I admire Skeptic greatly,
even if occasionally they dismiss something out
of hand that maybe bears closer scrutiny.
As other kings have been known to do, this king was fond of saying, 'L'etat, c'est moi' (The kingdom is me.) He had a great if unthinking affection for his peasants, since he viewed them as really just part of the kingdom, and the kingdom as really just himself. Oh, once in a while they might complain that he ate more food in one meal than one farming family got to eat in the whole day... but he'd found that by waving the executioner's ax in the direction of the noise, he could get things to quiet down. And that satisfied him; all he was really after was to get that annoying noise to go away.
One day the king looked out from the highest tower and saw a dust cloud on the horizon. 'Good grief,' he said, 'it's the army of our neighboring country, come to try and conquer me!' But then he looked down to where the peasants were usually farming, and he saw them sharpening their farm tools into weapons. 'Ah!' he said. 'How wonderful to see! My peasants are getting ready to fight and die for their kingdom!' (by which he meant himself.)
Accordingly, he was quite surprised when, long before the enemy army had reached the castle, the peasants with their sharpened weapons broke in, and took his head off at the neck. His failure was in thinking of his peasants only as the agents for his own wishes -- instead of as independent beings who might pursue other agendas at great cost to him. One of the reasons he made this crucial miscalculation was that so often, they did do what he wanted. That was back when he could have them put to death, and they had to keep him happy to keep themselves alive.
Now, a change in perspective. It's been more than a hundred years since Charles Darwin spotted the principles of evolution at work, and almost fifty since Watson and Crick proved that DNA was the mechanism by which one of those principles (the transmission of traits) operated. So nearly everyone knows that their cells are filled with genes, and nearly everyone knows that their body is in its current form because of those genes.
And nearly everyone assumes that whatever our genes are doing is all for our benefit.
As Dawkins pointed out in The Selfish Gene, this isn't always the case. Why do we assume it is? Well, Darwin introduced us to the paradigm of evolution by saying that evolution was how we became the most intelligent and most successful species on the planet. He didn't even know about genes; how could he have suggested that our genes had made this possible because it fit their agenda to have hosts that dominated the planet?
(A word of explanation, here: the language of intention is often used in discussing evolution; we may say that a one-celled organism uses a strategy, for example, or that a gene has an agenda. This is often misunderstood by critics who think we are attributing sophisticated thinking to one-celled organisms and protein sequences. No, we are not saying that these entities are using intelligence to determine their fate -- any more than the basic theory of evolution holds that mammals deliberately evolved fur to keep them warm. Those that did simply survived longer, left more progeny, and came to constitute the majority. No, a gene does not have a conscious goal of guaranteeing its continued survival and replication -- but if it has done so through millions of generations of trial and error, then it probably possesses adaptations that are easiest to speak of as if they were consciously chosen.)
Most of the time, our genes do indeed serve our own best interests. That's because most of the time, their best interests are the same as our own: for the human to survive (and the genes inside, too) and replicate (replicating the genes inside, too.) But we shouldn't forget about the possibility of exceptions. Many of the diseases we suffer from turn out to come from genes which do good things, malfunctioning. But what if there are other genes, which survived in our genome not because they were ever any good for us, but because those genes have particularly good strategies just for getting themselves copied? There is some evidence that this may be the case with cancer-causing oncogenes.
Now we turn to the meme. If anything, we are even more consciously and aggressively sure that our memes are 'ours,' under our control and always working for our benefit, than we are of our genes. It's not hard to imagine that we feel this way because we are more responsible for the content of our heads than for the contents of our chromosomes; we choose the contents of our head. (Or we think we do.) It's no wonder that the idea of memetics is protested so fiercely -- as fiercely as evolution was protested when it was first proposed, and still is today in some places.
But the perspective provided by memetics is a valuable and much-needed one -- particularly because genes need hosts, but memes only need carriers. In that, a meme is much less like a gene, and more like a virus; a gene needs to keep its host alive and sexually functioning in order to achieve its own agenda of propagation. A virus may be able to achieve that end through a single sneeze; a meme may achieve it just because its promise puts its carrier through a brief period of high optimism -- during which the carrier wants everyone else to know about this great new idea....
The perspective of memetics is valuable and needed; otherwise we may find ourselves just as surprised as the trusting king when we discover that 'our' ideas have destroyed our goals and our lives.
About time that someone gave a review of this book that is actually critical. The concept of memes as an informal idea is perfectly reasonable, even if I agree with Gould that it's pretty much a "meaningless metaphor".
However, Susan Blackmore has taken this informal idea, and presented it as a rigorous scientific theory, which it most certainly is not. I've seen it described as "cocktail party science", and that's exactly what it is. The idea has of course, taken hold very quickly, because it provides a convenient escape hatch to the whole debate on the nature of consciousness. Don't worry, be happy, because "you" don't exist to begin with!
What amazes me even more is that I know people who attack books like Frank Tipler's "Physics of Immortality" as pseudo-science of the worst kind, but then buy into Blackmore's ideas without a second thought. Hell, at least Tipler's ideas are fully falsifiable.
?
bigtable.com
All about Burroughs.
It's amazing that someone would actually advance this hypothesis. We're all driven to reproduce, and some of our (um, I mean mainstream modern Western cultural) social conventions, such as monogamy, don't necessarily maximize our ability to spread our genes. If you do the math, and want to maximize your chances of propagating your genes, then men should mate with as many partners as they can. This isn't because of some silly idea virus garbage, this is simple biology.
Actually, monogamy does in many cases increase (not maximize) our ability to spread our genes. In societies which are not stratified economically, the burden that is placed on a single individual man to raise two sets of families is large. The chances of raising all the children to sexual maturity so they can then raise children goes down. In highly economically stratified societies, harems are not the least bit uncommon either, but only the wealthy have them.
In our economically stratified society we do have monogamy, of a sort. It is not the least bit uncommon for wealthy males to have multiple wives during the course of their lifetimes and multiple families. It is, however, uncommon for non-wealthy males to do this. This is called serial monogamy which can be likened to polgyny, except sex between partners is exclusive at different points in time.
The reality of it is that in our modern society we don't have monogamy. In Victorian England where momogamy was imposed by social convention, nothing really stood in the way of an extramarital affair, especially if the man had $ either.
Apes, cats, bats, rats, and rabbits all do the same thing. They don't communicate ideas, and yet they managed to figure it out.
There is ample evidence that apes do communicate ideas and that different groups have cultural differences between other groups. There have even been claims that some groups practice rituals that accomplish nothing, much like religions.
Meme theory isn't the only driving force in human reproduction, but it certainly appears to be a driving force. Take for example the Amish, they have a taboo against using farm machinery, so they have more children to do the required work, most children stay in the religion, and as a result, the Amish population grows at 3 times the rate that the rest of the US population grows.
There are many examples that have been presented. Meme's can travel effectively through parental inheritence. Many ideas and beliefs you have are undoubtedly passed on to you from your parents. This is true for the vast majority of people.
Other cultural taboos also originate from the drive to increase the survival rate of the species. Take pork, for example. The prohibition on eating pork in certain religions no doubt comes from the fact that eating undercooked pork can lead to trichinosis, which is a fatal disease. (Pigs carry Trichinella Spiralis, which causes trichinosis). Someone probably observed that lots of people who ate pork caught this and died, while those who didn't, didn't. So, unaware of the parasite living in their swine, they decided that it must be God punishing them for eating the "filthy animal" and issued an appropriate edict.
This isn't necessarily what happened.
It could be that some hypothetical nutcase with a slight case of schizophrenia for some reason thought that pigs were a dirty animal, so he wouldn't eat pork. Let's also say, hypothetically, that everybody else thought he was nuts, but that the pigs in the area did have trichinosis, so the people that didn't share the taboo started dying off before they had all the kids they were going to. Let's say the nutcase converted 5 people to his belief through "spreading the word" and as a result, those mere 5 people didn't get the disease so they had a SLIGHTLY higher survival rate. Let's say over generations that this taboo was passed on to 99% of the children of the taboo holders. Eventally, the taboo holders will outpopulate non-taboo holders. The beauty of memetics is that it doesn't require logic at all, it can be completely random. It doesn't require intelligence, just the ability to communicate.
You can come up with a completely random idea, and if it helps survival in the environment, it may become a mainstream idea. Just as a mutation can be give just a slight advantage to survival and eventually become species normal since gene holders are more likely to produce more progeny.
That's it. Cause and effect coupled with instinct and the ability to communicate. Not some crapola mental virus
What do you mean? Cause and effect coupled with the ability to communicate is the mechanism through which the meme spreads. Thought Contagion laid out many many examples of cause and effect and showed in each case the possibility that the meme in question could be responsible for an increase in either birthrate, a decrease in death, or an increase in spreading through preaching. There is no need for a logical reason to have the meme, all that is important is that through some mechanism, any mechanism that the meme spreads.
