what makes for memeness?
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Memes are a kind of idea. But what is it about them that warrants a new term, rather than just calling them ideas? Well, they have a set of properties specific to them that the general concept of ideas do not necessarily share. Dawkins intended memes as a story-telling device to illustrate how genes are replicators. In doing so, he suggested that genes may not be the only class of replicator, but that communicated types of information may also be so. This gene-like information took on other Darwinian properties such as variation, reproduction, and selection and all that entailed. Memes then were “selfish” (in spite of lacking foresight) and were essentially in it for their own good and not that of their human hosts (although it raises the question of what it means to be human), hijacking human brains for their own propagation. The selfish-meme thereby became the “virus of the mind” or “thought contagion” view. A second strand was that culture is diffuse, varies and is subject to selection pressure. The meme then offered a candidate mechanism, a gene like replicator that is expressed as culture, thereby accounting for cultural evolution.
So then, to make the specific properties that differentiate a meme from other forms of idea (such as belief etc.) explicit. The three principle properties are variation, reproduction and selection, as suggested by Universal Darwinism. Further memetic properties are offered from biology that can be inferred about their population ecology as agents operating in an environment of a community of human minds. Stories, narratives, jokes, are memes and suitable examples of the properties that memes posess.
longevity fidelity facundity
systems: replication, variation, selection
At its core, Universal Darwinism is a scientific metaphor within general systems theory, and its subsidury, complex adaptive systems theory. It is a relationship between systems as an entity (or population of entities) and its environments, which may consist of other entities and can be dynamic and diverse. An astroid, hurtling through space, would be an entity existing in a near vaccum. Its structure and behaviour is affected by what the solar system throws at it: dust, radiation, planets, space probes. However, it is just a chunk of dead rock – it does not replicate.
Replicators, on the other hand and by definition, replicate. They have certain property to their structure which allows them to copy themselves thereby producing other entities which inherit the same structure and behaviour. Those copies are capable also of replicating further replicators and so on, thereby allowing a population of structurally similar entities to grow. All lifeforms are based upon replicators, particularly genes: viruses, bacteria, plants, animals. But not all replicators are lifeforms. Memes, for example are not genetically based, they are ideas, but they do have a structure that enables them to use human brains (and other mechanisms) to copy themselves. In a sense, they do have certain life-like properties which make them analogous to genes. As replicating ideas, is clear that rumours, gossip, and tales are communicated from person to person thereby propagating themselves across culture and communities.
This copying process is not of perfect fidelity; copying errors and deliberate alterations introduce variation. Mutation, in gene copying, is one source of biological variation. The game of Chinese whispers, or telephone, is based on the mishearings in the passing of a phrase along a chain of people.
Selection pressure favours fitter variants. Fitness is a relationship between traits of the entity and traits of the environment: a suitable matching of traits that allows the entity to fit into its environment. In the passing of a information, there is both the tellers urge to relate, and the listeners span of attention. Much is dependent, not only on the content, but also on the context. It has to be memorable and relatively easy to relate for the teller to convey it, they also need an appreciative audience. The audience on the other hand, are not passive recipients; listening is a behaviour which the listener is activly engaged in. Accepting what we are told relies on a number of factors including: our prior experience, the speaker, the situation. Aristotle’s rhetoric featured pathos, ethos and logos.
differntial fitness, adaptation
Now, replication with variation may produce that may be more or less fitter than their predecessor; the fitter varients are more likely to be passed on wheras the weaker ones will die out. This is differential fitness: those entities that have traits that are better befitting of the traits of the environment have greater chance of being selected. Over time and generations, variation and selection pressure will result in better fitting entities. Entities will become adapted to their environment.
