Memes: what are they?

BlueBanana

It all started months ago, when one of my buddies just casually brought up how memes follow the laws of market economy. That was how I got into the subject. I immediately rejected the whole thought as ridiculous for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, dankness can't just appear out of nowhere. Demand of course increases the supply of memes, but the memes don't even have price. Or do they? What if we use the time spent on memes as price? But enough of that, dankness doesn't correlate accordingly with quantity, so the amount of dank is clearly not a constant.

Secondly, it's just arrogant to think we puny mortal humans could affect memes in any way. It's just that the mid level memers want to feel superior to normies while thinking they can one day rule the world, so they adopt the world view where that is actually possible, and they start suffering from god complex and narcissistic personality disorder.

Thridly, if this was the case, someone would get a monopoly or at least rise to a considerable status among the memers, to the extent where they'd be leading a world wide conspiracy that caused every major event such as wars and disasters - all that to make memes beforehand to then gain massive advantage in the hypothetical meme markets.

It's plain obvious that the memes are above us in importance and power - but what are they then? Are they some kind of an integral part of our universe, like a physical constant or a law of nature? Do the exist beyond our universe?

A thought I find especially interesting is that the memes and their behaviour could be explained via the theories of biology, such as evolution and survival of the fittest.

Michael

A thought I find especially interesting is that the memes and their behaviour could be explained via the theories of biology, such as evolution and survival of the fittest. — BlueBanana

You might want to read The Selfish Gene. It's where the term "meme" originates:

The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process.

But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind.

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. "Mimeme" comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like "gene." I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to "memory," or to the French word meme. It should be pronounced to rhyme with "cream."

geospiza

A thought I find especially interesting is that the memes and their behaviour could be explained via the theories of biology, such as evolution and survival of the fittest. — BlueBanana

The important difference being that genes have a basis in biochemistry, while memes have no physical basis whatsoever. Evolution by natural selection is a biological process; the cultural transmission of ideas should not be thought of in quite the same way.

BlueBanana

↪geospiza

Not an offence but thinking of memes as a cultural phenomenon is about as normie as opinion about memes can get. What next, they are creations of human mind? Nothing but jokes? Well, enough of the metaphysics of memes, they'd be a subject for another thread.

Of course the theories don't apply exactly, because memes are something far greater than we simple piles of carbon based molecyles, but the behaviour of memes doesn't differ from that of those beings that possess an organic and physical body, and the point is that some basic principles can be applied to both. The lack of physical and organic body, which would be far too simple for memes which can reproduce both asexually and sexually, and on top of that clone themselves in the shape of reposting, does limit our capability to apply these theories on individual level, but on the scale of ecosystems the theories function with no problems.

Nils Loc

It seems absurd to say memes don't have a physical basis since meme is just another word for idea. You can't have a meme without a vehicle of transmission.

Everything can be coded into information, transmitted and replicated at the cultural level is memetic.

SophistiCat

↪BlueBanana

As

↪Michael

said, the origin of the "meme" idea is in a Dawkins book, and indeed it is supposed to be analogous to biological evolution, not economics. As to it having "no physical basis whatsoever," that could be debated, but that is a red herring in any case. The important thing is the mechanism. Evolutionary algorithms in computer science, for example, have as much physical basis as memes, but the reason they are called so is because they share essential structural similarities with the process of biological evolution.

"Memetics," however, has been criticized as disanaloguous to evolution, and the whole idea has been condemned by some as pseudo-scientific. Wiki gives some pointers.

Nils Loc

Memetics probably appeals more to those who believe in biological or metaphysical determinism. It is the effect of wanting to apply the mechanics of evolution to disparate domains.

The complexity of the entities interacting however diminishes the effect of whatever we might attribute cause of behavior to. In another thread Bluebanana has raised philosophic doubt whether beliefs cause actions or whether they are just expressions of an underlying and unknown set of determinants (a Darwinian black box).

We see with Dennett, Dawkins and Harris a tendency to weight ideas as harmful (ie. Religion doctrine as a replicating virus) independently of the organisms selecting for them.

In the end it boils down to what we ought to do or be, on what grounds? What should the conditions of accepting an "ought" be and do we really have the freedom to do it? Some I guess are more fit than others to do that kind of work. Are we really thinking or just exercising
a rational from a deep rooted bias?

Ideas are spreading and being selected for on some basis. A meme by any other name is just as sweet (or horrid) depending on your experience.

I wonder if the fact I got a lobotomy years ago is to be blamed for my irrational fascination with thinking of ideas as living entities. They are the ghosts haunting this machine that I am.

VagabondSpectre

↪BlueBanana

Nils Loc

Memetics relies on the idea that Darwinian evolution is likely to be substrate-neutral, that such that process can occur in very different environments. Wherever there is (1)variation of elements, (2)heredity or replication, (3) differential fitness -- evolution is occurring.

Life on Earth is a tremendously complex and interdependent web, such that the phenotypic effects of genes are literally the background supports (selection pressures) of other genes. Thus the predominance of oxygen in our atmosphere might be viewed as a phenotypic effect of a mass of replicating entities and their genes.

Dennett uses a slogan to help us understand a meme's point of view:

"A scholar is jut a library's way of making another library."

Whereas

A pigeon is not a library's way of making another library.

Imagine all of the evolutionary supports (pressures) vital for the replication of a library.

geospiza

↪Nils Loc

It has gone completely off the rails. Biology is the place where the theory of evolution is at home.

Nils Loc

Well I'm just regurgitating Dennett memes. I'd have to read his chapter on it over and over again with patience and a widening context of knowledge to discern the potential for memetics as anything beyond speculative fiction. I won't become an academic biologist though.

Many biological ideas proposed during the past 150 years stood in stark conflict with what everybody assumed to be true. The acceptance of these ideas required an ideological revolution. And no biologist has been responsible for more—and for more drastic—modifications of the average person’s worldview than Charles Darwin. — Scientific American: Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought

Scientific American: Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought

BlueBanana

↪VagabondSpectre

Well who am I to be blamed when the discussion seems to take a direction entirely different from what I had expected? With people making comments that are both intelligent and have a scientific basis, all there is left is to make a religion on memes.

Now that I think of it, there is one point of view I could evince which is that maybe we should instead be studying other fields of science with memetics. The problem is the fundamental error in memetics, which is the assumption that humans are the ones to create memes, when it's quite the opposite.

Nils Loc

The problem is the fundamental error in memetics, which is the assumption that humans are the ones to create memes, when it's quite the opposite. — Bluebanana

It might be more beneficial to you if you could believe in personal autonomy and responsibility over the choices you make in life such that you can recognize why memetics is bunk and has no explanatory power, like genetics does. You have the ability and resources to critically evaluate ideas.

Memes: what are they?

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