Apocolyptic predictions cause religions to spread quickly, because the meme holders of the religion are told that converting people is a good thing, and that there is not much time left. This doesn't advantage the meme holders at all, it might even hurt them, but if that meme is passed along (and assuming the world DOESN'T actually end) with other meme's like "birth control bad, anal sex bad, oral sex bad" then the new converts might just outpopulate the non-converted.
What's illogical about that? Where is the obvious gaping hole in the hypothesis? The real problem, as is the problem in evolution theory, is that it's not all that easy to make a bunch of artificial memes and study popluation dynamics among REAL people for 20 generations to see if the meme kills the hosts or if it helps them. Since animals cannot hold memes, or at least meme's that we can observe, we can't study that either. It's a bit of an impasse, all you can do is look at history and draw inferences, but there are a lot a taboo's that would certainly seem to increase reproductive rates, even when the taboo seems to be completely illogical.
The idea of a meme is only a way of looking at a thing, so it would be more appropriate to talk about the meme-as-a-concept as being more or less useful, rather than right or wrong. The idea is to note the similarity between genes and ideas, which involves not only the process of replication, but also of mutation and selection. As time goes on, memes mutate, and the various mutant strains compete with each other for mindshare. The mutant stain that replicates best, wins.
For example, a religious strain lacking a concept of "hell" would not replicate as well as a mutated strain that incorporated, say, images derived from Dante's Inferno, because a fear of hell intensifies the importance of the religion in one's mind, which makes one more likely to exibit behaviors that advertise that one is a member of the faith (such as praying over a meal in a resturant) If other people see these behaviors often enough, well, we all know how advertising works. The idea of hell therefore makes a package of interlocking religious memes more fit to replicate.
It is claimed that the "eye" evolved independly about 40 times. You could say that the eye is a "forced good trick" of biological evolution. One might also ask the question, do religions have the characteristics they do by chance, or does the process of memetic evolution, in effect, guarantee that they will have these characteristics.
Stupid lousy MIME encoding. D'oh!
I have never ever seen them critical of religion or pointing out that there is as little evidence for religion as there is for UFO's. Give me an issue that points out that religion is as baseless as everything else the discuss.
The whole concept, at least as I currently understand it, just seems so ... silly. It seems like a very amateurish and feeble attempt at explaining something that can't be explained.
Instead of voicing your seemingly arbitrary opinions, why don't you read about the hypothesis instead. It is internally consistent, can explain a wide variety of behaviors - even "bizarre" ones, and has many real world examples that it can be applied to and explain actually quite well. Whether it really is "memetics" at work is certainly debateable, what isn't is that the model of memetics certainly seems to be useful in explaining many beliefs.
Go to the library and pick up Thought Contagion, it's an easy read you can get through in a day.
well, how?
My biggest problem with fundamentalist (yes) atheists is the tone of certitude. I know many people who consider themselves atheists/agnostics, who I have deep respect for. But I don't get that same feeling when I see people with bumper stickers that says things like "Atheism: There's no substitute for being right!". I think American Atheists or one of the other big groups puts them out. I often wonder how that's any better than a fundie Christian.....oh I see, because WE are right, and THEY are wrong. That's cleared it up then.
It is often implied that atheism is the only option for a serious, thinking person to hold. I obviously disagree with this, but I am probably biased. Many of my scientific heroes are theists, in one form or another. John Polkinghorne and Simon Conway Morris are two good examples. Two serious thinkers, highly respected in their fields (physics and evolutionary biology, respectively). In fact, very few are out-and-out atheists, now that I think of it.
Then again I may be blinded by my disdain for nihilism. But I just thought I'd point out that there are many brilliant people out there who don't think the case is so open and shut as you seem to imply.
It seems to me that these terms are really just new labels for social processes that are already well understood and undisputed. I don't think anybody'd be shocked to hear your explanation of why the Amish community grows as it does and for what reason, and I also don't think the terms "meme" or "thought contagon", at least how you've used them, are anything but a new label for well established knowledge.
My biggest problem with fundamentalist (yes)atheists is the tone of certitude. I know many people who consider themselves atheists/agnostics, who I have deep respect for. But I don't get that same feeling when I see people with bumper stickers that says things like "Atheism: There's no substitute for being right!". I think American Atheists or one of the other big groups puts them out. I often wonder how that's any better than a fundie Christian.....oh I see, because WE are right, and THEY are wrong. That's cleared it up then.
Well I'm not that type of atheist:
* I don't have the stupid Darwin fish on my car.
* Marry Maudlin O'Hair is an asshole and probably a theif.
* American Atheists is just the secular analogue to making money for a "good cause", and "stopping the evil religious wacko's" just like any damn church is out to stop the spread of other "evil religions" - just send us $$.
But I'm pretty damn tired of hearing mindless stuff like:
* Can you PROVE there isn't a god?
* You can't have morals if there is no god
* God told me you're a sinner, so you're going to Hell
* Evolution theory is an untested hypothesis
* Creation theory should be taught in school
* Galileo wasn't persecuted by the Church
* The Inquisition never happened, or if it did it only killed a few people
* The Taiping rebellion had nothing to do with Christianity
* Darwin recanted on his death bed
* Noah's Ark could have existed
* Hitler wasn't a Christian, he was an atheist
* The founding fathers were all fundamentalist Christians
* Morality comes from studying the Lord's Word (TM)
* What the Lateran Treaty?
* Bruno who?
and on and on and on and on. Christianity and all religions, quite frankly, pisses me off just because it is so damn irrational coupled with so much damn ignorance. What particularly aggravates me is how on Earth liberalism from the 20's which was feuled by religious sectors coupled with secular humanist atheist and is now considered "evil" and it's suddenly compassionate to pour money into the SDI program and that it's not the military that is draining the tax base, but a couple of welfare recipients.
Hey, don't any fundamentalists now ANYTHING about history or the history of their own movement. Let me answer that: HELL NO.
I don't mind the lighter friendlier side of religion. I don't mind "mainstream" Christianity, in face my brother, my sister, my mother, and my father are all mainstream. This means that they go to church once a week, believe in evolution theory, and sometimes actually don't vote republican.
Nihism, by the way, isn't atheism.
But I just thought I'd point out that there are many brilliant people out there who don't think the case is so open and shut as you seem to imply.
That because brilliance does not imply objectivity, knowledge, or correctness.
Timothy Leary was brilliant too, he was also nuts.
One of the problems that seems to pervade books on Memetics (not just this one, but also Brodie's "Virus of the Mind" is that, given the "hammer" of Memetics, they find that everything looks like a nail. (And then go around hitting everything, alas.) Neither this author nor Brodie is willing to limit the scope of the world of memes, saying what a meme is not as well as what it is. Instead, all ideas, behaviors, concepts, mental functions, etc. are absorbed into their concept of memes, rendering it meaningless.
Memetics will look less like a "pop science" and more like a useful tool (which, in fact, it can be) when it establishes boundaries.
--Brett Glass
"banal"
I'd have to point to one major, major difference between the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and memetic theory: Sapir-Whorf was postulating a universal negative, that if you didn't have the word for a concept you could not think about that concept. It should have only taken thought experiments to demolish that idea ('So tell me, Sapir -- or are you Whorf? -- how do you explain the fact that languages gain new words over time?') but in any case, it was demolished by experiments with peoples who only had words for the colors red and green, but knew that chartreuse was a different color, one they didn't have a word for.
In contrast, memetics does not dispute the existence of any other influences on human thinking, and it does not claim to be the single theory which explains it all (and anyone who claims it is, doesn't understand it themselves.) It simply says this: 'Ideas are like genes and like animals; they are honed for the task of replicating themselves through evolutionary selection, and any idea which keeps itself successfully replicating over time probably has some alarming sneaky strategies for doing so. Human thinking can be affected by the fact that there are ideas so highly developed for selfish self-replication, just as human health can be affected by the existence of viruses very highly advanced in the art of selfish self-replication.'
Honestly, I think the reason that a lot of Slashdot readers have trouble accepting the theory of memetics is that we tend to be (well, except the wingnuts) careful critical thinkers. We tend to forget just how little of what the wide world calls 'thinking' actually qualifies -- how often people tell us what they 'think' about one issue or another, when what they really mean is which idea they decided to parrot because it sounded best. Did you know that on average, college students rate ideas that are expressed in a rhyme as 40% more true than the same thoughts expressed in prose? Now you know why 'If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit' worked.
Here's the definition of meme: if it's mental, and if it can replicate itself (not necessarily perfectly) from one person to another, then it is a meme.
What are the principles of evolution? 1. Beings compete for resources. 2. Those beings who are better suited for the competition have longer lives on average, and since they have more time to procreate, have more progeny on average. 3. Repeat this process often enough, and you will see the average suitedness of the being to its environment dramatically increase.
