Memes and you

[OrphanPip]

I don't believe in memes, but I can understand how memetics might be a useful way of thinking how particular ideas change over time in gradual ways, and how they compete with other similar ideas.

It's not really productive to think of genes as selfish, although that is how Dawkins chooses to present it metaphorically. It is just that certain genes may be in competition with the fitness of the organism they are carried in. For example, the genes that cause worker ants to forgo reproduction and put all their energy into feeding the queen and future queens. In this sense it is not the genes of the individual ants clearly do not benefit the individual organism, they benefit the queen, or themselves. How can these types of social organisations develop, the answer is genes which favour their own selection over the selection of the individual.

I personally think selection operates at several levels, from the gene level (the selfish gene concept), to the organismal and possibly the group level (although it is arguable that group selection is redundant and anything explained by group selection can be explained by selection of individuals, and in turn it is arguable that gene selection renders the selection of individuals redundant). If we think of selection operating at the level of the gene, even when they are genes that survive because they allow the organism they are found in to survive, it explains the same thing as looking merely at the selection at the level of the organism. These things are not actually separate concepts, but different perspectives on the same mechanism of natural selection. Ultimately, gene-centric selection explains more than older models, that is why it has grown to become dominant in the biological sciences, when it was perhaps about 50/50 back in the 70s when Dawkins first published the Selfish Gene.

In essence the concept of a "selfish gene" is no different than the concept of a selfish individual.

Now for the question of the evolution of sexual selection. This is a place where we might look at how selection at the level of the organism may be more explicative than selection at the level of the gene. Because, as conventional wisdom goes, populations with sexual reproduction are capable of evolving faster and dealing with environmental change better than asexual reproductive organisms, so they out compete most asexual organisms. This is just with complex eukaryotes though. Even some bacteria reproduce sexually, except they swap genes with each other directly without producing offspring. Although, I'm not sure sexual reproduction can't also be explained by gene-centric selection, for example the genes involved in sexual selection certainly benefit from the success of the phenomenon, even if perhaps individual alleles don't benefit from possibly being left out of the reproductive line by the randomness of the meiotic process.

[Theunderground]

This shows me how 'concepts' and 'words' become bigger than plain reality.
Those who dont want to accept a personality as distinct from 'the determined by biology class' are really ignoring the biggest empirical evidence there is...Aka,themselves. Unless you have no distinct personality that is?

[Ian VotV]

A lot of people I know believe that ideas and concepts are things called 'memes' (a concept created by Dawkins), and that ideas and concepts evolve and become extinct in the same way as biological organisms do, in accordance with Darwinian ideas of evolution (if I'm correct about the idea). I'm a bit suspicious of this. I'm wondering if there are any among you that feel the same as me about this meme idea, or if I am rejecting something which is accepted by almost everyone?

I dont think most people reject the idea of memes (theres a pun in itself). It is generally, i would think, understood that ideas and trends come and go and evolve. The internet is the best breeding ground !

I love the term memes and have used it wheneverpossible for a long time, but i do also think that some people might see it as a fancy new term, allbeit one that describes a process that most people can grasp.

ian

[YesNo]

I think we basically agree, OrphanPip, and I like the idea you mentioned of selection operating on different levels. Thanks for the response.

[OrphanPip]

This shows me how 'concepts' and 'words' become bigger than plain reality.
Those who dont want to accept a personality as distinct from 'the determined by biology class' are really ignoring the biggest empirical evidence there is...Aka,themselves. Unless you have no distinct personality that is?

Once again, I fail to see how a materialist understanding of human cognition in any way contradicts diversity of personality.

[Theunderground]

Ok,to clarify. what 'causes' the difference in personality? Is it a 'material cause' or the fact that every person has an intrinsic independent personality. ( ie,independent from material causes.) Hope you understand what i am saying.

[Heteronym]

Memes seem to me like a simple thing that was blown out of proportions. Humans have throughout history exchanged ideas and information, and around the 1970s Dawkins coined the term. I really don't see how saying meme is more special than saying idea.

[YesNo]

The way I see the difference between "meme" and "idea" is that an idea originates within human consciousness and can be considered a product of it while a meme has its existence, assuming it exists at all, outside of human consciousness.

[Heteronym]

I've been reading Mary Midgley's The Myths We Live By, an excellent philosophy books that confronts a lot of modern muddled thinking. One of her many targets is memes. She devotes many essays to memetics, taking the matter far beyond what's been discussed here so far. She begins by lamenting the fact that methods used in physics have extended to other areas of knowledge where they make no sense. When Newton, in the 17th century, discovered the laws of nature, philosophers believed that they could find sweeping big ideas that could explain the whole of the social sciences too. Apparently what worked for planetary orbits also worked for humans. This is called scientism, the belief that only science can explain things. From this Midgley explains that:

"Standards are now set that concentrate on form, not on the suitability to the subject-matter, This makes it necessary to use methods which closely imitate the forms of physical science. And among those forms, a prime favourite is, of course, atomism."

