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MEMETICS FROM NEW DAWN

MEMETICS How Mind Viruses Influence Our Choices and the Way We Think By Jack Hardy

The word ‘meme’ was first popularly used by Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene'''. The word ‘meme’ has come to mean a cultural accretion of knowledge, a package of several ideas that can be passed onto others. It’s usually more complex than a single idea, and can represent a fashion/music/lifestyle or a belief. It is the mental equivalent of a gene whereby a package of many attributes is passed on.'''

The science or study of memes in action has come to be called memetics.

A meme has been regarded too narrowly I believe, and I am interested in broadening the definition of a meme. No matter how narrow a definition you give to a meme, sooner or later you have to consider more nebulous or abstract ideas as having acquired enough cultural accretion to have become memes. It’s easy to conceive of a visual fad such as the hula-hoop as having a chartable spread through society and calling it a meme, but surely socialism, futurism or a new political idea are also memes that spread through society.

Memes like these, just as in any fad or fashion, have a zenith before arcing into decline. There will always be a few adherents of any ‘ism’ who may be the actual carriers of the meme, but eventually they may find themselves beached upon a shore that has no tides.

Someone new to the idea of memes might say: why don’t we just call them ideas? The answer is that memes act as if they have a life of their own. Whether they do or not is not the relevant point, but they do replicate and have a dynamism absent from our common notion of a simple idea.

Memes seem to have an arc of existence defying simple replicative models. Indeed, I daresay many memes lie dormant awaiting resurgence, as might forgotten gods that can spread like wildfire. Let’s say a meme like Nazism could be re-established which is why many are so keen to quash it.

On this model, some memes could be likened to a huge bull waiting to be let out the gate and into a china shop.

I suspect memes act as living entities with strategies for survival and aren’t simply replicators. As I use the word meme, I mean it to be an accretion of mental energy that acts as if it has a life of its own. This mental energy can spread through many minds or maybe it resides someplace as yet unidentified. Whether or not this is strictly true is less important to me than the fact this definition allows for insights and explanations previously unavailable.

Once you allow a meme to escape the unimaginative straitjacket that has kept meme theory bound for the last twenty-five years, you can accept new explanations. In human affairs and parapsychology, as well as in ordinary life, we finally have a tool to crack the nut, to explain which was once considered unexplainable.

Memes as I use them are for the most part something that appears independent of self, and shared by several minds. However, we all have a sense of self, an ego or superego that we create as we grow, which could be considered our individual meme.

Many thinkers have a problem with the idea of a ‘group mind’ which is understandable, or that memes can be anthropomorphised as having characteristics to enable their survival. One approach to deflect this criticism is to state they don’t have to be actually like this, but they act as if they do. Same as flocking birds might not actually have a group mind but they act as if they do.

There are experiments that seem to indicate the existence of group minds. I’ll mention Richard Restak’s experiments with bees. His work can be found in the journal Mind (No. 249), and has also been featured in Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle (page 140). Basically Restak showed that bees can anticipate future sources of food despite quite complex mathematical computations. What he did was position food at increasing distances away from the first site according to a mathematical formula. The bees all went to the area they next expected food to be at, but who or what was doing the calculations for them?

Basically a meme is a concept. It can be shared or held alone. Memes can have favoured attachments just like molecules. Certain pairings can be more probable than others. Memes are not just an explanation for the workings of human affairs, but a way for things to find each other. With memes, man can find God, a woman can find her mate, a customs officer can find a smuggler, and a hunter can find his prey.

Another area memes make themselves problematic to academia is we can use them to explain phenomena usually of a non-repeatable type. I think it was Arthur Koestler who postulated the existence of the library angel. What he meant by this was how he often was looking for some information and he’d open a book to the very page with the information he needed. Or he found a useful book shelved wrongly but placed right where he happened to look. People are known to open the Bible at a passage unusually apt to their interest. I’m sure we’ve all had these coincidental experiences, and I doubt we could repeat them for the sake of a scientific study, but memes can explain them.

Building Memes

How do memes work? Conscious and unconscious processes build memes. They aren’t something you can usually identify, and to devolve them (or use them) seems to work best when they happen unconsciously.

Let’s take a meme building activity like a new fashion. Pioneers will wear and parade the new fashion, and the media acts as a platform for others to espouse it. Everyone quickly becomes aware of it, but not everyone adopts it unless it fits in with the zeitgeist. Instead of a fashion we can view, imagine this applying to a new philosophy or belief. The longer this meme is built, the more it accretes levels of meaning and spreads to include lifestyles, food, clothes and outlooks, all of which can indicate a particular meme.