And that's exactly what you're describing above. A meme was started, and forced to replicate from people. But what did it do? It mutated from one form (the white man holding the knife) to a form better-suited to survive (the black man holding the knife) in its environment (in the mind of a white person)!
Your insistence that memetics can't be true or non-trivial, because social psychology is true and non-trivial, is like the behaviorists insisting that we couldn't look at the possibility that behavior was ever planned or reasoned, because if we worked hard enough we could always fit it into a mold of learned habits.
Read "Naked Lunch".
If you can get through it, and glean anything out of it (it is possible if you really really try, but I could only do it for a bit), then and only then should you take Burroughs seriously.
I think the easiest kind of Meme for the internet age folks, is the chain letter....
It is an idea that spreads itself...
I agree to a certain extent, although for me it is not true, I have read many books that could have explained something better that should have been easy, but their way of explaining it is bad, where as when I read another book it helped me understand it much better... I see this with a lof of math books, where I eventually learned how to understand complex equations through programming books but before then, no one would explain in laymen terms...
So while I understood what was said about memes, I can understand if someone doesn't understand and needs it to be explained in a way that a laymen can understand. I guess in this area of memes, I am not a laymen, since I picked so easily what they said...
Just read around a bit (this board, books, etc) and you may find something that will spark your understanding...
Ok, let's say you have some homeless guy. No one notices him, nor pays any attention to what he does at all. He doesn't interact with society at all, nor do they interact with him. He gets along by scrounging for food in empty backalley dumpsters. He finally decides to commit suicide, because he can't bear to live his life anymore. He commits suicide - how? It doesn't matter. His body is never found, and he is completely forgotten from society. No one remembers him. Now the question is - what meme would allow its carrier to be so detached from society that that he cannot spread other the other memes infecting his head to other carriers? What meme would allow its carrier to be forgotten from society, if its only purpose is to spread and prosper? It doesn't seem very logical.
"The idea that ideas are infectious is radical and controversial." JK says this as part of his background in his review of "The Meme Machine".
This idea - if you will forgive the third-degree recursion - is nonsense. Ideas have been seen, rightly, as "infectious" and "contagious" for centuries.
Richard Dawkins gave us a framework for looking at this when he coined the term "meme". Stephen Jay Gould objected to "meme" only on the grounds that he objects to Dawkins' view of genes, on which the notion of memes is based. Gould, nor anyone else, has ever suggested that ideas do not take on momentum of their own and survive or die on their own strength as well as the strength of the people who promote them. That Jon Katz says otherwise must be sloppy thinking on his part, nothing else.
Isn't the word, "meme" just a blanket term for ideas, thoughts, customs, and mannerisims? If so, is it really news that the human creature reacts in the way it does to them?
Nobody should be shocked to learn that compelling ideas, valid or not, are commonly shared among many people. Nor should one be shaken to the core to discover that "customs" are events that recur not because they're the logical reaction to the immediate environment but precisely because they've occured in the past.
People with fancy titles, Hiding the banale or the foolish behind difficult words. Is nothing new.
Try reading "Intellectual Imposteurs" by Alan Sokal. For a full acount of this fenomenon.
Am I the only one who has a difficult time "getting" this whole theory? The whole concept, at least as I currently understand it, just seems so ... silly. It seems like a very amateurish and feeble attempt at explaining something that can't be explained. It reminds me of religion in that way. And in other ways it just seems like new terminology for things that are already very obvious.
It seems like the majority of the comments here are from people who have been able to grok it though. Maybe I just need to read more, as my knowledge on this subject is almost nil.
Posted by Mary CW:
I'm hallucinating that I read somewhere that Gates/Microsoft had great interest in the meme theory, and used it as input to their PR/ad campaigns, etc. Anyone else heard this?
Posted by John Hayward-Warburton:
I wish this was easier to understand. Several years ago, when I was working for local radio in the English Midlands, the author gave me an interview for one of my programmes, in which she discussed the similar ideas in her book "Dying to Live" (all about Near-Death-Experiences). The final point she made, about the meme-based model of the world around us being that which we call "consciousness", hasn't hit home yet (maybe because I'm a practicing Christian), but it would be really useful to have a door into her understanding here. She's jolly well researched, too. I hesitate to condone the word "psycho-babble" because discussion of such subjects is rather like trying to tell a being in a two-dimensional world that there is an "up". Actually, just thinking about all this makes my head hurt again. Sorry. JHW
But then I've not finished the book so maybe I'm destined to be disappointed. Even if that's the case, though, you've not managed to mention any weakness in the book that isn't really a weakness in the reader.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
This review should give everyone that reads it pause. Not because the book itself is so ground shaking, or so poor, as it may or may not be.
It should give us pause because of the underlying criteria Jon Katz is using. He doesn't dislike the book because the thesis is poorly supported, or the thesis is wrong; he doesn't even offer distaste for the subject matter (no, he revels in memes, as I think anyone observing current Internet culture should), and only seems to note distastefully that the writing is ``dry.''
No, it looks like Mr. Katz pans the book because he doesn't understand it. The writing isn't simple and clear, but (from inference) typical academic, and the subject matter is dealt with in a precise and laborious way. Apparently there's no jumping to conclusions, just slow presentation of information and inference, until we get to the end, and find the thesis (People are comprised of memes and some more basic hardware used to pass memes, and the memes are what make us sentient?) -- a thesis that, because of the care taken in presenting it with a full show of support, bores and confuses Mr. Katz.
Certainly, some of the above is inference and hyperbole. I hope that Mr. Katz will forgive me pressing a point at his expense. But his analysis of this book opened him to it (not the verdict, but his display of the thought process he went through to decide his verdict).
Perhaps this book is too heavy for someone who is too busy to give it his full attention, or for people that are used to executive summaries. I hardly think, though, that such ``heaviness'' makes it unsuitable reading material for the Slashdot audience, as I (as a single member with admittedly foggy understanding) see said audience.
Your understanding of people, Mr. Katz, keeps me reading your articles long after your writing style would normally drive me away. Your assumption, however, that at least I as a Slashdot reader appreciate your review that pushes away ``too difficult'' material is wrong.
Everyone encounters material -- both reading material and tasks -- too difficult to understand easily, or even with more than cursory examination. Not everyone shies away from such material, and not everyone encourages others to shy away from material that they found too difficult.
--Matthew
If you will excuse me from saying so, that's a pretty hoity-toity post.
You blast psychology and other social sciences over and over again for lack of accountability and evidence -- "What evidence brings her to say that?" -- and yet it doesn't look like you're sufficiently familiar with the topic.
Specifically, you attack everything about the book without actually knowing (beyond cursory examination) the subject matter, and without a single clue as to what research was put into it.
Your attitude seems only reasonable if one starts with the assumption that no proof can be garnered about the subject. Therefore, anyone spouting theories is spouting hot air, because there's nothing to back it up. You seem to assume that this book can't possibly have any basis in fact, because it's a book on "social sciences."
I think your basic assumption is severely flawed, to say the least. Working with psychologists right now (I'm a programmer), I can say there's a great deal of work put into being sure that the measuring methods mean something, the experiments are relevant to the question being asked, and the data is collected in a statistically relevant way.
I can speak nothing towards the book, having not read it -- but I find your attitude of "What will we gain from this analysis? Insight? Inner peace? Enlightenment?" completely unscientific. Are questions of our intellectual origin, or mental processes, out of reach of science? Or are they as fair game as questions of our physical origin?
Something that neuropsychologists are able to show is that thoughts really do correspond to physical processes: questions of intellectual origin are simply extremely complex questions of physical origin.
--Matthew
I've read Feynman's article before, and once again I am not very impressed with it. It's a commencement speech written by an incredible man, but it's still a commencement speech.
As for your ``example'' of how ``flawed'' psychology journals are. First, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised that editors were simply amazed that a physicist would publish an article in their journal, due to the bias you very adequately demonstrate. They certainly should have investigated the article, but I would be surprised to find that every article written by, say microbiologists for physics journals are better handled by the reviewing boards.
As for the psychologist I'm working for: I haven't been around long enough to learn much of the experiments, rather than my end -- statistical analysis and software generation.
The most I can say is that your low opinion of anything outside of physics and chemistry contrary to my own experience of research psychology, and other soft science. If I am simply undisciplined and easily fooled, so be it -- but I doubt it; I'm not exactly a soft science person myself.
--Matthew
Dennis Hopper said it best: "Just because it happened to you, doesn't mean it's interesting". Come on, does it really surprise anyone that ideas spread in a Darwinistic way? The problem is, the meme concept doesn't really explain why ideas spread, it just takes the fact that it does happen and runs with it in unlikely directions.
We talk to one another not just to selflessly impart information, but to receive the gratification of an elicited response. You tell someone about something because, when that person finds the idea interesting, they find *you* interesting. Likewise, the news media wants to tell you about things you'll find interesting -- then you'll find *them* interesting, and you'll watch, and they'll make money from commercials.