So memes are analagous to genes because it makes the study of culture and human ideas sound more scientific. In the same way that genes are the basic building blocks of life, memologists think memes are basic building blocks of culture. The problem, as Midgley points out, "is that thought and culture are not the sort of thing that can have distinct units. They do not have a granular structure for the same reason that ocean currents do not have one - namely, because they are not stuffs but patterns."

What are memes? According to Dawkins, they are 'tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes-fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches,' just about anything really. So she asks:

"If memes really correspond to genes of culture they cannot be its units. These are completely different ideas. Considered as genes, they would not be the cultural phenomena themselves but, instead, a set of hidden entities which were their causes. In that case they must indeed be fixed units, unchanging causes of the changing items that appear in the world. But all the examples we are given correspond to phenotypes. They are the apparent items themselves. Moreover, most of the concepts mentioned cannot possibly be treated as unchanging or even as moderately solid."

So if memes are "hidden causes of culture rather than its units, what sort of entities are these causes supposed to be? They are not physical objects. But neither are they thoughts or ideas of the kind that normally play any part in our experience. They seem to be occult causes of those thoughts. How then do they manifest themselves? What makes us think they are there? It does not help to say that they are are bits of information in the infosphere. Information is not a third kind of stuff. It is not an extra substance added to Cartesian mind and body or designed to supersede them. It is an abstraction from them. Invoking such an extra stuff is as idle as any earlier talk of phlogiston or animal spirits or occult forces. Information is facts about the world, and we need to know where, in that world, these new and causally effective entities are to be found."

The problem with Susan Blackmore's assertion that we're just 'meme machines,' a very reductive way of conceiving people, is that ultimately it means we just follow the purposes of alien viruses and have no purposes of our own. "If anyone actually did try to believe this," Midgley argue, "it is hard to see what practical consequences could follow other than helpless fatalism, quickly followed by general breakdown. It is clear that the suggestion is, like so many other learned suggestions about selves, merely a peper doctrine about other people, not one by which anyone could live." I should add, it's just replacing God with memes.

Midgley continues: "As William of Occam observed, varieties of entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. When human beings think and act, no extra entities need to be present in them besides themselves." For me this is the crucial point of her argument. Before memes we already had the language and the concepts to study and understand the way ideas changed, and we also had awareness that some ideas survive and others don't - and it happens because we change them in reaction to the context of our world. Memes are just a redundant entity to explain human motivation.

She then addresses one of Daniel Dennett's points about memes, namely that it explains why people sometimes have ideas contrary to their well-being; so it follows that they serve someone else's reasons - this someone else is the meme. The idea that our self-destructive thoughts are not our own but caused from outsider entities is most appealing, if you're interested in stealing people of all agency and personal responsibility. This of course is what Midgley warns against when she points out that social sciences have borrowed natural sciences propensity for sweeping big ideas that explain everything. Science has the habit of explaining things in simple ways. But humans are very complicated, messy things. Midgley quickly explains why Dennett's approach to memes is not to our advantage:

"The fact that our thoughts and customs are not always to our advantage is not a new scientific discovery. It is a familiar platitude, both in daily life and in traditional humanistic thinking. We know all too well that our thoughts and customs often lead us to act foolishly, destructively, even suicidally. And the crucial point about this self-destructive tendency - the thing that makes it most distressing - is that in these cases the conflicting motives which lead to the trouble are indeed all our own. They do not arise from possession by some kind of external parasite. They are warring parts of ourselves."

She then concludes with a wonderful defense of literature:

"That is why literature is such an important part of our lives, why the notion that it is less important than science is so mistaken. Shakespeare and Tolstoy help us understand the self-destructive psychology of despotism. Flaubert and Racine illuminate the self-destructive side of love. What we need to grasp in such cases is not the simple fact that people are acting against their interests. We know that; it stands out a mile. We need to understand, beyond this, what kind of gratification they are getting from acting in this way. If, instead of looking for this factor directly and imaginatively by studying their conduct, we were to shift our attention to the alleged interactions between populations of memes, as Dennett advises, we would lose a crucially important source of knowledge in order to pursue a phantom."

I of course recommend reading the whole book, if you're interested in the discussion of memes.

[YesNo]

I see a couple books by Mary Midgley in the library. I think I'll check out The Ethical Primate tomorrow. Her views on memes seem to agree with mine.

I also don't like the "selfish" metaphor used to describe genes or memes. Genes have no basis on which to be "selfish" and with sexual reproduction it looks like "cooperation" is a better metaphor for their behavior. I got that idea from Niles Eldredge.