For example, consider the meme of an artist, or what it would mean to be a beatnik, hippy or a rasta. A meme that started as a fashion can soon be taken to include preferred foods or political viewpoints and philosophy. The views held by a person can now be deduced, simply by looking at the hat they wear.

Like a plate resting upon a table where there are only a few disparate molecules in direct contact, or a brain where an idea can lodge in one of several areas, a meme could be said to lodge in some of many possible minds. It may change minds often and doesn’t have a constant localisation.

Transmission of Memes

When I first read Richard Dawkin’s book a quarter of a century ago, I had already formed a nebulous theory of mental energy. Living in what seemed to be a vast population of like-minded people, where everyone similarly reacted or used the same expressions, I envisaged a gigantic group mind. Similar to ants or bees or flocks of birds, it seemed to me we all acted in a predictable manner linked to the group. I’d started to consider this a gigantic psychic generator that could be tapped in some way.

Another thought was there would be nodes where you could find certain phenomena like a very lucky person or someone that could do no wrong. When I discovered the word ‘meme’, I realised this was a descriptive term I could utilise. It took a couple of years to simmer before I knew how to use it, and about 15 years before I suddenly realised the further implications of memetics. The mechanistic model of building and devolving memes wasn’t the crux of the matter, though undoubtedly this is what hooked people in the first place.

Consciousness seems to be a factor in the transmission process, though not an absolute. It’s just that memes seem to operate better the less aware we are of their operation.

Unaware as well as conscious effort build memes so they can have a growth period, and once built, are able to be devolved by others often unconnected to the building process. This devolvement works best by unconscious effort and is a process for knowledge to become distributed in ways once thought to be science fiction. The potential of telepathy, although fantastic, can be explained in memetic terms. Similarly, memetics enables unconnected people to have a shared knowledge or belief system. Thousands of years ago, when scattered cultures on different continents built pyramid structures, there was a memetic diffusion of similar goals. This is exemplified by the phenomenon known as the 100th monkey effect, to which I’ll come back to later in this article.

Animals can share memes. As their consciousness is taken as being more simplistic, they act alike. When flocks of birds and schools of fish turn, feed, or flee all at the same time, it is difficult to explain this as a totality of separate, independent decision making. Are they all plugged into a group mind or acting in an identical way just for being biologically similar? And it’s not just animals that act identically. Human children can act and react in the same way. Are they similar for being closer to the mould? Are they more telepathic for being more similar?

This is the real advance of memetics. By looking at memes as a potential indicator of both group and individual consciousness, we can unseal some previously closed mysteries.

Devolving Memes

In the last section I mentioned nodes as a place where memes could be better able to be devolved. To posit such nodes is only helpful to explain why some people are vastly better in attracting phenomena than others. Like a very lucky person or vice-versa. Another illustration would be a really good artist. Many people assume a successful artist simply has the right idea at the right time, but world class artists appear to have more than this simple formula working for them. A good artist tells us something we recognise as truth in an original way, and a great artist draws on something that makes their work and originality speak to other times. They draw on a muse with many strands and are often at a loss themselves to explain how they weave it into art. They are distilling the essence of the zeitgeist. Somehow, they are devolving the spirit of the age and telling us something we recognise as a truth. Something we knew all along without having enunciated it. When this happens, we call it a masterpiece.

Could it be the artist has positioned themselves on a node that devolves this creative energy? Their brains are a receiving medium for something they have unconsciously sought. It certainly seems there have been geographical distilleries of genius like in Athens or Paris in the past.

I’ve noticed a similar thing happen with music. I know the success of one local band can fuel the aspirations of others, and certain places seem to throw up on occasion not just a singular bloom but a whole bouquet. Most bands, unlike artists, seem to make a handful of distinctive rousing music and then atrophy. They never better their first original work, and plough the same furrow making their later compositions just variations on a theme. Yet there are rare artists who define an era, and their work both embodies and propagates memes.

Bubba Sparxx once rapped, “Rhyming chose me”.

As with art, science and theory leaps forward from singular people or places that seem truly inspired. There are often people working on similar things but only one gets the credit and is remembered. If it could ever be shown radical ideas and advances come from on high, it must be a scattergun approach where several people are simultaneously trying to establish it, and it doesn’t really matter who will win the race – just that one will.

Passing on Learned Behaviour Via Memes

The above are speculative asides. My main thrust is that ideas, fads or philosophies can be transmitted without local contact. These are memes that can be devolved and spread within limitations or throughout all society.

Consider personal experience. Haven’t we all done something for the first time and then discovered how natural it seems? Like riding a bicycle, it can take a few moments and then seems like we always could do it.