Conversely, of course, you won't bother repeating information to someone if you don't think it's going to interest them.
And this is how ideas live and die. The idea of "memes" takes the process out of context and really fails to get at the real issues behind why ideas spread -- it conveniently factors out human nature. Nebulous concepts like ideas surviving on their own and propagating due to their value to a culture are interesting fodder for late-night freshman year dormitory discussions but fail to take important things like human nature into account. And therefore they're not very interesting.
A small article I read by Susan Blackmoore 5 years ago gave me a better grasp of consciousness than a 4 year degree in AI. The article got me thinking along the right track, and eventually I cam to this conclusion: Consiousness is the process of updating your internal representation of yourself, and that's all.
When Hawking's "A brief history of time" came out most critics dismissed it as incomprehensible. What they meant was incomprehensible to their arty minds. Another Blackmoore book I read "education of a parapsychologist" was delightfully devoid of bullshit, so I find it hard to believe that she has changed so much. Are you sure it was empty psychobabble ? Maybe you just didn't understand it.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Nice to find someone who understands concepts without needing extensive elaboration. I like your poetry, do you have an email address ?
Just a couple of points - the term subconsious is misleading. Consciousness is a small sub-set of what our brains are doing. That we think of the rest of what happens in our minds as the subconsious betrays how inaccurate our representation of ourselves can be. It's like the 'ps' command thinking of the processes it monitors as being subroutines. This theory of consiousness is not philosphy, it's falsifiable.
Actually I don't believe a turing machine can be sentient, a quantum computer could be, but that's another story.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
I was just about to mention the Burroughs connection. Those novels had really strange ideas of information as virus, propagating through human (and non-human) minds.
Philip K. Dick also had similar ideas, expressed in his exegis and novels such as VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth.
--
Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
I'm not sure about this author, but I did not get that out of Dawkins. Remember, in oversimplified form, for Dawkins, the purpose of life is to replicate genes. If memes can be another tool of genes to replicate themselves, so be it.
Thanks for the tip.
I wonder if this is another case where the PoMos are postliterate as well.
I read The Meme Machine and found it to be the best, most solidly written book on memetics so far. It made considerable progress towards promoting memetics from a fuzzy, catchy idea to a solid scientific model, and made some controversial predictions. The other well-known book on memetics, Richard Brodie's Virus of the Mind, is a lot less rigorous, and reads almost like a self-help book.
Psychologists make an interesting career out of studying intangibles. Many great things have come out of psychology. In the end, however, one is studying intangibles. As such, the field and the results derived from it can only be taken so seriously.
I always think that psychology is heading for obsolecenes - after all, many problems caused by an ego and id conflict can be neatly solved by Prozac (or plain old ethanol). The more progress we make in neurobiology, the less we need to rely on a tradition rooted in the last century.
The paranoid in me think of the whole "human consciousness is merely an illusion of memes" as a new attempt to attack the whole framework of science - "See, even the scientists now admit that all thoughts are nothing more than the products of illusions". We really should legalise recreational drug use so the "tree hugging hippies" in the social science department have something more entertaining to do than spawning new crackpot theories.
Excuse my grumpiness, studying for an signal process paper exam with those fun fourier transforms and integrating fun fun random distributions make me want to charge up a 600V 500uF electrolyte and zap some moron claiming his/her LSD-induced crazy talk is as valid as the theory of evolution.
Kill'em! Kill'em all!
Oh come now, good sir. As I said, there is nothing wrong with philsophy or religion. My grievence was that unscientifically obtained and analyzed information was being presented under the banner of science. That is what psychology has always claimed to be, a science. This book does nothing to further the legitimacy of this claim, from all that has been presented of it. You would do well to read Dr. Feynman's commencement speach about Cargo Cult Science before you fire back with a rebuttle similar to the one you just did.
Further, your insinuation that people who are criticing this matter are "uncomfortable" or "unable to think [about]" these matters is more than just a poor grasp of the issues at hand, it is insulting. Part of the scientific process is the meticulous analysis of a theory and the evidence supporting it by people other than those who presented it. This is the cornerstone of science. If you take exception to people who try to do this and insult them to boot, you had best keep out of all things scientific, for you clearly then are completely lacking in the understanding necessary to participate in such discussions.
Finally, as to your remark Certainly dismissing it as "psychobabble" reveals a hostility towards the entire notion of philosophizing about the self. I would re-emphasize that this meme material is being presented as psychologial (thus a scientific) theory. Remember, she is a psychologist at a university, and books published by her of this nature is clearly going to be recieved as psychological in nature. Indeed, from all indications, she promotes her theories as such. If it is philosophy, then the author should make that disclaimer that her book is not a book of or about psychology, but philosophy. To do otherwise is disingenuous at best, pernicious at worst. One cannot have it both ways.
I would also point out to you that ad hominem attacks are always the resort of the desperate, those who have no legitimate facts or points to argue about, with respect to the matter at hand. Insulting is a poor way of proving the validity of your (or others') thoughts.
You seem to assume that this book can't possibly have any basis in fact, because it's a book on "social sciences."
Go read Dr. Richard Feynman's commencement speach "Cargo Cult Science" and you will see why such an attitude is not unreasonable.
There has been a conflict between the hard and soft sciences for decades. Just two or three years ago, a physicist submitted an "article" to a psychological journal which expounded upon the effects of quantum gravity on behavior. It was total nonesense, a hoax from the start, but it was manufactured for a specific reason. The journal accepted it without ever investigating its validity. A hard-science journal always has a board of reviewers who frequently reject papers, explaining to the author where their work is lacking. Most of the time, those authors then fill in the gaps, and often get accepted later when they've done a better job of it.
To continue with the story, this article was published in the journal, lauded by psychiatrists. Then the hoax was revealed by the author, much to the delight of chemists, physicists, and other hard-science people. The psychologists howled in complaint, much to our amusement.
In the end, it was their own fault for not investigating the validity of that paper. That's what make science work, peer review. In the hard sciences, we try to validate or prove wrong other's work. Experiments are repeated to ensure the validity of the result. Reproducibility is where it's at.
I can say there's a great deal of work put into being sure that the measuring methods
mean something, the experiments are relevant to the question being asked, and the data is collected in a
statistically relevant way.
All of these things he's doing are important, certainly, but they are only the begining. I'm sure your psychologist is working hard, but is he reproducing favorable experiements, or does he feel that's a waste of effort? Does he put as much work into disproving his theory as he does into proving it? When he has the data, does he look for uncontrolled variables? Does he look for side-affect reasons that produced his favorable results which would undermine their support of his theory? Is he constantly refining his theory to match the experimental data, or refining his data to match his theory?
It's much like open-source software. In this case, however, we're studying nature. We're either right, or we're not, and if we're not, nature will put us right when experiments prove a bad theory is wrong. We must be carefull not to fool ourselves, though.
I've read Feynman's article before, and once again I am not very impressed with it. It's a commencement
speech written by an incredible man, but it's still a commencement speech.
"still a commencement speech"? Goodness, that says a lot about a lot of things. If you're not very impressed with it, it just shows how little you understand science. Every scientist I know holds Feynman in extremely high regard, not because of what he's achieved, but because of his high scientific standards. You are in no position to disgregard what he says on what science is. I am quite disappointed by your reaction.
Working with psychologists right now (I'm a programmer)
If your training is in programming, you are certainly in no position to either assest the scientific valdidity of psychology, nor to judge Dr. Feynman. He is a man out of both of our classes, and a scientist with few peers. Ignore his words at your own risk, even if it is "still a commencment speech" as you so cavalierly put it.
I'm a chemist by training, one of the most materialistic sciences that you can get. I've never heard much about memes before this posting (certainly never had the opportunity to see a definition of it, though I was able to infer some of the meaning from context). It seems to me that the meme, from what I've read here, is just a theoretical model to try and understand a part or property of one of the most complex systems in the universe as we know it, the human mind (not brain).
I hardly think it fair to call Mr. Katz's characterization of the material to be a reflection of himself rather than the book. Psychologists make an interesting career out of studying intangibles. Many great things have come out of psychology. In the end, however, one is studying intangibles. As such, the field and the results derived from it can only be taken so seriously.
Like all of the soft sciences (aka social sciences, humanities) it is very difficult to support theories with hard experimental data. In physics and chemistry, theories are (relatively) easily proven over and over with independent scientists verifying others' work. In psychology, however, one may construct theoretical models to characterize concepts and states of reality as we know them without much accountability.
When a chemist finds a new method of synthesis, the results are tangible, you can hold the them in a bottle. Likewise when a physicist tinkers with the forces of nature (ie, superconductors lifting massive weights off the ground, etc). Even the most abstract theories such as Quantum Mechanics (my specialization) can be proven through rigorous (though arcane) experimentation. We have even reached the point in theoretical chemistry that we can predict the results of a chemical reaction (no small accomplishment, let me assure you).