For example, funny jokes are more likely to be remebered and retold than a lame ones (although humour is highly subjective). Consequently, tweaks to the joke, whether accidental or deliberate, could affect its funnyness
exponential population growth and environmental carrying capacity
Unlike the game of chinese whipsers, which is a linear chain (a one-to-one relationship between teller and listener), social systems are networks. These networked social relationships are many-to-many; a person may relate the same information to many other people, either sequentially, or in parallel, as in a public talk or broadcast. A listener might hear similar information coming from different people. Information spreads across the culture, and because of the pluralistic nature of replication, can bloom at exponential rates. The epidemiology is similar to that of a contagious pathogen.
An environment has a limited carrying capacity. A pond can only support so many fish, a virus is limited by the population size, and so are memes.
The global population is the logical ultimate limit, but in most cases viruses are limited to those who are suseptable, and memes to those who are amenable to a particular idea. An emerging scientific theory is likely to spread among the community of scientists, but may have limited reach outside fo that community; it is unlikely to permeate fundamentalist religious groups.
Limits to growth create competetive struggle as the carrying capacity of the environment is approached. Differential fitness then comes into play whereby “the survival of the fittest” can be taken to mean that those variants with a competetive advatage in fitness are more likely to survive and reproduce than their lesser endowed conspecifics, and thereby that variant begins to occupy a greater portion of what the environment can carry. Fish in a pond which can support only so many fish, are in competition for food. Sould a varient arise which is slightly better at getting food (owing to some genetic change) such as having a bigger mouth or being faster, then that new type of fish will occupy a greater percentage of the number of fish the pond can hold, replacing than the slower or smaller mouthed types, as better access to food increases their relative chances of survigving and reproducing. The novel gene variant that gave rise to the fitness advantage will increase in frequency. As a memetic example, an emerging technological innovation can supercede an older product. Flat screen monitors took over the market share from the older cathode ray tubes because they take up less space and energy, are more relyable, and became cheaper to manufacture. The memes for “flat screeness” became more frequent among computer users.
The competitive struggle is an ongoing cycle. Perhaps the variant with the advantage outnumbers or even completely replaces those disadvantaged ones, but the carrying capacity of the environment is still limited. The newly dominant form becomes the basis for further generations, and further variants and these later variants may have further fitness advantages which means that they (and their genes) then would come to dominate the population. Iterating this struggle for survival with constantly emerging variants is the driver of evolution. Flat screens are likely to give way to holographic displays or augmented reality as that technology becomes commercially viable.
environmental changes
Environments can change, they can drift over time, cycle, have variations within them, or suffer catastrophic incidences. The weather and climates of various earth’s regions serve as biological environments. It is clear that certain biological traits are suited to given environments and others not: there are no walruses in the Arabian desert, nor camels in the arctic. That certain species fit their climates is true whether offered a creationist of evolutionist explanation, but evolution posits that species become adapted for survival in their habitat where either the climate changes, or through migration. Here, conditions have changed which requires different survival traits than their ancestors. The Darwinian processes of reproduction and variation, under new selection pressures, raises adapted traits to prominence. For memes, the environment is socio-cultural which also changes and pronounces what is acceptable or otherwise. Some stories die out as no longer relevant to the time, while other stories retain their core narrative but adapt to meet the times. Stories spread, and there are those which may cross cultural boundaries. In doing so, they may be revised so as to fit better with their new territory. Furthermore, media technologies have an influence, from the oral tradition, through writing, print, film and TV, to interactive virtual reality. The same story can be adjusted to fit a new medium and is called adaptation. A prime example is the zombie sub-genre, which has adapted from Haitian folklore, through the Romero standard zombie (RSZ), to VR zombie shoot-em-up games like Arizona sunshine.
evolutionary trade-off
Specialism has its benefits, it also has its costs and there is a trade-off in what traits can be optimally attained. The benefits of the acquisition of a trait must, in survival terms, pay for itself, and outweigh what it takes away in other areas. Body mass allows a creature to throw its weight around, but as the Crows in Dumbo lampooned, you don’t see many flying elephants; flight, conversely, requires a lightness of the body as well as wings, but it does allow a quick escape from land-based predators. Human bipedalism allowed our ancestors to see over tall grass, but slowed us down. It did allow for a larger brain size and the ability to pick things up and use them as weapons. The brain uses a huge amount of energy, but that allows us to outsmart other animals in the game of survival; a game is somewhat akin to rock-paper-scissors. Different species have adapted various strategies in accordance with their habitats and other species around them.
