Memes!

Bloody things. Can you believe this damn book spurred a sort of philosophical science area of study known as Memetics?? I'm not kidding. I already read a book by one of the fields leading, um, people called "The Meme Machine" by Susan Blackmore. So I pretty much know a bunch about them already, but here I get to read the chapter, the grandaddy of all these memes!

Essentially memes are ideas that follow the evolutionary pattern. Specifically Richard Dawkins' selfish gene, selfish immortal replicator pattern. Memes are like selfish ideas. So when the human brain was formed it's so goddamn big and powerful that we started to develop things like culture, religion, music, ideas et cetera. Memes are like an evolutionary explanation of this. So memes have a very loose unit, like genes, nothing extremely exact, and can change upon replication. And replication is as simple as: I hum a tune, you hear that tune it gets stuck in your head involuntarily. That's an example of a replicated meme. It's not limited to music, it's more like all ideas. Think of it as viral software for the brain. Like units of software that go from brain to brain to brain to brain. Some much more successful than others. Basically memes, like genes just want to multiply and live on as immortal replicators. But it's really not limited, fashion counts, body language, films, you name it. Culture, et cetera, all this extra stuff caused by our humongously awsome brains.

They are competitive like genes because the human brain only has so much space, and so much attention. So memes compete for attention, and once they are at attention they can be replicated more because say I would be more likely to talk about it. Just think of bands that get popular and your local open mic band. One had a more viral meme. Stuff like that.

Basically once again Dawkins has completely shifted the perspective from the unit of survival being the human, or the brain, to the unit of survival now being these ideas. Our bodies exist as survival machines for our genes, and our brains have evolved to become survival machines for our memes. It is certainly an interesting perspective.

In essence Dawkins has once again ruled out the entity as important, explained it away as a through away tool for something else. We are now truly cogs being ground out by the wheels of genes and memes. But wait! Dawkins hilariously at the end says, ah but we can rebel against our genes and our memes because we have big brains! Particularly he is focused on people becoming truly altruistic.

This last little cry is not just funny, especially considering he just crushed our significance with the rest of the book, it seems really childish and simplistic. First of all, I don't think altruism for the sake of altruism is as virtuous a goal as people make it out to be. Surely give of yourself, but does it make sense for everyone to consider themselves worthless and everyone else worthwhile? It could create an interesting holding up of each other's existence, but it seems really bizarre when you take it to its logical conclusion. Maybe it's my interest in Yoga and Philosophy, but it makes much more sense to me for us to find and accept our own place in nature and the universe and flow with that, instead of pure sacrificing of all for other. I definitely feel like Dawkins is stuck in this weird science limbo of evolution worship and a strange morality that seems to have no rhyme or reason when compared to his beliefs about science.

One last thing, there's some great pot shots he throws at religion here. The funniest is his main example of a meme is the god meme and he keeps coming back to it. Not subtle at all. Also just about all the bad things he mentions that memes cause are related directly to religion. He attributes absolutely zero positive things about memes to the religion meme. His hatred of blind faith without evidence reminds me of a younger more naive me. Laughs all around!