Phsychologists, however, are doomed to study a system in which they are handicapped by the ultimate bias: they are the systems they study. Therefore, while they may be learned and know important things about the human mind and consciousness, going past a certain depth or level passes the point of usefulness or meaningfulness.
The initial descriptions of what a meme is, as quoted from Dawkins' book, seem simple and useful enough. (Take the most serious note of that, for most important truths are simple.) Memes seem to me, from what I'm reading here, to be soundbytes. Short, catch-phrases without meaning or depth-of-thought. Then, however, Blackmore declares, "Everything that is passed from person to person is a meme,". Oh? What evidence brings her to say that? Are we now saying that memes are the packets in the human internet we call civilization? If so, do they vary in size or are they standardized? If they're standard how many memes make up the complex concepts expressed in mathematics, physics, and chemistry? How do memes (if they are building blocks) fit into interpersonal relationships? According to Blackmore, it's all memes. Based on what evidence? Based on what observations? Who decides? If we're spending all this energy to just *define* what a meme is, is it really so important? What will we gain from this analysis? Insight? Inner peace? Enlightenment? Thank you, but people have been getting all that from religion and philosophy for centuries now. So is psychology now the religion of the "post-modern" era? (another term I find meaningless). Bottom line, where's the science? Isn't that what psyhcology is supposed to be, a science?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for religion, inner peace, greater self-introspection. I'm very devout in my faith, but let's not mix our disciplines here.
In the end, I can guess at Blackmore's motivations. It is, of course, these motivations that dictate the quality of her work. I've been a member of Academia long enough too see how it works. The Publish or Perish code in Universities runs deep and runs strong. Professors are denied tenure and or promotion on the basis of what they can churn out. Quantity, not quality. Like everywhere else in our information (not idea) based society, truely meaningful thought and dialog are being drowned out in a sea of news, facts, data, bits, and bytes.
From all I've seen, the concept of the meme peaked in usefulness and meaningfulness with its introduction in Dawkins' book. Let it be a name for the flotsam of the sea of information we're drowning in. I've noticed of late that on Slashdot, if you don't post early after a story goes up, you'll either be the last one on a list of 200+, or no one will read your thoughts because ever more new stories are getting posted and the piece of news at the bottom of the page just isn't as interesting as what's at the top. Given the time differential between the story (and inital comment's) posting and my post, I doubt this essay of mine will even be ready by many more people than the fellow to whom I'm responding (if he even looks at his user page). I'm sure it won't get moderated up any, after all, who's reading this story now anyway? There's more intersting stuff going on right now, who cares about then. There's no time anymore for introspection or analysis.
Too many memes, too little time.
You've got it backwards. Religious beliefs are memes.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I see memes in terms of what I believe to be their negative affects, ie; jealousy, racism, religious fervor, nationalist fervor, and such.
When one is in the grip of a 'memetic virus', the idea or concept is all-consuming. If you've ever had a 'crush' on someone you know what I mean.
Personable religious and political leaders exercise tried and true methods to spread their own ideas at the expense of others.
Signs, symbols, slogans and propaganda are all methods of spreading and reinforcing the effects of a particular meme.
What makes some memes more likely to 'catch' than others? The same things, in a sense, that make us more likely to catch a cold; weakness, fatigue, exposure and whatnot.
Armed forces, cults, religions, Alcoholics Anonymous, whatever, all focus initially on getting new recruits to break down emotionally to the point where they are convinced that they lack the ability to direct their own lives. At this point, the memetic virus enters to fill the gap. The host is given new strength in return for utter reliance upon the new virus.
This is perhaps not always a bad thing, but certainly something to watch out for.
**>>BELCH
Jon Katz reviewed The Meme Machine, not the Selfish Meme (or Gene, or whatever), as your review box suggests.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Susan has realy let memes out of their box. No more messing about in urban myths, traditions and religions. Memes are just as valid a replicator as genes with all the creative power that implies.
This book will certainly show you a different view of the world, even if you don't agree with it. It is a starting point for a new science of memetics, not the final destination. Much of it's content is speculation, but the arguments are persuasive and thought provoking. The final chapters on the nature of 'self' and 'creativity' deserve a book of their own really. You can't do such world changing theories justice in just a few pages.
I am looking forward to the articles and books written in response to Susan's ideas, as well as her next book on the subject.
Alex
Without having read the book, I can imagine that her theory is similar to Daniel Dennett's "Multiple Drafts" model of consciousness, which he presents in Consciousness Explained as an alternative to what he calls the "Cartesian Theater".
If that's correct, I would say the claim that the mind is entirely composed of memes is a matter of definition -- it sounds like she extends the definition of memes to encompass all those things that make up our "inner lives" (with or without giving a better explanation than anyone else has of exactly what those things are). I guess that makes sense, in that the concepts from "Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes" (IIRC, the relevant chapter from Dawkins' The Selfish Gene) can be applied to these things as well as to the more discrete memes. Dawkins' central idea (or one of them) was the application of the concepts of evolution beyond their traditional domain of genes, right? This is just taking it further.
I think where this would cause trouble is if you fail to keep the extended definition of "meme" in mind: if you still think of it as referring to the relatively large, discrete ideas, then it would certainly sound wrong to say that that is all the mind consists of, but I think you would be misunderstanding the theory.
Though again, I haven't read the book, and maybe this is not what she is saying at all. This is a theory that I could agree with, but if it's not the one she is suggesting, then I may or may not agree with whatever it is that she does mean.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
What if, rather, memes are a religious belief? The point being: you can model behavior all you like with one theory or another, but you really can not ever definatively answer the question: Why do we behave like we do? (Hrm, perhaps the real question is: Why do we try to understand why we behave like we do? (Ugh, nevermind :-P))
Burroughs wrote that probably 20 or 30 years before Laurie Anderson sang it. Anderson was someone who would very likely be familiar with his work. I think it was in Nova Express. I don't recall him particularly elaborating on the idea (his books are fiction, after all, and not terribly coherent fiction at that; don't get me wrong, i think he's great).
:(.
I'd try to find the relevant passage, but all my books are in storage
mahlen
What's wrong with dropping out? To me, this is the whole point: one's right
to withdraw from a social environment that offers no spiritual sustenance, and
to mind one's own business.
--William S. Burroughs
Looking at the self from an OS metaphor is an interesting idea. The way I see it, the /kernel/.. the part right above the bare hardware is brainstem, animalistic and automatic behavior, maybe also at this kernel level there is what we would call instinct, automatic thoughts, sort of (events, if you will, whereas the behavior functions only call events indirectly, that maybe take a lot of practice to override). Now, this kernel is inborn mostly, but can be modified by imprinting (OS patches) or training (evolutionary computing? not really any good metaphors). Above the kernel level, maybe theres a user-space, where we get linguistic interpreters (human language could be seen as an Idea Description Language).. this interpreter is practically a kernel process, and can patch the kernel on occation. At this same level there is a Behavioristic Descripton Language interperter, which allows us to add behaviors that the kernel doesn't have.. Hmm. this is getting confusing :) /very/ good. Well, the interpreters can send "good" events too, and reinforce patterns, and then the hardware gets more affinity toward those patterns and sends "good" by itself eventually (cultural reinforcment)..
Both of those languages might boil down to a binary fromat.. and memes appear at this level.. the hardware has affinity for certain patterns in the binary format, and this affinity causes the kernel to recieve a "good" event everytime those binaries are run, sometimes its
Yeesh.
Rave Morning.
Hehe Hope you enjoy it..
-Nick
Don't you mean "its?"
Why do you ask?
Christian R. Conrad
MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here
Well, now that memetics is itself a meme...
/some/ benefit for the host organism ("we bought M$ products before and it was cheaper, for the most part works, and had enuff bugs to keep me employed fixing them").
The parallel is, just as a certain gene, such as the one for 'blue eyes' controls certain aspects of one's physical build, a meme is an idea that influences one's behavior or decision making, what advertising is pretty much about - so if the boss says to put an SQL server up and you kneejerkingly write a purchase order for a M$ product without any thought, then you have the M$ meme - your mind is no longer in control, just a slave robot to someone else's selfish desires. Of course this process depends on the meme having
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Oh, wait, maybe those are mimes. Nevermind.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
It's just an extension of the analogy. If the
body is the product of a bunch of selfish genes,
then (simplistically) the mind is the product of
a bunch of selfish memes. Unfortunately this
is a misinterpretation of the analogy, as minds
are considered the foodsource of memes as opposed
to their vehicles (any form of media).
K.
