Merritt,
Here's several sites with meme information, including quoted sections in two cases:
[definition of a meme]
brodietech.com
WHAT IS A MEME?
When Richard Dawkins introduced the word "meme" in his book The Selfish
Gene, he had the glimmering of a concept in mind -- a replicator akin to
the gene that would be at the center of the evolution of culture the way
genes are at the center of the evolution of organisms.
Since then, there has been a great deal of thought from many camps as to
the nature of the meme. Does it have a physical existence? Does a meme
in
your head remain constant, or does it change over time? Are words
written
down on paper memes. or are memes only memes when they're in your mind?
Since we want to come up with a useful definition for meme, there is no
True answer to these questions.
While researching Virus of the Mind, I
read
and spoke with many thinkers about memes. The most useful definition
seemed
to be the one I called "A Working Definition" in Virus of the Mind:
A meme is a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences
events
such that more copies of itself get created in other minds.
The key here is the link between mental programming and behavior. I take
the position that all our behavior is a combination of instinctual --
directed by our genes -- and learned -- directed by our memes. So when I
say that the presence of a meme in my mind influences my behavior, I
mean
that I act differently because I have learned something. And when I act
differently, I change the world, if only subtly.
[below, a website on memetics]
pespmc1.vub.ac.be
[and, from Dawkins article Viruses of the Mind (also quoted from in the section above) ... this part touches on crazes, or manias]
physics.wisc.edu
Less portentously, and again especially prominent in children, the
''craze'' is a striking example of behavior that owes more to
epidemiology than to rational choice. Yo-yos, hula hoops and pogo
sticks, with their associated behavioral fixed actions, sweep through
schools, and more sporadically leap from school to school, in patterns
that differ from a measles epidemic in no serious particular. Ten years
ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through the United
States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today, the
reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of
geographical spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but
epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to
study it. We don't have to get into arguments about ''determinism''; we
don't have to claim that children are compelled to imitate their
fellows' hat fashions. It is enough that their hat-wearing behavior, as
a matter of fact, is statistically affected by the hat-wearing behavior
of their fellows.
Trivial though they are, crazes provide us with yet more circumstantial
evidence that human minds, especially perhaps juvenile ones, have the
qualities that we have singled out as desirable for an informational
parasite. At the very least the mind is a plausible candidate for
infection by something like a computer virus, even if it is not quite
such a parasite's dream-environment as a cell nucleus or an electronic
computer.
It is intriguing to wonder what it might feel like, from the inside, if
one's mind were the victim of a ''virus.'' This might be a deliberately
designed parasite, like a present-day computer virus. Or it might be an
inadvertently mutated and unconsciously evolved parasite. Either way,
especially if the evolved parasite was the memic descendant of a long
line of successful ancestors, we are entitled to expect the typical
''mind virus'' to be pretty good at its job of getting itself
successfully replicated.
Progressive evolution of more effective mind-parasites will have two
aspects. New ''mutants'' (either random or designed by humans) that are
better at spreading will become more numerous. And there will be a
ganging up of ideas that flourish in one another's presence, ideas that
mutually support one another just as genes do and as I have speculated
computer viruses may one day do. We expect that replicators will go
around together from brain to brain in mutually compatible gangs. These
gangs will come to constitute a package, which may be sufficiently
stable to deserve a collective name such as Roman Catholicism or Voodoo.
It doesn't too much matter whether we analogize the whole package to a
single virus, to each one of the component parts to a single virus. The
analogy is not that precise anyway, just as the distinction between a
computer virus and a computer worm is nothing to get worked up about.
What matters is that minds are friendly environments to parasitic,
self-replicating ideas or information, and that minds are typically
massively infected.
Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for
their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are
that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that
a virus might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale
signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical
textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily
assumed to be male).
1. The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner
conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction
that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which,
nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors
refer to such a belief as ''faith.''
2. Patients typically make a positive virtue of faith's being strong and
unshakable, in spite of not being based upon evidence. Indeed, they may
fell that the less evidence there is, the more virtuous the belief (see
below).
This paradoxical idea that lack of evidence is a positive virtue where
faith is concerned has something of the quality of a program that is
self-sustaining, because it is self-referential (see the chapter ''On
Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures'' in Hofstadter, 1985).
Once the proposition is believed, it automatically undermines opposition
to itself. The ''lack of evidence is a virtue'' idea could be an
admirable sidekick, ganging up with faith itself in a clique of mutually
supportive viral programs.
3. A related symptom, which a faith-sufferer may also present, is the
conviction that ''mystery,'' per se, is a good thing. It is not a virtue
to solve mysteries. Rather we should enjoy them, even revel in their
insolubility.
Any impulse to solve mysteries could be serious inimical to the spread
of a mind virus. |
