Continued from thread “God’s greatest mistakes”. https://tokyo3.org/forums/holiday/topics/13813/
God’s greatest mistakes → Answer to the ultimate question → The meme machine
By the way, nobody pulled me up on my listing of “cliffs” among God’s greatest mistakes. Consider the Nullarbor cliffs. The sea level fluctuates. It has has only been at the current level for 10,000 years. The Nullarbor cliffs retreat an average of 10 cm a year due to wave action. Over 10,000 years that’s only 100 metres. 100 metres is nowhere near long enough to explain height and strata of the Nullarbor cliffs. Or many other cliff faces around the world. There’s no point in extending the timescale further than that because sea levels were very variable. In a nutshell, proposing that all the world’s current coastlines – beaches, cliffs, etc. – were formed in only 10,000 years is ridiculous.
There is a way around this by adding up different lengths of time at different sea levels, but even that doesn’t work very well, because sea cliffs cease to be sea cliffs whenever the sea level drops.
I totally recommend this book The Meme Machine (MM) by Susan Blackmore. It is both readable and informative. It is suitable for people of every educational level. The logic is solid. It is better written than any other non-fiction book I know!
MM begins with Imitation comes naturally to us humans. We copy each other all the time … When you imitate someone else, something is passed on we call this the meme. Imitation is not necessarily exact copying, passing on the gist of a story counts as imitation. Everything passed from person to person by imitation is a meme, this includes stories and songs, words and skills.
MM takes on board Dawkins selfish gene idea which is: in the gene’s eye view, evolution may appear to procede in the interests of the individual, or for the good of the species, but is in fact driven by the competition between genes. … Dawkins introduced the important distinction between replicators and their vehicles. The meme is the replicator of culture, in the same way that the gene is the replicator of anatomy.
Memes spread themselves around indiscriminately without regard to whether they are useful, neutral, or positively harmful to us. Positively harmful memes include pyramid schemes and fraud. Instead of thinking of ideas as own creations, and as working for us, we have to think of them as autonomous memes, working only to get themselves copied. This is a scary idea indeed … the idea of memes strikes at the deepest assumptions of who we are and why we are here.
(It was too scary for me when I had that idea back in the mid 1970s. I quickly shut down that line of thought).
For a theory of memes to be worth having … it must be able to explain things more economically or comprehensively, and must lead to testable predictions that turn out to be correct.
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection … is beautiful because is so simple and yet its results are so complex … Darwin’s argument requires three main features: variation, selection and retention (or heredity). Given those features, evolution is inevitable.
Daniel Dennett and Stuart Kauffman described the whole evolutionary process as an algorithm … Algorithms are substrate neutral, meaning they can run on a variety of different materials … Algorithms are also completely mindless. We cannot predict exactly how it will all unfold and can only stand back and watch the pageant. Evolution uses its own products to climb upon.
Memes certainly come with variation … There is memetic selection … Then, when memes are passed on there is retention of some of the ideas or behaviours in that meme. MM gives an example from an urban myth.
Where do new memes come from? They come about through variation and combination of old ones – either inside one person’s mind, or when memes are passed from person to person. … Human creativity is a process of variation and recombination.
Not all thoughts are memes … However, in practice, because we use memes so much, much of our thinking is coloured by them. My own view is that the idea of memes is an example of the best use of analogy in science. The analogy between memes and genes, like all analogies, should not be pressed too far. The specific details of how each replicator works might be quite different. Also, memes are not the only other replicators to consider. Our immune systems are now known to work by selection.
The sentence ‘Copy me’ is a simple example of a self-replicating sentence. A memeplex is a group of memes that is replicated together … genes go around in groups, too. Most computer viruses do little else than replicate themselves using stolen replicating machinery, so the comparison with viruses is apt. Might we build the equivalent of a computer bacteria? … This idea seems to stretch the analogy too far. The vast majority of memes, like the vast majority of memes, cannot be considered as viral at all. … The competition of memes to get into our brains has made us the kinds of creatures we are.
Analogies have been drawn between biological evolution and the evolution of culture since the days of Darwin’s contemporaries. Darwinian explanations require more than just the accumulation of variation over time. Language provides a good example of cultural evolution.
Another example is the spread of inventions. Why did farming spread at all, if it did not make life easier? Memes might spread because the appear to provide advantages even when they do not.
Innovations evolve in the sense that they arise from what went before. Technology develops with very limited specific goals, not for the grand goal of the advancement of humanity.
Carl Popper separated the world of physical objects from the world of sensations and emotion, from the world of ideas. How can an idea change the physical world? In memetic terms, all that happens – whether in science or art – is selective imitation.
If there are two replicators, genes and memes, then there will inevitably be conflicts of interest. If they occur, they prove that we need a theory of memes. … In the Foré people, the maladaptive practice of cannibalism among women and children but not among men led to the loss of up to 50% of the population but could still spread through the community.
(To page 36).
Memes do not really have eyes or points of view. The memes’s eye view is the view that looks at the world in terms of opportunities for replication. Imagine a world full of memes and far more memes than can possibly find homes. Now ask, which memes are more likely to find a safe home and get passed on again? We could not (even in principle) calculate the proportion of potential memes that actually do get passed on.
Why can’t we stop thinking? Thinking requires energy that is not entirely negligible. Presumably then, all this thinking has some function, but what? Think about brains without memes. Thoughts are limited to one brain and subject to the pressures of natural selection.
The weed theory of memes is that an empty mind is like a vegetable garden where the earth is ready for anything to grow. There are far more seeds in the soil and the air than can possibly grow into mature plants. This is just what seeds do.
There are other analogies in the world of biology. Think of a forest. Every tree has to compete for light. Who benefits from this competition? Not the trees. They have all invested enormous amounts of energy into growing the trunks and are still competing with each other. The beneficiary is the successful gene, not the trees.
Once you grasp the basic idea of memes, it is all too easy to think of everything as a meme. The emphasis on imitation allows us to rule out all kinds of things that cannot be passed on. Perceptual experience does not necessarily involve memes. A cat has a complex and detailed map of the world. Her life includes many of the experiences that I can recognise in my life too – perception, memory, learning, exploration, food preferences, communication and social relationships. These have usually not been acquired by imitation and so are not memes.
Psychology traditionally deals with two major types of individual learning. In Pavlov’s classical conditioning, two stimuli become associated by repeated pairing. Skinner’s operant conditioning is when a behaviour is either rewarded or punished. There is a similarity between operant conditioning and natural selection. Much of human learning is Skinnerian and not memetic. We can probably never tease out those things we have personally learned by imitation from those we have learned in other ways – but in principle the two are different.
(Page 45)
In later chapters, Susan Blackmore explains the presence of altruism from a meme’s point of view. Altruism could not be explained by Dawkins in his “The selfish gene”.
(I’m trying to see if I can get any insights into the origin of biological life by analogy with the origins of memetic life. There are some insights).