-
How come there's an "open source" entry in the
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
A few months back, Skeptic magazine devoted most of an issue to this psychobabblizing of Meme theory and basically came to the same conclusion as Katz, I believe, except in perhaps a more skeptical manner. IIRC, they said it's an interesting theory but too much overanalyzing has been done by too many liberal-arts-degreed people, diluting the real meat of the subject.
korc
Don't you folks get it? All ideas are memes. Religious beliefs certainly are memes. The whole idea of "memes" is also a meme. Even the scientific method is a meme.
These are all ideas that have survived and flourished in people's minds, and continue to perpetuate themselves in one way or another.
The "Good Times virus" and similar hoaxes are also memes, and are obvious examples of how memes can spread like viruses.
Consiousness is the process of updating your internal representation of yourself, and that's all.
You just blew my mind. Er, wait... Maybe you just updated my internal representation of my internal representation of myself. Or something like that.
Your AI background, email address, and your choice of words suggests to me that you probably have a file named conciousness.c in your home directory. Care to release it under an open-source license? :)
Anyway, to put your statement into less programmer-like words, it sounds like you're saying that conciousness is our awareness of our own awareness. In a recursive-like fashion, we are also aware of our own awareness of our own awareness, etc. Maybe this is an interesting observation, sort of like how a turing machine can implement a turing machine?
That's not to say that we have to be fully aware of our own awareness in order to be concious. Lots of stuff goes on in our own minds that we are totally unaware of: specifically, the subconcious. "Look, Ma! I'm aware of my own lack of awareness!". ;)
All this thinking involving conciousness, AI, recursion, and turing machines has lead me to the question:
How many thoughts do you think a thought thought could think if a thought thought could think thoughts?
This gives me a headache. However, I am aware of the headache, and am also aware of my own awareness of it. As you said, my internal representation of myself has been updated. Or has it? How, exactly, do you even have an internal representation of yourself? And how is it being updated? And how can this internal representation of yourself produce such an idea as the "internal representation of yourself"? If we understand conciousness, do we really understand it, or do we just think we understand it???
The fearful insistence that consciousness is special is yet another example of the desperate provincialism that insists that the Earth is flat, that the solar system is geocentric, and that humans are the final goal of evolution.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
I haven't read the Blackmore book, and this review doesn't help much in deciding whether or not I should. There's a lot of introductory stuff here; I guess this review wasn't originally intended for the Slashdot audience.
In the small part of the review where he actually talks about the Blackmore book, Katz appears to be offended that Blackmore talks about mundane memes, instead of just the self-replicating ones. Katz seems to have missed the point about what a basic and fundamental building block of thought the meme is. This doesn't ridicule or trivialize Dawkins at all. In fact, it's vitally necessary for understanding.
From Katz's article:
If Katz actually accepts this terribly inaccurate definition of a meme, then it's no wonder that he's missed the point. I think he needs to re-read Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" -- and not just the famous Chapter 11.BTW, what's all this about "fusion meme machines" and "nuclear memes"? Is Katz simply being figurative about highly successful meme complexes, or is this this a reference to some serious theory that I'm not aware of?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Can the same be said for memes? Consider all the ways in which religions, legal systems, spoken languages, and computer operating systems have borrowed concepts from one another, and then modified the concepts that they borrowed. Which concepts, or components-of-concepts, are so basic that they can only be borrowed as "digital" units?
Furthermore: there's a branch of psychology called "social psychology", which, as you might expect, studies how social forces people's behavior and thinking. (A classic social-psychology study is the Milgram experiment, where subjects believed they were "teachers" giving fatal electric shocks to "students" in an "educational experiment".) What can "memetics" explain that current theories of social psychology, or our common-sense knowledge of how people act, can't explain? How many fans of "memetics" have even read The Social Animal, the classic (and very readable) basic textbook of social psychology?
Critical thinking is almost impossible? Maybe for some people....send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
The reading guide that accompanied The Social Animal included one study on rumors (it was done around WW2, when the government had a particular interest in the effect of rumor). Basically, subject A looked at a picture, and then described it to subject B, and so on. Anyway, then the experimenter compared the last person's description with the actual picture, and compared the description with the actual picture.
If my dim memory is correct, one thing they discovered was that emotionally touchy stuff was extremely likely to get mistransmitted to better fit the speaker's prejudices. For example, if the original picture had a white man with a knife and a black man in it, after descriptions of the picture passed throgh a few white subjects, there was a significant chance that someone would say there was a black man with a knife in the picture.
Another thing I remember from my intro-psych class is that over time, people forget the sources of the information that they remember. This is obviously useful for people in the marketing/propaganda biz -- your message will eventually sink in, even though the people who hear it know you're not an entirely trustworthy source.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
- All of the basic units you mentioned change over time (by comparison, the genetic code that maps nucleotides onto amino acids is nigh-immutable).
- Words change meaning over time, and not just by acquiring idiomatic meanings, either. For example, the word "awful" used to mean "afraid".
- The shapes of letters change over time; any decent dictionary should have charts or pictures that show the relationships between the old Phonecian alphabet, the Greek, and the Roman.
- Phonemes change over time -- that's why different native speakers have regional accents.
- If you treat words, etc., as the building-blocks of memes, what happens when someone rephrases an idea they heard in a different language? All the building-blocks have changed -- therefore, it must be a completely different meme!
- If all "memetics" has to say is that we communicate using words, and learn those words from other people, then it's a trivial and unoriginal theory.
So why do these attempts sometimes fail? Do memes come with hit points? You're doing handwaving, not science. Of course, some ideas spread quickly. People knew this long before the word "meme" was coined. And of course, some ideas don't spread so quickly. I don't see how talking about "memes" gets me any closer to understanding why some ideas spread more quickly than others. A fellow I once knew said there's a difference between keeping an open mind and letting your brains fall out.send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Brodie's book may indeed be less rigorous, but it makes the material somewhat more approachable to the masses. This has to be a Good Thing(tm).
Ask your doctor if getting up off your ass is right for you! -- Bill Maher
I'd tend to classify language more as a vector. It is a conduit (and not necessarily the only one) by which the memes are transmitted.
Ask your doctor if getting up off your ass is right for you! -- Bill Maher
While we're doing corrections - the reviewer's name is Jon Katz, not Jon Kaz.
There's a moral here, and it's name is the Preview button.
Memes are kind of like religious beliefs. Most people believe they exist but they are just about
:-)
impossible to quantify.
Hey, it looks like I got first comment
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
Yet another indication of people's commitment to read stuff that they can only criticize since they are so *obviously* the experts. Yes, that comment was immensely useful to all of us, I'm still awed by your insight. Thank You.
Okay genius. Let me guess. You have a degree in Psychology, Computer Science, and Quantum physics? I'd bet those "few lines" of Katz article are the only lines you *did* read, thus making you a hippocrite by not having done your research!
Just by the tone your post it's quite obvious that the only reason you didn't like this article was either because it's not written in C, or because it's evidently written by someone with a little more maturity than you.
I'm getting sick of the "you're responsible for what I read because I don't have the capacity to stop myself" posts. SOMEONE please moderate them out!
It seems you can psycho-analyse this guy and guess his education, just by reading his two sentences? Impressive
/. experience.
That was completely unwarranted. May I suggest the Threshold selector for a less sickening
I definately recommend the original Dawkins Paper, it'll make you think.
I was immediately sucked in by the show, but since I missed the beginning, I probably didn't get her official explanation of memes. What I did hear dissapointed me. It seemed that the definition of meme was constantly shifting and becoming more encompassing as the show went on, until a meme was practically anything we remembered.
Based on the little I know, memes most definitely exist; the very idea of memes is itself a meme: QED. Still, I have trouble with her premise that it's the memes themselves that are the active entities - that the evolution of human brains was influenced by memes so it would perpetuate and proagate memes. You know, like the one that goes "Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill." (Unix fortune)
The hypothesis is certainly a clever one, but it doesn't mean it's correct. I like to believe that atoms are really little solar systems, complete with entire civilizations. Believe me, it explains so many things! ;-)
By the way, was it William S. Burroughs who first came up with the idea that language is a virus (in Nova Express, or The Ticket That Exploded) or was it Laurie Anderson? And where did she get the idea?
Yes! Two other books I've read. Very intriguing ideas about early Christianity and a literal interpretation of the sacrament of communion (infecting the communicant with a virus from space that would allow mental contact with an extraterrestrial race, ie, God). Anyway, that's all I can accurately remember at this hour....
yet another indication of Katz' commitment to research and fact-checking, only a few lines into his article and he's already demonstrated that he hasn't bothered to read the background material on his topic. But wait, this is the internet! You just point and click your way to freedom! sorry, I forgot for a second.
Why does everone have to instantly attack someone who makes a simple mistake
I don't know, maybe it's because Katz consistently demonstrates that he is either unwilling or unable to 1) research his topic, and 2) check over his writing to see if there are any glaring errors
These are reasonable things to expect from a "professional" writer.
it's quite obvious that the only reason you didn't like this article was either because it's not written in C or because it's evidently written by someone with a little more maturity than you.
