Memes: what are they?
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.
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.
Comments (12)
You might want to read The Selfish Gene. It's where the term "meme" originates:
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.
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.
Everything can be coded into information, transmitted and replicated at the cultural level is memetic.
As 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.
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.
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.
[quote=Scientific American: Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought]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.[/quote]
Scientific American: Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought
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.
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.