Memes are a myth
ideas.aeon.co
ideas.aeon.co
Goodman juggles vastly different concepts of what a "meme" is without consistently distinguishing between them. He seems to dismiss memetics as an abstract model based on a lack of evidence for memes as physical entities, which, depending on how it's constructed, seems like either fringe absurdity (an idea particle) or a logical conclusion of materialism. And his question of whether an idea or its proponent "wins" is a poorly-defined non-sequitur.
The original question is bad, in my opinion. Assuming you acknowledge the existence of ideas, a better question would be "is meme theory a useful or accurate model of how ideas behave?"
Yes, exactly. It's like complaining that gravity isn't "real" because nobody's touched it. That may be so, but it's real enough in that we can observe its effects and use those observations to make accurate predictions about the behavior of objects in space. If meme theory can do the same for the behavior of ideas in social groups, it's real enough too.
I have not followed meme theory: Can it?
I think the answer to that would have been no as of 2005 (http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2005/vol9/edmonds_b.html), but I haven't been following since then so there could have been advances made.
I have a hopefully close friend who is much smarter than me whose field of study is memetics, so I am certainly not going to chuck out the theory for personal reasons as well as a natural cautiousness around ideas I don't really understand.
I think it's important that they bring up Dennett specifically, who has strong opinions about consciousness and intentionality that appear on a surface reading like they might conflict with his take on memetic theory (http://www.consciousentities.com/alternatives.htm#memes).
Some deliciously irony:
> Since its introduction almost 40 years ago, the term has taken root in science, language, and popular culture.
> Should we take the existence of memes on scientific faith, or countenance the parsimonious explanation that ideas are just ideas that we use for better or for worse?
> There is no reason to invent a language or a science, or insert some entirely fictitious evolutionary notion, every time we have a question that seems unanswerable.
> It sounds nice, and perhaps the meme is a useful analogy—but it is just an analogy.
Dennet's favourite examples of memes are words. They're clearly "physically real", in that we can capture them with a microphone or a pen. We're nowhere near able to measure the neurological effect of a word on a brain, but we certainly know that the effect is there, since hearing words (eg. instructions) can alter our behaviour.
Once belief systems are understood as evolving memetic complexes that compete for niches in the ecology of the noosphere - well, it does tend to unweave the rainbow.
It is not necessary that we have the technology to discover the physical manifestation of memes right now for them to be a valid scientific hypothesis, only that in principle we can someday conduct tests that may potentially refute the hypothesis. This does not mean that memes do definitely exist. It just means that the proposal for their existence is scientific and rational, pending further investigation.
On the other hand, the notion of faith in God is, by definition, not a falsifiable theory; no experiments can ever be done, even in principle, to disprove faith, since it is by definition an extra-rational concept that proposes you should accept its veracity without evidence, and indeed despite any evidence that it may not be true. This is an anti-scientific theory.
The two proposals are thus fundamentally different in terms of how they -- on their own terms -- suggest you should evaluate their veracity. One is scientific (that is, falsifiable); the other is not.
In its original and vague context Dawkins isn't so much proposing a mechanism of idea evolution and transfer but simply a different way of looking at what we already know about ideas along the lines of 'in some cases, ideas can change like genetic code' rather than the response author's 'culture evolves according to analogous laws to genetic natural selection.'. Serious interpretation and extrapolation of what is essentially a cute analogy across the whole of culture is inevitably going to be ridiculous without proper evidence.
In that sense I agree with the author. Nobody knows if this works beyond being a toy idea, but "memes are a myth"? I'd disagree -- 'memes' offer a worthwhile analogy and a useful contribution to our lexicon, especially in the internet age where ideas are freer than ever. Sure, I couldn't say 'X is an idea that acts exactly by the mechanism of memetics', but I can say 'X seems to act like a meme' and I think that's useful.
Just because its not physical doesn't mean its not real. The realm of ideas is real. It has real effects on our lives.
A person't effect on the world doesn't go away when he or she leaves the room or dies. It continues as long what they did continues to to have an effect, which might only be until the sun supernovas.
I think the idea of everlasting soul is an approximation of the impression that object permanence creates in our minds. Its incorrect, I think, but should not be a surprise, given the way our minds, IMHO.
I hear what you are saying, but the working assumption is that thoughts, memories, beliefs and memes all have physical neural correlates.
What I meant was people think there is some energy floating around. Or that a soul leaves at death and continues on somewhere else. That is not how we continue to have an effect in the world.
If he considers genes to be "real" in comparison (which I cannot totally infer from this piece of writing; but he does seem to put a lot of stock in the identification of a physical mechanism for projecting the idea of genetics onto, in DNA), there's a pretty straightforward map-vs-territory argument to reduce that (and pretty much everything else) to equivalence.
All of thought and semantics are imperfect metaphors. The question "are memes real" is exactly equivalent to "are genes real" is exactly equivalent to "is math real" is exactly equivalent to "are trees real" is exactly equivalent to "is anything in our understanding of reality real".
Short of a physical "theory of everything", the only description of physical reality that is "real" is the total enumeration of all of physical reality.
Writing God with a - is certainly a meme.
Genes are not actually selfish; they can't be. It's an obvious anthropomorphism, which is more useful as a metaphor than a rigorous theory.
As the book progresses, Dawkins takes this idea into further and further flights of speculation, seeing how well it might apply to any aspect of human society and experience. I haven't read the book in a while, but my memory is that this section of the book is home to some hilariously dated notions of "biology that needs explaining," like why women like to cook and clean the house, and men prefer to get drunk and cheat on their wives. (I'm exaggerating but not by much).
It is in this section of the book--already fairly far out on the limb of speculations--where he introduces the concept of the meme. So it's never been on very solid ground, scientifically.
In terms of its physical manifestation, that is a problem for information in general. A copy of the Bible, and a copy of the Bible in which the letters have been rearranged randomly, is indistinguishable by any physical test short of a human being reading it.
This looks to be another philosopher airing out a personal grudge against science in general and Richard Dawkins in particular.
Conversely, those who aren't religious or have thrown out the idea of a God altogether are more likely to be against such a thing because the state replaces the mythical behavioral control mechanism with a real all-seeing eye.
If true (and I have nothing to prove it is) then the God meme would certainly be helpful to the state.