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.'

Pinker in Edinburgh

Steven Pinker at the University of Edinburgh's Enlightenment lecture series: In his lecture, Prof Steven Pinker will explore an example of each: everyday metaphor as a window into human cognition; swearing and taboo words as a window into human emotion; and indirect speech-veiled threats and bribes, polite requests, and sexual come-ons as a window into human relationships. 6 June at McEwan Hall.

[video] Pinker's TED Talks lecture on The Stuff of Thought (July 2005): In an exclusive preview of his book The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds--and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize.

(Thanks to aliiis for the announcement.)

Steven Pinker on Combinatorial Grammar

'The Infinite Library' in Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999): Pinker argues that language is composed of a mental dictionary and a mental grammar of creative rules:

Combinatorial grammar allows us to talk about a combinatorial world, a world in which violets could be red or a man could bite a dog. Yet familiar objects and actions around us often form a noncombinatorial list of distinctive kinds. When we merely have to single out one of them, a combinatorial system is overkill. We never will have to refer to fish with an enmity to sheep or to military actions with scales and reddish flesh, and that's what a combinatorial system for words like Wilkins's allows us to do. To refer to everyday things it's easier to say dog or fish than to work through a complicated taxonomy that is just a fancy way of singling out dogs or fish anyway.

Exchange between John R Searle and Pinker on the book (June 2002).

Pinker: How can we explain these cavalier misreadings? For ten years Searle has insisted that he has a philosophical argument which proves that cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and linguistics are based on 'stunning mistakes'. The main mistake lies in analyzing mental phenomena as forms of information-processing.

Searle's three basic objections to Pinker's account are 1) 'an obsession with combinatorial grammar is not a defining feature of rationalism in its debate with empiricism'; 2) 'when [Pinker] does try to describe the essential difference between rationalism and empiricism he gets it wrong'; and 3) 'the debate about the past tense is not a case in which "two great systems of Western thought (rationalism and empiricism) may be tested and compared on a single rich set of data"'.

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.

The Stuff of Pinker

[video] Steven Pinker on I Want That! (2006): Mr Cube loves Smart Furniture.

Of thought and metaphor (January 2007): On Pinker's new book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

'Look at almost any passage and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works. 'Rather than occasionally reaching for a metaphor to communicate, to a very large extent communication is the use of metaphor.'

[old video] The Stuff of Thought (September 2007): Why don't we make grammatical sense when we swear?

[old science news] Holy @&%*! Author Steven Pinker Thinks We're Hardwired to Curse:

[He] takes a fresh look at the 'poo-poo theory', which proposes that swearing was actually the first form of language. He points to the fact that brain-damaged patients who lose the power of articulate speech often retain the ability to curse like a sailor. 'Since swearing involves clearly more ancient parts of the brain...it could be a missing link between animal vocalization and human language.'

What the F***? (October 2007) by Pinker:

The strange emotional power of swearing--as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures--suggests that taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo word and its genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking and making love, is an extreme example of the distinction. Curses provoke a different response than their synonyms in part because connotations and denotations are stored in different parts of the brain.