The End Doesn't Justify the Memes

Mind Hacks lists two TED talks on memes:

• Daniel C Dennett on 'the awesome power of memes'.


• Susan Blackmore on 'memes and temes'.

Months ago, reading up on this area of study, memetics seemed worth considering (especially Blackmore's passionate explanations). But after reading Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (2000), a collection of essays by experts from different fields on this new discipline, edited by Richard Aunger. I was quite disappointed that in Dennett's foreword he says 'I am not entirely persuaded by any of the chapters in this book'. (vii)

Of the nine contributors to the collection five object to the idea forwarded by memeticists:

• Rosaria Conte makes a most polite assessment of meme literature using the social cognitive perspective. She praises advantages of the field and describes some disadvantages but focuses on one unsatisfactory aspect: the conceptualization of the requirements of memetic processes.



• Robert Boyd and Peter J Richerson conclude that memes are not 'a universal acid' (one of Dennett's metaphors in Darwin's
  Dangerous Idea) and assert that 'population thinking is a better mousetrap'. (161)



• Dan Sperber's objection has to do with memeticists not having empirical evidence to support their claims that '...in the micro-processes of cultural transmission, elements of culture inherit all or nearly all their relevant properties for other elements of culture that they replicate.' (173) He ends by saying 'imitation, even if not ubiquitous, is of course well worth investigating. The grand project of memetics, on the other hand, is misguided'. (173) But there's hope in studying imitation.



• Maurice Bloch puts forward the previous arguments against the diffusionists by American and British critics:
  
  
  1. Memes like traits don't spread like a virus but are 'continually and completely made and unmade during communication' (I still have to read more on this) and;
  
  
  2. Culture is not a single isolable type which means that transmission of it is of many types. (201)
  
  
  He simply thinks that memes don't exist and Blackmore (whose 'The meme's eye view' essay argues strongly for memes) hasn't presented convincingly her case.



• To this Adam Kuper agrees by concluding that '[memetecists have] yet to deliver a single original and plausible analysis of any cultural or social process'. (187)

Coriana Six provides a more thorough assessment of the collection (December 2007).

In Blackmore's The Meme Machine and most of her articles found online, it is easy to take Bloch's side. Blackmore is quite passionate about her study but most of her research is speculative. She has an article in Aesthetica Magazine (July 2006) called Memes, creativity and consciousness:

We are the meme machines that culture is using for its own propagation. No wonder the planet is in such dire straights; we have unwittingly taken on this parasitic new replication system and it is spreading all over the globe, using up all the natural resources. This is how I became interested in the role of art and creativity. We may think that human consciousness is what makes us creative, but on this new view, all creativity is an evolutionary process. Just as elephants and the AIDS virus were novel creations of genetic evolution, so all of music, literature, and art are novel creations of memetic evolution. We human meme machines copy old memes, mix them up in our heads, and spew out new combinations--the most creative of us being the best copiers and recombiners of memes.

Reading this should convince any artist that memeticists like Blackmore 'overstand' the creative processes. In his recent Enlightenment lecture at the University of Edinburgh, Steven Pinker was asked his opinion of memes. His reply: after 32 years, the study of memes has yielded no great progress. In How the Mind Works (1997) he says: '...a complex meme does not arise from the retention of copying errors...[but] because some person knuckles down, racks his brain, musters his ingenuity, and composes or writes or paints of invents something'. (209)

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Mind Hacks also reports that in 2006 Dennett had a falling out with fellow Darwinian Michael Ruse.

Some of the exchange can be found in When evolutionists attack, where Ruse says:

'I am a hardline Darwinian and always have been very publicly when it cost me status and respect--in fact, I am more hardline than you [Dennett] are, because I don't buy into this meme bullshit but put everything--especially including ethics--in the language of genes.'

Foreign Policy's Public Intellectuals

The Top 100 Public Intellectuals: From the list created of a hundred names compiled by Foreign Policy, the public is asked to vote for five intellectuals. They are some of the world's most introspective philosophers and rabble-rousing clerics. A few write searing works of fiction and uncover the mysteries of the human mind. Others are at the forefront of modern finance, politics, and human rights.

Here is a personal shortlist:

• Noam Chomsky: Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955...a groundbreaking linguist and a prominent critic of US foreign policy.


• Richard Dawkins: Seminal 1976 work, The Selfish Gene, explores the role played by genes in the evolutionary process. He may be better known today for the criticisms of religion and 'intelligent design' theories.


• Daniel C Dennett: Austin B Fletcher professor of philosophy at Tufts University, where his life's work is building a 'philosophy of mind' to explain how human consciousness works.


• Umberto Eco: His dense novels...are a dizzying blend of philosophy, biblical analysis, and arcane literary references. An expert in the burgeoning field of semiotics, he is president of the Advanced School of Humanist Studies at the University of Bologna.


• Douglas Hofstadter [not in list]: College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. His rsearch focuses on consciousness, creativity, at the nature of thinking.


• James Lovelock: His great contribution to science is the famous Gaia hypothesis, the idea that Earth can be thought of as a giant organism.


• Steven Pinker: Johnstone family professor at Harvard University and author of seven books. A frequent essayist, he focuses on language and cognition in his research.


• V.S. Ramachandran: Directs the Center for Brain and Cognition and at the University of California, San Diego. Dawkins calls him the 'Marco Polo of neuroscience' for his work on behavioral neurology.


• E.O. Wilson: Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and naturalist, [he] argues that human behaviour can largely be explained by biology. He is Pellegrino university professor emeritus of entomology at Harvard University.

Heterophenomenology and Qualia

Heterophenomenology is Daniel C Dennett's third-person approach to the science of consciousness. It's similar to a method that readers of literature use to believe, detail, and interpret the actions, thoughts, and characters of what they read to form their definitive version of the work of art.

Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005) is Dennett's later book on heterophenomenology.

An End to Qualia? Dennett's Defense of Heterophenomenology (Spring 2007): A short review: Dennett goes on the offensive against the 'new mysterians', those who argue that the problem of consciousness is fundamentally unsolvable or requires an explanatory framework outside that used by observational science.