I too find the meme concept very useful and explanatory.

I think the fundamental aspect of the meme is that memes are parasitic on our thought patterns, and 'evolve' independently of our own biology. This explains how ideas that are not helpful to our own personal reproductive success can nevertheless spread. The meme of religious celibacy may be one example of this.

A successful meme is one that appeals strongly to some aspect of our thought processes. It will be even be even more successful if it strongly inspires the person 'infected' to try to persuade others to adopt the meme, hence the obvious application to religious proselytizing.

Have you read Susan Blackmore's "the Meme Machine"?

Meme for celibacy certainly wouldn't affect the survival of the species to any significant degree, of course.

But a biological 'gene' for celibacy would not spread very well at all.  This was my point - it requires something like a memetic mechanism to spread. A genuine commitment to celibacy is likely to have a rather significant impact on the reproductive success of the individuals holding it.

<<<<< I have a friend who is a Christian fundamentalist who believes that someday soon Jesus will fly to earth on a cloud and all the dead people will rise from their graves to meet Jesus in the sky. >>>>>

Dawkins does a great job explaining why this is so in "Root of All Evil."  On Youtube.  Children are very volunable because they are wired by natural selection to copy.  That's why kids believe in Santa Claus.  The programming runs deep and many of the membots are incurable.  Take the hell meme, for instance; some membots will carry the fear the rest of their lives like a cureless brain wart.

 

<<<<<But memes have also infected my brain. >>>>>

A metameme is a meme about memetics.  Quite true, metamemes can infect brains in the same way as any other meme.  But memeplexes have different degrees of toxicity.  Your not going to become a suicide bomber because you carry information about memes. 

Neat story about the camouflage pants.  I like the one about urban teens that wear their baseball caps backward.  Completely defeats the purpose of the cap; the visor is there to shield the eyes from the sun.  But to their peers, it's "cool" to do so.  Peer acceptance, girls, being different, being rebelious are all memetic hooks that account for the contagion of this strange behavior. 

Youtube "Susan Blackmore."   She has a 10-minute lecture on there that is just delightful.  She's great; you'll enjoy it.  I like her line in The Meme Machine where she says that memeplexes actually shaped western civilization to facilitate their replication.  There's a church every few blocks where I live in Sarasota, Fl. 

 

<<<<< Further discussion about memes on this forum may spark more interest in memes and spread the information like a virus. >>>>>

I would like that very much.  The social science (it's not a true science like genetics) has been repudiated by much of academia because people don't like to hear that their most cherished beliefs are nothing more than the memotype of a malicious, selfish computer virus that's grows in their brain like a tumor.

Great stuff

To be continued,

 

 

 

 

I recently wrote my bachelors dissertation on memes, particularly in relation to Marxism. My forthcoming Masters dissertation will seek to apply the theory to the link between Culture and Power. I love the theory, it's wonderfully simple. I would hold back on the parasite analogy and stick to the gene analogy. My reasoning here is that parasite implies something that is malicious to the host. A better analogy would be the many bacteria that live in our bodies (according to Dennett, for every one human cell in our bodies there will be nine alien cells), many of these alien cells are not only beneficial but essential for our survival, it is a fair trade, we provide the necessary conditions for them to survive and they perform essential tasks in our survival machine: breaking down nutrients, bolstering our immune system etc.

We couldn't have functioning human brains without memes, just as we couldn't have a functioning digestive system without bacteria. Memes are just part of the way that our minds work. Some memes are like pro-biotic yoghurt that help us to be happy, some (like science) are 'good for the eyesight' and help us to see truth, whilst others it is true are malevolent parasites akin to AIDS or lancet flukes. The discovery of the meme meme is important because this particular meme allows us to see all memes for what they are, and can help to keep our minds immune from outside parasites. The meme meme is like the mother of all vaccines, combined with a healthy portion of fruit and pro-biotic yoghurt.

 

Are our conscious thoughts built entirely on memes? And if so, is what we think of the "self" nothing more than a lifetime collection of memes interacting with one another?

Rick

Jacob, You certainly elevate the level of this discussion.  Thanks.  I had an idea of Memetics 101, and now I find myself hitting my bookcase in search of info about the selfplex.  That's cool; let's try to keep the discussion open to all, beginners as well as avid devotees. 

 

Definitely.  Memes are an important part of primate evolution.  The analogy is accurate.  Most memes are beneficial and have been selected because they aid our chances of survival—how to ignite a fire, for instance.  Or sharpen a spear. 

I focused on the pernicious memes because of the relevancy of religion to the RRS board. 

Again, I agree.  I like the term metameme, a meme about memetics, but either way it's certain the more we know about the process the better.  When a Jahovah Witness knocks on your door, it's great to know—behind that charming, smiley face—is a benighted, programmed creature who wants to infect you with a deadly, mind-controlling memetic hook.  God bless 'im.

 

 

 

 

I'd like to put it slightly differently. Memes are selected because they are good for their own survival. If they are or appear to be good for the host, then that aids their replication into new minds. Let's look for example at an alternative "medicine" like homeopathy. Homeopathy has been around for well over a hundred years, but in recent years has seen a significant increase along with post-modernism. The idea that something is alternative to the 'norms' of society is appealing to many people who think that maybe science isn't all it's cracked up to be. The word "alternative" also connotes a level of equality or even superiority to conventional medicine. Then of course the word medicine is also appealing because people think that these remedies (which actually only contain water) will actually cure them. These factors along with the placebo effect make homeopathy an extremely appealing meme.

