I had never heard of a meme prior to reading this, but based on its description, I don’t think the world has even seen a true meme yet. Google isn’t a meme, it is today’s version of the stone tool.

A better definition of a meme might be the deliberate programming of information into our own genetic code. When future generations are born with worldly knowledge encoded in their genes, those modified genes will be the true memes.

Science is fundamentally the replication of natural processes. As we learn more about these processes (including genetics), a positive feedback loop will occur that will enable humans to replicate them inherently without constructing a tool. In a rather far fetched sci-fi example, mastery of the processes that allow us to transfer solar energy into a laser beam, when added to our genetic code, could result in humans that shoot photosynthesis-powered laser beams from their eyes.

Inevitably, we will be able to replicate the evolution of the brain and nervous system, which will give birth to AI. With that will come the ability to preserve our own consciousness in a more enduring vehicle embued with even more advanced senses.

That is, if we don’t get wiped out by a meteor first.

FWIW, I think it’s actually Vernor Vinge’s singularity, isn’t it?!

This is a fallacy for three reasons. First, information, by definition, requires energy: something has to convert new data and older information into new (and hopefully more meaningful) information. Second, information building on other information suffers from the law of diminishing returns: it takes more and more energy to gain smaller and smaller amounts of information. Third, as information complexity goes up, the amount of energy required to store and maintain the information rises. (Raw storage can be used, but lots of bits are needed. Alternately, information can be encoded, but that takes effort to devise the coding scheme and energy to encode and decode.)

Here’s an example of reason 2 from my field of laboratory medicine:
A patient comes to the Emergency Room with chest pain. A battery of laboratory tests are performed, and the ER doctor turns the lab results into information and concludes that there is a 90% chance that the patient is having a myocardial infarction (MI). He orders a more specific (and costly) test, and the extra data yields better information: a 98% chance that the patient is having an MI. The ER doc orders another expensive test, the result is equivocal, and the revised chance of MI is 94%. Additional data converted into additional information are not helping: they are wasting time and money.

What I find strange is that Kurzweil and others write entire books about information without understanding information’s fundamental costs and limitations. They act as if information is a stable chunk of granite that popped into being with no effort and can be combined with other chunks of granite to make info-structures. It just isn’t so.

(Note, I have read your exerpt)
Craig I cannot really see the use of reducing memes to extended phenotype, and I struggle to see that that strategy has explanatory value.

Take for example a boring example such as the chorus of a new pop song which is stuck in my head, and I sing out loud infront of a friend, who also aquires it.

If you wish to explain the pop song as an extended phenotype of my own genes I think you have a problem. Sure you can explain the architecture of my brain and what it is about my brain that leads me to get it stuck in my head (clearly a product of my genes, and some environmental influence). But you can not by any stretch derive the song by understanding my genome. And this technique would seem to ignore many of the important features of the song itself. Its pop melody, the lyrics which are similar to other pop songs at the moment, the rhythm which is inspired and in some sense a mutated version of previous pop rhythms. You may try to swallow all of that up by claiming it is part of the environment that my genes in their extended phenotypic way interact with, but I think you have lost the power of explanation. A theory with no explanatory value is a theory unlikely to make predictions, and therefore untestable.

In terms of a memetic explanation. The pop song is stored in my brain, mutated when I get the melody wrong, though may keep most of its features. And it is copied when I sing it to my friend. The reason it does this is because of its catchy features, the melodies, rhythm, lyrics, puns, which cause my brain, evolved to take note of particular things better than others, to remember it, recall it frequently and sing it out loud more frequently than other things I have heard or thought about. We may ask lots of useful questions about why my brain has the preferences and evolved skills it does but this does not detract from the usefulness of looking at the meme itself and seeing what features it has that aid its storage, replication and mutation (with some fidelity). As it does all these things it can be considered an evolving replicator. And if it does all these things it should be credited with algorithmic force.

Craig how would you design a test to distinguish between memetic and extended phenotypic explanations of the catchy pop song?

I’d like to see you take on Dr. Kurzweil’s health nonsense directly either here or on Science-Based Medicine. He seems to be getting a lot of press for predicting nerd rapture (uploading our brains to computers and attaining immortality). He seems to think that in the meantime we need to get massive supplements, chelation therapy, alkaline water, etc. so we can stay alive for this event. We can conveniently buy all this crap from him and his homeopathic buddy, Dr. Grossman. Dr. Hall has mentioned Kurzweil briefly, but I’d like to see a full frontal assault.

If you want to, you can say that under these schemes, memes and utils don’t “exist,” whereas if we are taking them into consideration, then they do “exist.” Another analogy would be if you are a mathematician working out theorems of real numbers, then infinitesimal numbers don’t “exist” (you can even prove their non-existence), but if you are are a mathematician conceptualizing the hyperreals, then infinitesimal numbers do “exist” under that scheme. I hope you can see the futility of arguing the ontology of these things, because it is really not about whether they “exist,” it’s about whether that conceptualization is useful in shedding light on topics like microeconomics, cultural evolution or the structure of mathematical logic, vis-a-vis other althernative ways of conceptualizing these things. IOW, if you want to object to any of these things, do so by pointing out their uselessness or at least inferiorit to an alternative, not by pointing out that something in them doesn’t “exist.”