Well, Katz is a hell of a lot older than me...
But it still had social implications. Something along the lines of memes are necessary for our social makeup. darkewolf @ CyberPunks.Org
"That is not dead which can eternal lie...."
Nimheil
Um.. don't you mean The Selfish Gene ? The part on memes is a single chapter and the author wasn't nearly as serious about the idea as others have made it to be.
It may not be that kind of book at all, of course. For a book review, this was singularly uninforming. I learnt more about it from comments than from Katz's description, which was essentially three or four one-sentence paragraphs at the centre of an extended discussion on which authors on the subject he personally prefers. That should surely have been an opinion piece, not a review. A review is supposed to tell you a little more than (a) it's dry and academic - or study notes for a 12-step program (not two genres which I would have thought had a great deal in common, but still); and (b) it develops an argument which results in a discussion on how we think (goodness! A psychologist looking at that! What a surprise...)
I don't believe it's entirely fair to criticise use of coinages such as "memeplex", either. We can't all generate snap buzzwords for concepts such as the hopeful monster (Gould) or the selfish gene (Dawkins -- and it's _gene_, Katz, not meme). In fact such cool phrases can be truly annoying: therre is a limit to how often the butterfly flapping its wings can be alluded to without people ultimately forgetting all about what it was intended to illuminate. Introducing "memeplex" instead of a three-word (long-winded? Dry? Academic?) alternative might be an entirely reasonable ploy.
I have a number of books on psychology, psychiatry (note -- they are different, a distinction which escapes those who take it upon themselves to complain about the conflation of cracker and hacker. Sorry. Pet peeve), sociology, anthropology and the rest. They're not necessarily easy reading. They look at big subjects and they have their own language. There is a spectrum ranging from the "make a quick buck" variety, with their absent index and lack of references replaced by "Scientists say... Therefore it is obvious that... ", and the PhD thesis which gets turned into a book, complete with all footnotes, references and appendices. And a very wide spectrum it is.
Beyond a complaint about unnecessarily complicated language and a quick reference to 12 step programs, Jon Katz's "review" doesn't even tell me at which end of the market this book is aimed.
Nobody likes to look behind the curtain and no one accepts what they find when they do look. First of all, let's put away the term consciousness. We don't know how many memes are tangled in it, therefore we have this insufferable (hyperbole) state where everyone's right and wrong about it. Second were talking about two concepts here the world-ego (built by constant life experience) and "real"-ego (conceived because constant life experience consistently does not makes sense just on it's own account). It's like those bonehead naturalists used to say, "all there is reality, only ears, mouth, nose, skin, and eyes." Bull. Reality does not speak for itself. I will submit exhibit A: a bunch of meme halves that should account for some of what is observed- the capacity, ability, or instance (take your pick) of being aware or influenced by your own actions. Somewhere in that vat of memes exists that so-called consciousness. As for consciousness being special. I think it's vital personally toward maintaining some sort of sanity. However, I don't think humans are unique among themselves nor among the species, geni, all the way up past the kingdom classifications. It's just that I don't need that to convince me to treat people and living beings with respect. And yes I am an omnivore. I know some of you will be scratching your heads on that one. If we were to drop our pride we'd realize how much simpler and vastly more robust intelligence really is and how its natural parallelism outclasses the artificially serial educatioon system we impose on our younger population. Now there's a psycho monster to be afraid of - the serial educator. And we'd also realize how in fact our serial education system destroys critical thinking because critical thinking requires the ability to consider several issues at once, hence parallel learning is the way to go. Ya know I think of starting a hacker run www.edu.org everytime some psycho-babbler opens their mouth or writes something. Just to save future generations from the same nonsense.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
izing we've seen lately anyway?
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
nuff said.
- - -
The best site I have found discussing memes is at the Principia Cybernetica. It is well researched and well-linked.
As far as this book is concerned, it sounds like yet another psychologist coming up with a theory to end all theories, at least as far as human psychology is concerned. Freud, Adler, Jung, and Chomsky all have made the same mistake, namely the belief that their particular theory can explain all human behavior. The author of this book apparently does the same thing. While it might be interesting, that does not mean it is a complete theory.
I have not read the book, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.
3) If it is the idea that spreads infectiously through the net, then shouldn't we be looking at a way to preserve our existing cultures? The web can be a way to distribute, as well as influence information. So to put two & two together,
#ifndef RANT
#define RANT
Really bugs me that people consider cultures to be static things that need to be 'preserved' The French try to do this, the Quebecoise try to do it. IMHO, they're failing pretty badly.
#endif
Yeah, now that we have a lot of people collected to the Internet, memes can really start to spread and evolve. For example, "the meme" is itself a meme and I first heard of it here.
Different memes, like viruses, propagate with vastly varying success rates in different populations. We'll have an interesting opportunity to study memes as the networked population becomes more stratified.
Mimes give memes a bad name.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
1) the book by dawkins was "The Selfish Gene". not meme. But it was about memes. Hmmm, also, propagation is spelt wrong. HOw easy is it to put in a wee spellchecker? Ispell might be an easy way. It's just a sign of being professional, but it doesn't bother me personally.
2) I also started to think that maybe maybe the websites we're making here are at my work are weblogs too, after reading the article but it's in the eye of the beholder really. Maybe it's just the words, not the ideas that spread..
3) If it is the idea that spreads infectiously through the net, then shouldn't we be looking at a way to preserve our existing cultures? The web can be a way to distribute, as well as influence information. So to put two & two together,
4) In economics(imho of it anyway), you need a state to regulate the market for those aspects of it that are against human nature (eg: putting one cable down for each competing cable company, chlildren working in dangerous areas, whatever) but in the interests of the market. Whatever the opinion of the individual we should be aware that if all this memetic babble is true and not just pub talk, something must be done to sort out in which cases the net (and indeed anything else we create ) is actually in our best interests as individuals.
Ale
I agree with you in that many times initiatives are taken to "preserve" what has already become a boring husk of what it once was. If it is static then it is already dead.
If I were to "preserve" my culture in that sense(as an ex-chilean refugee) it would probably be all about learning outdated languages or about the lives of kings and generals in whatever old wars. And I have absolutely no interest in doing that!
What I mean by the need to watch out for the influence of the internet's "memetic spread" is more on the side of knowing my past, knowing the history about my culture that is still valuable and that can help me, see for example the fact that my father always thought of europeans as "superior" when we first arrived here, as really educated and rich people. It was hard to un-learn, but easy to understand that british people are actually the same as us chileans in those ways and many others!
This might also apply in the case of slaves, or peasants in similar cases, when for some reason they forget their past, their culture, and therefore what keeps them together as a group and gives them an identity.
I'm not sure what actually happened, but it makes sense to remove that past if you wanted to control your slaves/labourers. Better to tell people that they were animals and had no history, and that you are actually doing them a favour by letting them live and work for you.
So in reality, knowing what it's like to be chilean for me means seeing what happened, in the most open way I can, so I can forgive and understand why I'm here now. Also, chilean cooking rocks!
I wouldn't like to inflict any preservation on anyone, in the way you speak of it, but I hope you can understand from these mixed up ramblings the importance that I see it can have many times. And it isn't just something you can inflict, but also something that can be protected, so IMO free speech or freedom of information needs to take into account the information it's rubbing out beneath it if it is really free.
Ale
I always think that psychology is heading for obsolecenes - after all, many problems caused by an ego and id conflict can be neatly solved by Prozac (or plain old ethanol). The more progress we make in neurobiology, the less we need to rely on a tradition rooted in the last century.
you try taking prozac and see how "neat" a solution it is. You obviously have not had any experience with medications. Chemistry as the sole solution to emotional issues is a concept from the 60's, where everything was instant, in-a-can, in-a-pill, spray-on, etc. The same mentality would ultimately have all cognitive functionality manipuated through physical/chemical means....brings a whole new meaning to getting a college degree (just take a pill, it will assemble all the appropriate neural pathways for you overnight!)
I think talking and thinking will remain as the primary means of overcoming one's emotional difficulties, with medications used as supplemental support for severe illness.
Female Prison Rape in NY
William S. Burroughs made this whole argument first and most simply in his essay "Word Virus." He went into the line of thought that all words are only words because we assign meaning to them. Just like a meme these words then infect the vocabulary of the person that this word is spoken too. And in the same way a virus grows. The word's reach expands.
The body is an illusion caused by the way a large number of related microbes congregate.
A rather substantial branch of biology and medicine is based on this point of view.
Still, I'd have to see a bit more evidence that the self-kernal is a mere collection of memes. I suspect that an OS metaphor is closer to the truth: there is a kernal, and there are many core components (memes) that are more or less part of the OS, but not part of the kernal. Is the kernal what we feel as conciousness? Idunno. But I suspect that there is a kernal that is not a meme, in that it does not spread from one individual to another.
