Re: MD Re:MEMES

[RISKYBIZ9]

To: Dan, Kenneth (who likes memetics), Jonathan (who is interested in the meme of "patterns"), Marco (who is engaged in a related memetic thread) and 3WD (who is memetically borrowed from). From: Roger DAN: Thank you all for your well thought out responses. I find I am having a very difficult time making the connection between memes and the MOQ, so I would like to go back to Roger's definition of the term meme. Forgive the digression. "Memes are defined as any social pattern, behavior or thought that is imitatable. Examples include songs, tools, techniques, strategies, beliefs, ideas, religions, roles, principles, styles, morals, and virtually anything else making up human society." The argument in your quote seems to rest on memes being imitatable and so memes are a kind of independent entity making themselves known to human beings only, who then imitate the memes and thereby propagate them. ROG: A meme is a pattern.  In Blackmore's opinion, a pattern which can be reproduced (BTW Kenneth has already mentioned that some mememicists would argue with her on this qualification). And patterns aren't independent entities making themselves known just to people. I believe that all biological life works to a great extent by identifying and reacting to patterns. In some cases they can copy too. Let me separate my answer into two sections, the first is on identifying patterns (memes), and the second is on copying. PATTERN IDENTIFICATION: Below is a related quote by the grandfather of the MOQ, W. James that impressed me from one of 3WD's recent posts: "Sensible reality is too concrete to be entirely manageable -- look at the narrow range of it which is all that any animal, living in it exclusively as he does, is able to compass. To get from one point in it to another we have to plough or wade though the whole intolerable interval. No detail is spared us;... we [would] grow old and die in the process. But with our faculty of abstracting and fixing concepts we are there in a second, almost as if we controlled the fourth dimension, skipping the intermediaries as by a divine winged power, and getting to the exact point we require without entanglement with any context. What we do in fact is to harness up reality in our conceptual systems in order to drive it better." The biologist/mathematician team of Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart echo this theme in The Collapse of Chaos" "Our brains have evolved an impressive ability to detect features... and [these features] provide a quick-and-dirty method for anticipating events in our environment so that we can respond more rapidly to possible threats. There is thus lot of pressure for brains to evolve feature detectors." Cohen and Stewart refer to the "patterning" process as "feature detecting," and James called it "abstracting" . (In other writings, James calls it "conceptual shorthand"). Patterns are compressions of data. They are simplifications of the intolerably complicated range of experience. But I would agree with you that this is not an exclusive talent of people.  As a practical example, consider the studies of a species of frog's response to potential food.  When a stationary, edible fly is placed in front of (and in view of) it, the frog completely ignores this experience.  However, the frog will invariably try to eat inedible moving black dots suspended in midair. The relevant simplifications of reality -- the patterns -- representing food to this type of frog does not appear to be "little furry stationary black things with wings", it is "little flying black shapes". Put this frog in a room full of stationary flies! ! , and it would starve to death.  It can perceive and respond to one pattern, but not the other.  Similarly, squirrels have evolved a great ability to detect patterns that we know as hawks, but to basically ignore blackbirds.   Humans aren't unique in pattern identification, we are just extremely versatile at it. Cohen and Stewart explain it well. "We like to wrap up a bunch of complicated ideas in a single mental package, and label it. We use these packages to structure our world and make it comprehensible. The things we label in this way include the great simplicities, such as 'cat,' 'child,' 'tree' and so forth, but also more abstract items such as 'fractal' or 'molecule.' The reason the world of our daily lives seems so simple... is that we have become very familiar indeed with a small range of these mental packages, the ones that let us cope with most normal events in our structured environment... Language takes one further step, and associates each package with an arbitrary symbol: a word." PATTERN (meme)  COPYING: I have read that Japanese snow monkeys have been observed watching how an especially smart simian learned to wash sandy potatoes in water.  Supposedly much of the group copied this behavior.  I would say that in this case "potato washing" was a behavioral pattern that would qualify as a meme. The point is not that other creatures can't identify patterns at all, it is just that they are not as versatile at identifying them as we are, and they are much more limited in their skills at mimicking non-inate patterns .  The monkeys are an example to the contrary though, and I have also read of "cultural" differences between different bands of chimpanzees and bonobos as well.  Another non-human example of possible memes is in the singing of birds and whales.  Both are good at identifying and mimicking a certain range of song patterns.  And parrots are good at identifying and mimicking sound patterns in g! ! eneral. Primitive humans are good at identifying and copying a wide range of behavioral patterns. However, it was our use of language which allowed us to label, store, communicate and copy memes much more effectively than other species.  5000 or so years ago, we discovered another huge leap in these skills with writing. Then came printing....  As I said before, the dynamic evolutionary advance of culture through memes was always accompanied by improvements in static latching.  This is in agreement with MOQ theory. DAN: Certainly that is not what you mean, however. The MOQ states patterns of value are the (hu)man and are in no way independent, so if we begin there and equate memes with patterns of value, then memes are the (hu)man and imitation results as a moral conflict between inorganic patterns and biological patterns. The MOQ explains how, intellectually, we are completely unaware of imitation and so consign it (erroneously) to being a universal principle to our unique human-ness. ROG: I am not following you. I am unable to understand the above meme and therefore unable to adopt (copy) it without serious adaptation (variation leading to evolution or devolution)  I am trying to illustrate what a meme is even in my confusion on your objection. Could you please clarify the above meme? DAN: If I were to venture a definition of the term meme, in light of the MOQ, it would be something like this: memes keep us in place. Memes are the image we have of our self and the image others have of us and this image is one and the same; it exists both inside and outside of self (the last, illusion, for there is no inside or outside). We will fail to be different than that image no matter how hard we try, for we are trapped in the image, by the image. We cannot see it! We are it! I don't know what that does to memetic theory but I fear it shoots it all to hell as a SOM construct (consider the debate going on concerning if memes are in the brain or not). Memetic theory seems to begin on a foundation of quicksand. If the MOQ can rescue it, please feel free to rebut. So far I have read nothing to the contrary. ROG: You are making memes into something mysterious and ....weird.  Memes are patterns derived from direct experience that can be copied, stored, transmitted, and adapted.  "Mary had a little lamb" is a pattern that is easy to whistle or play on an instrument.   Try it now.....go ahead. Hum or whistle it...... If you whistled or hummed it or even thought of it, you copied a meme. If you accidentally or intentionally hummed it slightly differently, you adapted it. If you didn't repeat it, the pattern was not propagated. The benefit of memetic theory to the MOQ is that it is a systematic intellectual exploration of the evolution/co-evolution of social and intellectual patterns. The theory of memetics harmonizes and synergizes with the metaphysics of Quality extremely well. DAN:   As for morals being memes it would seem that line of reasoning undermines what the MOQ is all about. Value. And the more I read of memes, so does memetic theory. Looking forward to your response. ROG: "Thou shalt not kill"...a moral meme.... a social pattern of value. It's the same thing. No conflict at all. Hope this demystifies things a bit.... Roger