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Why are so many people so comfortable with the idea of the Singularity? Why do so many people welcome the idea of abandoning their bodies? Here is where the free will debate reenters the conversation. And here is where it links up with the issue of human malleability. Here also is where IR scholars familiar with the agent/structure debates might be able to help clear things up for the Darwinists. The purpose of this section is to launch a challenge to ethologist/evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ well-known definition of a meme… an idea that is able to copy and transmit itself in ways analogous to the copying and transmission of genes (A fuller description will be presented shortly). This challenge is necessary because the current understanding of memes serves to replicate persistently misleading ideas about the exogenous nature of causality in human affairs, and thus deprecates our respect for freedom.

To begin, it is important to recognize that one of Dawkins’ most significant achievements as a biologist has been to crystallize thinking about what might be called the chicken and egg problem of evolutionary science. For Dawkins, eggs use chickens to make more eggs. That is, the analysis of how genes use bodies (phenotypes) to replicate more genes is coupled to an understanding that selective pressures act upon genes rather than individuals or groups. So, instead of being primarily concerned with how the fittest individuals pass on their genes to subsequent generations, evolutionists have come to focus more on how various behaviors among kin serve to propagate genetic variants.

In Dawkins’ elegant formulation, the beast within is the “selfish gene,” hungry for space in the gene pool. The stability of altruistic behaviors among kin, however costly for some individuals (even up to forfeiture of reproductive possibilities and loss of life), can thus be understood in the context of a genotype’s protective strategy for success. Dawkins also holds that the phenotype can extend beyond bodies into artifacts and even other bodies. Ant hills, for example, would be an expression of ant genes, and a host’s disease symptoms resulting from a parasitical, bacterial, or viral intrusion would be an expression of the infecting agent’s genes.

Dawkins’ concept of memes is where the trouble starts. He describes them as units of cultural transmission that “propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” According to his formulation, memes are to ideas as genes are to phenotypes. That is, memes are selfish entities that can use brains to propagate themselves. The word has, in its own catchy meme-like way, taken hold in common parlance. Since a meme is often portrayed as a kind of mental virus, the idea has been enlisted to hype a kind of advertising called viral marketing. The concept is also widely put to use as an all-purpose explanation for transmission and mutation of cultural ideas. Journalist Robert Wright, for one, has joined the meme bandwagon with fervent enthusiasm.

Memes are also a central concept in transhumanist ideology. Proponents start from the assumption that memes are driven to replicate themselves by exploiting available phenotypes and working to evolve better ones. The most aggressive memes, therefore, would find it advantageous to prompt humans to build superior hosts through which those memes could prosper even more. The most successful of those memes would be prepared to switch substrates altogether, discarding human hosts and taking on cyborg form when that better serves their needs. One seemingly positive analogy for this is a butterfly emerging from a caterpillar-spun cocoon. Another is a parasite that develops by devouring the body cavity of its host, and finally drives the host to suicide when it is ready to breed.

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Dawkins’ error boils down to crediting memes with algorithmic force. This presumed endowment manifests itself as a self-propelled, generative dynamism, and a driving, ontological priority. It has inspired legions of meme fanatics, including psychologist Susan Blackmore, who advocates a worldview that subordinates human intentionality and dismisses the existence of axiomatic human freedom. Dawkins’ error is easily redeemed. His edifying conception of the extended phenotype provides a far better way to account for the replication of ideas. In the paragraphs below, I briefly propose a reformulated description of memes that I believe will prove to be more straightforward and productive for the long run.

First of all, a move toward reformulation starts by accepting that there is no evident or pressing need to elevate memes beyond the status of an extended phenotype. The concept of memes, at its core, is redundant. The genes-eye view is already good enough to explain the rise of culture. Since it is possible to speak distinctively about materially-expressed extended phenotypes, that concept can be recruited to speak also about symbolically-expressed ones. In that sense, all the tools and rules we fabricate can be seen as extra-somatic membranes of our physical and intellectual existence. People are not vessels for memes, but for genes. So then would all our artifacts be such vessels… including memes as well. Describing memes in such terms would provide stronger theoretical grounding for them within Dawkins’ own oeuvre, and thus a more integrated description of the extended phenotype itself.

Another virtue of accounting for memes as a symbolically-expressed extended phenotype of the human species is that doing so could provide a sturdy bridge for interdisciplinary discourse. For example, this proposed reframing would allow for a closer accord with the structurationist concepts described earlier, in which cultural artifacts are seen as the simultaneous medium and outcome of social practice. Likewise, a meme’s reformulated ontological status could be shown to match that of any other discernible social practice within Searle’s conception of social reality. This move, therefore, promises to reveal commensurable perspectives across the disciplined discourses of evolutionary science, linguistic philosophy, sociology, and constructivist IR. But achieving such a commensurable understanding would be no simple task. The artifact-as-agent paradigm is quite persistent and may continue to exert an appeal across otherwise sober and scientifically-oriented disciplines. The challenge for the memetic fundamentalists is their willingness to apply Darwinian acid to their own ways of thinking.

This is not to say that the practice of referring to “memes” must end. The idea resonates. Its vernacular understanding is bound to persist. But there are compelling reasons to question and reject the epiphenominality and subordination of human thought enshrined by Dawkins’ approach.