What is usualy considered a meme is a more optional item. Maybe an important one like "in this civilization, we usualy wear clothes in public" or "gravel is not food". But we can imagine a person not harboring such a meme, at least for a while. Fundimental items like "breathing once in a while is good for your health" are typicaly not considered memes. And I suspect that the foundation of conciousness is one of those fundimental items. Things like internal dialog, the mind movie, and the self-symbol might be memes, though.
Fear my wrath, please, fear my wrath?
Homer
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Religion, philosophy, and the irrational have always played important roles in science. Copernicus' scientific writings included a significant religious component. The structure of benzene was discovered thanks to a researcher's dream. Political, cultural, and economic realities have an immense effect on scientific research: they largely determine which research gets funded, as well as the sorts of theories that occur to scientists. There is no clear boundary between facts and values. The notion that scientific truth is the product of the pure application of a "scientific method" is a fiction.
This fiction exists because of a power struggle over the role of science in society. The question is, who gets to decide what is true for all of society? Religious and scientific groups, among others, have been fighting this battle for centuries. Each group tries to present its kind of truth as pure and infallible.
The human activity we call science encompasses a great variety of approches to truth. Chemistry, astrophysics, archeology, and Chinese medicine don't use the same methods or criteria of success. Rather than defining science in terms of its methods, it would be more appropriate to define it in terms of its goals, which might be described this way: to understand nature, usually in order to control it.
If you're interested in these themes, two classic works are Against Method by Paul Feyerabend and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn.
--
Slightly off topic point... That review reads like a pasting. You're essentially saying that the book is convoluted, abstruse and deeply flawed. Yet it gets 6/10. Doesn't anybody ever use the bottom half of the scoreboard?
"you can't have half of Huntington's chorea"
This may well be true (I haven't a clue as to what Huntington's chorea is) but I can tell you that you can have half of sickle-cell anemia. In fact, the reason sickle-cell anemia has become so wide-spread in some specific regions is that the half-way version is a very powerful advantage in those regions. The half-way condition (I'm sure it has a name, but I can't remember it) stops Malaria (I'm almost positive it was Malaria) by only "sickling" (The cells affected will change from the normal disc shape to a curled up curve, looking similar to a crescent moon) those blood cells which were infected by the disease. A cell so affected is culled from the blood stream before it can infect others, and thus, those with this mutation can survive Malaria whereas those without are much less likely to do so. Sickle cell anemia is a case where both parents pass on a copy of the mutation and all blood cells have a chance to become sickled.
Anyways, getting back to the topic at hand, it is possible to have a partial genetic condition. Whereas nucleotides are digital units, genes are not. They are large chains of small units, and the composition and order of those units is what is important. The idea that a meme could be absorbed and then altered stands perfectly to reason and analogy. Consider any retro-virus. These viruses invade and then alter existing cells with their DNA, with their genes to cause something entirely different to occur in some cases, but more frequently to alter what normally occurs very slightly. The cell continues to build proteins, etc. as normal, but the product is what the virus wants, and it normally isn't quite the same as what the cell would ordinarily build. These retro-viruses borrow what already exists "and then modified the that they borrowed."
What components of concepts are so basic that they can be borrowed only as digital units? Well, there are building block units. I'm using them to write to you. Words, letters, phonemes are so small that while they can be modified in appearence, their meaning is very difficult to alter. In the analogy, these are the nucleotides, the individual pices that string toggether to form DNA. Or better, if yu know some cell biology, it is like tRNA. The individual pieces can get altered, but the overall meaning remains the same.
Social Psychology can explain a lot. It can also predict a lot. Then again, the Babylonians, using an Earth-centered astronmical set, could explain the motions in the sky. They could also precisely predict eclipses and severalother phenomona. That doesn't mean it was the best theory to use. Perhaps Memetics can't explain anything new, but it can explain some things better. Social Psychology has a great deal of difficulty explaining some interactions, or the reasons that certain ideas remain when better ones are available (eg. why do people use M$ products over others, or why did people resist the notion that gravity affected all objects equally?) From my limited reading in Psychology, and Social Psychology in specific, the reasons behind these types of occurences tend to be rather long explantions of complex inner workings of the mind, often dealing with general inertia about changing attitudes, views or learning new methods. Well, if a meme was particularly good at spreading, it might also be defensive. It has already claimed a mind and would make every attempt to stop others from invading that would be able to displace it. Memetics may not be an end-all theory, but it certainly could help to explain some things that Social Psychology and commonn-sense knowledge already know to be true, but are unable to expalin directly.
As for critical thinking impossible, I think your Social Psychology memes are interfering with your acceptance of of memetic memes. The idea of an infectious idea is evidently heavily prevalent on the web. It is difficult to believe that anyone would refute that ideas spread quickly, especially someone who purportedly thinks critically. Make sure you are actually thinking, and not just rearranging prejudices. We critical thinkers tend to be a bit more receptive to new ideas, and keep our memes in good order, with defensive mechanisms disabled.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
Memes make me think of the Sarif-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics -- essentially that the way and what we think are defined by our language (i.e. newspeak in 1984). On the surface level, it makes sense and it's catchy as all hell. But the more you think about it, the more holes you start to see in it. This doesn't mean it's a poorly constructed theory or that it's wrong, it just means that it hasn't evolved into a working, usable model yet.
/. readers have pointed out the inherently memitical (let's coin some new buzzwords here!) nature of the meme itself; Indeed, it seems to be a rather virulent one. Five years ago most people would have blinked when asked to describe a meme, now anyone who reads wired, is into conspiracy theory, studies linguistics, social psychology or public relations, etc. will be able to give you a relitively succinct and accurate definition.
I havn't read the new book, perhaps someone who has can clarify this for me: is the method in which the memes are introduced taken into account?
The most successful ideas are those that have been marketed well. It's hard to have a successful product without a catchy phrase. Social Darwinism is more Lamarkian than Darwinistic, but Social Darwinism is a better way to sell it -- regardless of the nature of the idea itself and what psychological needs it satisfies.
A number of
But this hardly qualifies as proof -- so let's just sit back, wait and see. If it looks like a solid object, it might just be a lot of empty space with some electrons whizzing around that you can't pinpoint.
more on memes and memetic engineering at disinfo
-- r . m o s q u i t o --
Genes may be digital, but gene sequences, and hence traits, can be modified. It is these combinations that are modified and transmitted. While I agree that the meme is hardly the "building block" of ideas that popular conceptions have made it out to be, I think it is useful to look at the spread of ideas the way genetic traits spread through species.
It would be interesting to compare the game of "telephone," for instance, to random mutations in genes, especially in a medium like the internet. There are inherent limits to any such analogy--we can change our ideas over the course of one lifetime, and we can do so consciously in addition to the accumulated noise in transmission--whereas a virus can either only survive or die, and the only changes are due to natural selection and random mutation.
Of course, a memeticist would probably argue that natural selection and the conscious adoption/adaptation/rejection of ideas are equivalent, but I think that's stretching the analogy to the breaking point.
It was all written before in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Earth is a very big computer, and as a computer, it is not free from viruses.
As Lovelock says, Earth is huge living been. It is easier if you make analogies of earth with our own body. Neurons are part of our Brain, and they intercommunicate by synapses, having the capability of forming patterns and creating information from our senses.
Now, let's say that the whole earth "thinks", let's say that it have a "uberBrain". So, each one of us are one uberNeuron, and we intercommunicate (by talking and writing) with each other, acting like a very large information system (that produces sciences, religions, answers and questions), that is, the computer that Magrathea created.
Memes are just informations with a very high priority travelling through those uberNeurons. Science is the creativity of the uberBrain, the thing that form "ideas".
If a extraterrestrial advanced civilization come to Earth, they will not talk to individuals, they will talk to the whole Earth, to the uberBrain. They will learn all our science, culture and religions. It will be a uberBrain talking to another uberBrain, because just like you can't talk to a neuron, another civilization can't talk to a individual (uberNeuron).
As I said before, every information that travel have a priority. Informations with low contents like "My socks are white" don't have good priority and are lost easily. But those with high contents (for example this text), are keep forever in the uberBrain travelling between the uberNeurons, and they are called memes.
It may not sound so clear now, but you will heard more about it in the future...
I would like to sorry about the grammatic and ortographic errors because I don't speak you language, I am not from your country, I may even be from another time.
-- You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.
People are stupid because they don't have enough Meme's! The more Meme's you have, the more abilities you can do (play the piano, program a computer, travel the universe with an open mind) - plus if Meme's were existant in most people, the delusion called GOD would NOT exist. See how stupid people are? It seems the only Meme they have within them is the 'breeding' ability Meme. They're nothing a bunch of drones; who is to care if most of them are wiped away from the planet? I know I wouldn't be one of the ones mourning such a pathetic loss.