[meme example?]
biodiversity
An environment rarely supports only one type of entity be it a lifeform or an idea. A pond, or tangled bank, is teaming with life of myriad sorts – this is biodiversity. Each form is in its own niche, either competing with others for the same form of food, being the food that others predate upon, or simply cohabiting peacefully. Speciation occurs where divergent lineages are no longer genetically compatible and can no longer interbreed. A variant in one species cannot become prevalent in another; they have split. However, a variant that becomes dominant in one species can force variation in another, as the other species is now facing environmental changes, and thereby changes in selection pressure. From variation, the trade-offs, environmental niches, migration, and so on are the drivers that create different evolutionary strategems.
[meme example?]
predation
Many organisms such as most plants, algae, and bacteria produce all that they need from the minerals and light in their immediate environment; they are primary producers. In contrast, heterotrophs do not produce their own food. Rather, they consume other lifeforms that have already converted the minerals and energy into a convenient form consisting of all that the heterotrophic needs. Herbivores graze on the primary producers, but carnivores predate upon herbivores, and there are those that eat other carnivores, thereby forming a food chain.
[meme example?]
red queen effect / lv cycles
A fox runs for its dinner; a rabbit runs for its life. There is selection pressure on preditor and prey to outpace each other where an evolutionary advantage to one becomes a disadvantage to the other. The other is then forced to adapt. This process of adaptation then is cyclical and becomes a kind of ever-escalating arms race, referred to in biology as a “red queen race”. Population dynamics also go in what are known as Lotka-Volterra cycles, in that the number of foxes affects the number of rabbits, and visa versa. A growing number of rabbits, supports a larger fox population, but the larger fox population reduces the number of rabbits, so the reduced number of rabbits lowers the fox numbers, and the lower fox numbers then allows the rabbits to multiply. Running speed is just one parameter of many that has survival value; sensory acuity and cunning are also weapons in this race. Furthermore, foxes are not the only predators, and rabbits are not the only prey. The ecology and population dynamics are complex systems.
[meme example?]
evolutionary blooms and stumps
Evolutionary adaptation is driven by happenstance. The selection pressure of some chance environmental event or encounter resulted in the emergence or elimination of traits.
The burgess shale tells of some environmental event that lead to an explosion of biodiversity. It also tells how many of natures experiments were rejected. punctuated equilibrium
The number of possible viable variations, of potential species is combinatorially vast, but those that actually emerged, whether extant or extinct, while still enormous, is negligible compared with what potentially could have been in a many-worlds scenario. It happens that the historical antecedents just did not happen for most of these possibilities. Perhaps even if some distant ancestor was moving in a direction, fate cut them off, so a viable branch never came into being.
On the tree of life, we can see that there are evolutionary blooms where the environment has facilitated exploration of genetic phase-space; and evolutionary stumps, where the possibilities have been cut off.
[meme example?]
survival vs truth value
Knowledge, in nature, as embedded in the genes, has nothing to do with the human philosophical notion of justified true belief. What nature knows is a matter of practical survival utility – if some action keeps an organism alive, then that is true enough. Similarly, memes do not have to be true nor truly useful – the only measures that are important for them are that they survive and replicate. Given the priority of survival and replication, then any actual truth or utility value loses significance. It is sufficient for those memes to be perceived as true or useful, any actual benefit is another question. A superstition is an example of a persistent untruth.
off the leash independence
A virus uses the cellular reproductive machinery of its host but otherwise is a separate organism. A meme that has adapted for being good at leaping from brain to brain will proliferate and outstrip other memes that are not so good at that irrespective of whether there is truth or utility in the idea. To consider the analogue of meme and viral gene, we might consider the meme as using human mental machinery and communication capacity for its own benefit without necessarily being beneficial, or indeed being detrimental to its host. The meme then can be seen as an independent entity, one that is off the leash, and intent on its own success. This is a far cry from standard ideas, where we might accept an idea based on lack of information, gullibility, or other compelling fallacy. A meme is often seen as an entity that hijacks its host, it is an infection, a “virus of the mind”.
