things to think about

I finally got around to going through this talk a few times over the last few weeks, and have transcribed parts that I think are particularly significant (which ended up being pretty much much all of it). I’ve also added some notes and musings of my own.

Ironically, progress was much impeded by my contracting a couple of plain old biological viruses

***

Dennett opens by describing an ant parasite which affects its host’s brain, causing the ant to behave in a way which increases its chances of being eaten by a predator. Why? Because the next stage of the parasite’s life cycle takes place in the predator’s gut.

03:00

Well, does anything like that happen with human beings? This is all on behalf of a cause other than one’s own genetic fitness, of course.

03:26

It’s ideas, not worms, that hijack our brains

03:30

Now, am I saying that a sizeable minority of the world’s population has had their brain hijacked by parastic ideas? No, it’s worse than that: most people have!

03:52

There are a lot of ideas to die for. Freedom […], justice, truth, Communism? Many people have laid down their lives for Communism, and many have laid down their lives for Capitalism. And many for Catholicism, and many for Islam.

04:15

These are just a few of the ideas that are to die for. They’re infectious.

04:32

Most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant, new, out-of-the-box thinking, it’s infectious repetitis, and we might as well have a theory of what’s going on when that happens, so that we can understand the conditions of infection.

04:52

Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others.

05:30

One set of ideas or another have simply replaced our biological imperatives.

05:40

The subordination of genetic interest to other interests. No other species does anything at all like it.

06:52

We’re all responsible for not just the intended effects of our ideas, but their likely misuses.

07:57

Memes are like viruses.

08:13

What’s a virus? A virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude. That is, there’s something about it that tends to make it replicate better than the competition does. And that’s what a meme is. It’s an information packet with attitude.

08:30

What’s a meme made of? They’re made of information, can be carried in any physical medium.

08:54

Words are memes that can be pronounced. Then there’s all the other memes that can’t be pronounced, there’s different species of memes.

09:07

Remember the Shakers?

Dennett describes how the Shaker creed included celibacy, and how this makes it unsurprising the faith died out. But, in fact, this isn’t how they disappeared! The Shakers existed at a time when the social safety nets we have today didn’t, and there was a “ready supply” of “widows and orphans” for the sect to convert. Thus, the religion “could have continued forever with perfect celibacy on the part of the hosts, the idea passed on through proselytising instead of through the gene line.”

10:22

A meme can flourish in spite having a negative impact on genetic fitness. After all, the meme for Shakerdom was essentially a sterilising parasite.

11:10

It was germs, more than guns or steel that conquered the new hemisphere.

11:21

When European conquerors and explorers and travellers spread out, they brought with them the germs that they had become essentially immune to. […] These pathogens just wiped out the native people who had no immunity to them at all. And we’re doing it again. We’re doing it this time with toxic ideas.

12:56

These memes are spreading around the world, and they are wiping out whole cultures. They are wiping out languages, they are wiping out traditions and practices. And it’s not our fault, any more than it’s our fault when our germs lay waste to people who haven’t developed the immunity.

13.21

We have an immunity to all of the junk that lies around the edges of our culture. We’re a free society, so we let pornography and all these things, y’know, we shrug them off, they’re like a mild cold, they’re not a big deal for us. But we should recognise that for many people in the world, they are a big deal.

13.47

As we spread our education and our technology, one of the things that we are doing is, we are the vectors of memes that are correctly viewed by the hosts of many other memes as a dire threat to their favourite memes, the memes that they are prepared to die for.

14:20

Memetics is morally neutral. And so it should be. This is not the place for hate and anger.

14:30

If you’ve had a friend who’s died of AIDS, then you hate the HIV virus, but the way to deal with that is to do science and understand how it spreads and why, in a morally neutral perspective. Get the facts, work out the implications. There’s plenty of room for moral passion, once we’ve got the facts and can figure out the best thing to do.

15:00

And, as with germs, the trick is not to try to annihilate them. You will never annihilate the germs. What you can do, however, is foster public health measures and the like that will encourage the evolution of avirulence. That will encourage the spread of relatively benign mutations of the most toxic varieties.

15:30

That’s all the time I have, so thank you very much for your attention.

***

For me, there’s a couple of interesting points to come out of this talk besides the main explicit themes.

The first is a question of how vectors of memetic infection work. Dennett touches on it, when he talks about the drive to spread memes and their existence as a “packet of information with attitude” which can be spread in “any physical medium” [emphasis mine]. Most of the memetic theory I’ve seen so far takes it for granted that memes hop from brain from brain to brain and has a lot to say about what they do once they get there, but doesn’t examine the nature of those vectors; by this token, a meme could travel equally effectively by being encoded into written words and emailed as it could by being spoken in a radio broadcast or painted on a canvas. Anyone with a basic understanding of information theory (and mine is a basic as it gets) could tell you that this is wrong: any channel of information transmission is susceptible to noise, and different types of information are suited to different methods of transmission (and vulnerable to different types of noise). I think this could prove an interesting area of study, and one I very much intend to follow, once I’ve got my basic knowledge up to scratch. Who knows, maybe there’s already a vast body of theory in this area I have yet to discover.

The second point is to do with our responsibility to control the spread of our toxic ideas; putting aside the worryingly Colonial feel to the proposition for the moment (”Look at the poor natives with their inferior set of memes!”), what is it that makes Western memes so much more rapacious, so much better at replicating than those in a poor beleaguered victim meme-system? Is this even true?

If it is true, I’d like to suggest that it’s for the same reason that Russian prisons are such an infamously fertile breeding ground for drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis. As an undergraduate, I did a bit of study on signs and semiotics and, as I remember, some of the theory there stated that we live in an age where we’re so bombarded by signs and symbols that the ‘real’ world has ceased to have any meaning. Whilst a sign and a meme aren’t equivalent units (I’d say, possibly, that a sign refers to a meme), I don’t think it’s a huge leap to say that a society swimming in signs is also one equally suffused with memes (of course, memetics says that society is composed of memes, but there’s probably a question of volume here), and therefore an ideal breeding ground for increasingly voracious memes.

Time to revisit my degree notes; I think trying to reconcile semiotics and memetics could prove another interesting area of study. Unless, of course, there’s another huge body of theory I’m ignorant of there, too.

There’s a counter-argument here, too: why in the world would memes good at surviving in one meme-system be any good at surviving in a completely different memetic environment?

***

It occurs to me that I haven’t really defined a meme so far on this blog, despite having picked up a reasonable definition from various bit of reading. So, I think my next post will be about the definition of a meme, so I can be sure to be working from a solid base.