Don’t we all know someone who did something by chance and then it became a life’s work or career? Let’s consider a body of knowledge, a recently evolved meme such as ‘heart surgery’.

A new or trainee heart surgeon consciously learns the craft, but he/she is also memetically guided by the prior experience of others. Like acting or any trade, this memetic devolvement is best felt to be working when the subject is relaxed and has ‘let themselves go’. The examples of those that did it before us are like invisible spirit guides once we are ‘in the groove’.

Great men are said to sit on the shoulders of others before them, and so it is with all activity, whether it be carpentry, mothering, lying or fighting. No matter how harmful or mundane, others have built tramlines of the mind. In careers, apprentices or trainees can experience this as an arbitrary choice ‘fitting like a glove’. They have discovered an aptitude or somehow ‘picked it up’ without really being able to explain how. In animals of lesser consciousness, this becomes a pure instinct in which all eat, fight and sleep in practically identical ways.

Is there evidence learned behaviour is carried to others? One example would be when a rat finds its way through a maze. A second rat seems to find its way through the maze even quicker. In experiments, rats have been killed (to prevent telepathy) or identical new mazes substituted (to prevent scent trails), yet despite this, rats are progressively able to get through these mazes faster than the earlier ones. Where does this knowledge reside? They are accessing a meme that is being built, a meme of knowledge about the maze.

I doubt a meme is entirely independent of living things, but the crucial thing is that it acts as if it is. A meme has an arc of existence that, like the life of a living organism, is a self-contained pocket of energy.

Perhaps the best analogy of memes in the world is they are akin to numbers. The fantastic science of mathematics has enabled us to go to the moon and inspire computers. But we wouldn’t be able to point to a number or say, “this is a six”, we could just say there are six of something. Like memes, we use the concept of number to find linking commonalities and to make something have sense for us. To grasp that which has no obvious handle.

One of my favourite examples of memetics in action is that referred to as the 100th monkey effect, which is the result of studies from 1952-1958 of monkeys living on a string of Japanese islands.

What happened was that one monkey started washing the sand off sweet potatoes, and then others started doing it. At some point, a critical mass was reached and monkeys on other islands, though there was no obvious contact, started washing their food to remove the sand. This is almost a perfect example of a meme growing and then becoming accessible to all. A way for knowledge or learning to transmit to others not in physical contact. In human affairs, this is best seen in fashion, whereby there seems to be zeitgeist (spirit of the age) sweeping through disparate and otherwise unconnected populations.

The 100th monkey effect was first popularised in Lyall Watson’s book Lifetides. Another book by Ken Keyes simply called The Hundredth Monkey further propagated this novel idea. There have been a few articles that ‘revisit’ these experiments (e.g. one from Elaine Myers) but they miss the point.

Pseudo rebuttals to this theory usually harp on that not all monkeys adopted this new way of washing sand off potatoes. Ken Keyes clearly says in his foreword this phenomenon included “almost all” the monkeys, so he wasn’t claiming a universal spread.

Furthermore, the 100th monkey mechanism isn’t negated by this. The sceptics are confusing a hundred monkeys as somehow meaning 100%. Think of a meme such as a fashion. A few people adopt it, perhaps to widespread ridicule, but at some threshold point it becomes widely accepted. Now obviously, not every single person adopts the exact same fashion, but does this detract from the mechanism causing its explosive growth? Of course not. Indeed, there will always be adherents to memes of other fashions or the antithesis of the one currently in vogue. It’s a bit like the scene in the sci-fi movie ‘Fahrenheight 451’ where in a book burning society individuals each keep a certain book alive by reciting it and memorising it.

Similarly, fashions might be kept alive by adherents. Victims of fashion are the one’s gripped by a meme that has no hold on other people.

Critics of memetics similarly miss the point about statistics. I am not asserting twins will all have the same experiences or that coincidences can be statistically explained or expected, like the likelihood of two people at a gathering sharing the same birthday. In fact, memes explain why not everything will be the same in every case and every time.

What interests me are the astronomically improbable coincidences that can’t be configured. The one in a billion chance. The events that deserve some consideration instead of being dismissed as a one-off. These incredible coincidences are amenable to memetic explanation. I’m not claiming fantastical coincidences are the rule. Indeed, they are the exceptions that prove the rule, but these exceptions have underlying mechanisms making them exceptional.

There are other examples of mass learning within species if you don’t buy the 100th monkey theory.

In particular, one was the study done on blue tits pecking at foil on milk bottles to get at the milk. Once one or two started doing it, within a short time, blue tits everywhere were doing it.