antibiosis probisois; epidemiology; pathogens, symbiotes
The “virus of the mind” trope spectacularly points out that memes do not have to benefit their hosts to be successful. On the other hand, and a thing that that trope overlooks is that memes are not necessarily detrimental either. A vast number of memes are beneficial, and perhaps an even greater number of them are benign. Viruses are not the only form of micro-organism, and perhaps thinking about the life-like properties of certain ideas, it would be more informative to consider the wider scope. There are some microbial pathogens, there are also those that are probiotic such as those in the digestive system’s microbiome, further, there are the vast majority of protists that we have adapted safely to ignore. Disease models obviously focus on pathogens and often model the basic reproduction number (R0) and case fatality rate (CFR) to establish the risk of a pathogen. The CFR is dysbiotic from the host’s perspective, but that axis can be extended so as to yield a negative CFR. That is where the organism becomes of benefit to its host: probiotic. This extends the picture of relationships between organisms.
A similar approach can be made to memes. Some do have a kind of CFR in that they can kill their hosts, but others would have a negative CFR. For a large part, culture, technology, and other fruits of human endeavour have served to preserve and enhance human life. Memes can remain life-like, but rather than being entirely virus-like, can exist on a spectrum between the probiotic and the dysbiotic.
culture and organisation substrate for evolution – dna of culture
For biological entities, the fundamental unit of evolution and the encoding of the species is in the gene. This is expressed through developmental processes as the phenotype or the “body-plan” of that organism. The same relationship is said to hold for culture and organisation. The fundamental replicating unit being the meme and the corresponding expression being a kind of phenotype of culture: artefact, social organisation, belief system, routine etc. By admitting a fundamental unit, then this unit, in both biology and culture, offers a mechanism for replicating the code that is expressed as the biological or sociological phenotype. It also provides a mechanism of variation whereby changes in the replicating code, when expressed and subject to selection pressure, provide a Darwinian account of biological and cultural evolution.
meme/gene as evolutionary model of information transmission (Shannon information and teleosemantic theory)
the meta-meme
epistemology epistememes
This will help in building an engineering model
Memes would seem to be a kind of idea that have some additional properties which are featured in the model presented here. The terminology is loose in order to convey the principles.
- Spreadable: A key feature of a meme is that it is transmissible from entity to entity, where an entity may be human or machine or some other means of storing information. There are ideas that do not spread because they may occur in a mind (or simulation) but are never retold. They may be proto-memes, those that don’t get the opportunity for replication, or non-memes, such as those that are impossible to relate to others such as a transcendental experience. Two main means of spread, or motile modalities, seem to be in operation (and variations thereof): pull, which is fundamentally imitation; and push, where a host is motivated to spread the idea.
- Likeable: Exposure to a meme does not entail its reproductive success. Like a host with immunity, exposure to a virus may not cause infection. Likability is the susceptibility of the exposed to the meme. It can be thought of as the mental environment that the meme is trying to invade, and consists of attitudes, opinions, beliefs, education and so on. An idea then becomes a meme by virtue of its relationship to its host’s existing memes (or epistememes). That an idea is likeable among some sub-population contributes to its spreadability. Likeable here is meant in the sense of acceptability on some grounds; even a repulsive idea may be accepted.
- Stickiness: A meme must be carried by the host. If an idea is accepted and subsequently forgotten or overridden, then it has no chance of expression or further spreading via that route. A meme that sticks in the mind, however unconsciously, survives and may at some point be expressed – a biological example may be HIV and AIDS
Other properties flow from these
- Expressible:
Quadrants: Single transmission ideas, Ideas that can become memes; ideas that are intended to be redistributed; forced memes (intended not to be spread: secrets)