Yep. The combination of infectious religious memes and adolescent horniness and it's easy to see why a teenage Muslim would want to rush to the orgy.

Rick

 

 

I am God as you, There's a paragraph in Mirror Reversal that touches on your idea.    It's pretty far out but I wonder what you and the others think of it. 

 

    “It’s Anne Frank who’s the inspiration of our species. Even locked in the jaws of insanity, she realized that our species is still in infant stages and forgave her Nazi tormenters. The alternative, that it was all a waste of time, is unbearable to contemplate.

   “It took a half a billion years to evolve a primordial bacterium. Another two billion to evolve a cell with a localized nucleus. A billion more to evolve complex animals. How long should it take to evolve an omniscient God? But just as the biosphere is the total of life on our precious planet, the noosphere is the total knowledge and wisdom -- and growing exponentially. What an irony of cosmic proportions that people believe humanity was created in the image of God. But we were the nascent God all the time.” 

 

As Carl Sagan said, "it's just one more item on the infinite list of unrequited possibilities."  Not believing in God has some definite benefits.  We can throw out all "the devil" nonsense, for instance—and live without fear of vampires and demons.  

Also, Calvin's idea of predestination.  If there's no God, He can't be pulling the strings of our personal lives.   The fact is, we can't predict one minute into the future, much less a lifetime.

So, humanity's future is undetermined.   We'll have to break out of the Dark Ages before we evolve into a spiritual entity.  But I believe apotheosis is possible. 

In terms of the Prime Directive, the force that governs all life, homo sp is no more advanced than a rodent or insect.  As long as people keep on making as many babies as they can, and go to war to expand their territory, I don't see how religious people can consider humanity more evolved on a spiritual plane than fish. 

In short, as Sagan said in his last interview, we need a new religion based on a cosmology revealed by science.

 

 

 

 

Wonko, the Anne Frank quote was taken out of context.  The following is the paragraph from the last chapter of Mirror Reversal. 

    “We’ve come so far as a species. I’ll never give up on humanity. We took so long to evolve. Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, and recently Kurt Vonnegut all gave up on humanity before they died. But like the insuperable warrior, wounded, bloody and unable to walk, who faces the enemy onslaught pistol in hand, I’ll never give up hope. Religion and superstition mustn’t be allowed to destroy the world with their apocalyptic nonsense, the Endmeme that pervades all religions. 

    “It’s Anne Frank who’s the inspiration of our species. Even locked in the jaws of insanity, she realized that our species is still in infant stages and forgave her Nazi tormenters. The alternative, that it was all a waste of time, is unbearable to contemplate.  The point is that we only have species consciousness, i.e. knowing how we stand in relation to the other life on the planet, since 1859, the publication of Origins of Species.  We're still infants from a phylogenic point of view. The Endmeme is my own term and is defined in the Mirror Reversal Glossary.  It's the belief that Christ is coming back and this time it's NO MORE MISTER NICEGUY.  He's coming back with hordes of pissed off angles and the four horsemen who are Famine, Plague, War and Death.  And Death rides a pale horse so look out. The Endmeme is a horrible threat to humanity and there wasn't even a term for it in science and psychology textbooks until I came along.  Shows the power of memetics. Getting back to Anne Frank, she kept up hope until the very end, which was by treachery of a trusted friend.  There's a quote in the last chapter on how she forgave the Nazi because she realized humanity was still in early stages.  One last point on this:  H.G. Wells was one of the greatest science fiction prophets of the century.  He was cremated but wanted as an epitaph, "You fools, you should have listened to me."  He never gave up hope for humanity but admitted it didn't look good.  But we have to keep trying (to save it).        

 

this is interesting, jacob.  i've actually been thinking about this for several months, since you told me you were a memetic materialist.  while, as i said, i'm not entirely sold on dialectical materialism, i can understand the dialectic in the class struggle as the driving force of history much more easily than this sort of hard-wired memetic aspect.  if memetic theory can be applied to marxism, how does the possibility of a classless society fit in?  i can very well understand how the dialectical struggle can negate itself (the negation of the negation) in the dictatorship of the proletariat and thence to the highest stage of communism, but if historical materialism is driven by memes, won't any proletarian revolution be treading water at best?  i mean, no matter whose hands the means of production are in, we can't escape from our own natures, right?

well, i wasn't referring to an inevitability of a classless society, but whether, under the idea of memetics, it would even be possible at all.  dogmatic marxism is not marxism because marx, of course, modified his views several times and would still be modifying them were he alive today.  your notions sound like a more eloquent exposition of one of mao's opinions, i.e., things will always change, there will always be dialectics, and "the negation of the negation does not exist."  this is also interesting.

i am in 100% agreement with you that a proletarian revolution is not inevitable.  i think the end of global capitalism as we have known it is inevitable because so much of it relies on nonrenewable resources.  i am also in 100% agreement with you about micro-factors, which is why i tend to identify myself as a trotskyist.  trotsky was very adept at recognizing the dialectics within the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie, etc., and applying them to current events.  he was also an active revolutionary and you're absolutely right: communism is not a cloud cuckoo land for marxists to sit and dream of, waiting for it to float down into their laps like it's owed to them.  imo, a marxist is by definition an active revolutionary, even if that activity extends only as far as the ballot box (which imo is like punching a stone wall but at least it's something).

i would love to read your disseration.  currently, however, i teach english more than 40 hours a week, proofread translations, and i'm building my house myself.  no time at the moment, i'm afraid.