We are very excited to announce our next speaker, Susan Blackmore, who will give us her view on the hypothesis of "memetics" and all it's consequences!
I'm looking forward to very vivid discussions!
Here's the link to the paper you need to read:
<http://www.susanblackmore.co.
cheers
Julia
I guess I have a general question about the strong restricting of memes to imitation. How does this explain things that I thought were memes, such as social contracts and governments? While it might be possible for these things to scale up from and through pure imitation, this is not readily apparent to me. Or is it that imitation creates memes, which then, so to speak, take on a life of their own and are further refined through their interaction with imitation. So, writing came about through imitation, but then further iterations of implementing writing caused it to spiral out of control (in a good way) that was caused by writing itself and not purely imitation.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it seems as though the author dismisses goal emulation as not involved in memes, but it seems like this process could be key in variation and optimization of memes. For example, I might see someone make a basket, and then emulate their goal but do so in a more effective way, which then gets passed down. Or, perhaps I initially learn how to make a basket through imitating, but then through interactions with another, we end up finding a new way to make baskets more efficiently. It does not seem as if this can solely be cashed out in terms of imitation. So, is imitation the whole picture or just the behavior that kickstarts the whole process of meme-creation?
Or, to use her words at the end, while we might typically "copy-the-instruction," it seems as though we cannot fully divorce ourselves from the "copy-the-product" perspective, as this is what allows innovations.
What isn't a meme? This is essentially my question. Throughout the article, Blackmore provides countless examples to the point where it seems like any practice, idea, thought, belief, artifact, word, or technique is a meme. This would be fine, I guess, if these things weren't also referred to as carriers for memes. Is there a distinction between these two things? take this discussion towards the end of the article for instance:
ReplyDelete"Writing improved the longevity of language memes and ensured the success of slates, pens, pencils and libraries. Printing improved fecundity, and the spread of printed books ensured the survival of printing presses, factories and book shops. Communications by road, rail, ship and aircraft, served to spread more memes faster and they in turn encouraged the creation of ever better means of travel."
What is a meme and what is a carrier in this sequence? We are told that writing improved the longevity of language memes. Here, I'm already confused. What are language memes? Words? The representational content of the words (i.e. stories, instructions, recipes etc.)? grammar structures? The cultural practices that we get information about through reading the language? all of these at once? Lets bracket this concern for now though and move on.
Next, we're told that writing also ensured the success of slates, pens, pencils and libraries. Are these things memes, or just carriers for language memes? given the earlier discussion of basket types as memes, it seems that these things should be memes subject to the same evolutionary process as the language memes they carry. Then we've got printing presses. The same question applies here as it does for the communication and transportation systems we get next.
I'll grant that its possible that all these things are both memes and carriers. But doing so gives rise to whole new set of questions:
Do memes give us information about memes? Or do they give us information about the world? Does it matter what information they give us? Or do they carry information independent of a knower? If it's the case that they carry information independent of a knower, then how do they die out or become extinct? Why do they need to replicate themselves? If a meme is inscribed on a stone tablet and buried in the earth, this seems like a really effective survival strategy for a meme. It no longer even needs to be replicated because it can't disappear. These might be questions about replicators in general, not just memes. What is their ontological status? are they things or processes? practices or objects?
Genes don't seem to run into these problems so much because organisms themselves are carriers of genes (I think. Correct me if I'm wrong about this please). No more organisms, no more genes. They actually need to be replicated. But do memes survive independent of organisms? If not then organisms are the primary carriers of memes and their being put to use by organisms seems constitutive to their existence. But the way they are described seems to suggest that they exist independently of use. So long as they are imitatable and therefore replicable in principle, it doesn't seem to matter if anyone actually imitates them.
Anyway, If anyone is still reading this, this all just makes me think that memes are a somewhat unwieldy concept that includes way too much. Genes themselves, insofar as we could use them to make clones, seem to be memes, let alone genetic theory as a cultural practice for interpreting the evolution of life on this planet. Is that a meme? This is my question I guess. What isn't a meme?
This article begins with Darwin’s natural selectiveness, and introduces the definition of “meme” as a new replicator that supports a human evolutionary process. It was pretty confusing that the term “meme”. Does “meme” a carrier for conveying things or the thing itself being conveyed? When it comes to origin of language, it says that language is a good way of creating memes with high fecundity and fidelity, and state that in a community of people copying sounds from each other memetic evolution will ensure that the higher quality sounds survive. I can’t figure out “higher quality sounds” in this sentence. Does it mean fidelity or fecundity?
ReplyDeleteI agree that some of the earliest behaviors Meltzoff studied on infant imitation, such as tongue protrusion, might be called contagion rather than true imitation. To understand better on this argument, I would like to hear more how to differentiate contagion and true imitation. Definition of imitation has varied and the importance of imitation cannot be disregarded when considering learning. Thus, it would be helpful to grasp the concept of imitation by comparing with non- imitation behaviors.
ReplyDeleteI have the same question as Hyunjoo! I guess contagion is like when a person yawns, other people in the room also start to yawn. And at what age or under what circumstances will she say that the behavior is not contagion?
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ReplyDeleteI found this concept of memes and information transfer very interesting and confusing. Also, I think Mike above makes an interesting case. What isn't a meme? I would like to know more about that distinction. From what I've gathered, contagions are not memes? Blackmore suggests that acts such as yawning, coughing, and laughing are not memes because they are already a part of our programming. So, the things that are not memes are simply the things that we all do as part of our "repertoire"? Memes need to be a copying of new behaviors? This seems like an oversimplification of a more complex issue...
Moreover, learning can be memetic but only in group learning contexts? Is it that when a child is taught to ride a skateboard in Blackmore's example, that behavior is for the benefit of the individual and therefore not a meme but if the child learns this behavior and passes it on then it becomes a meme? I found this a little confusing. What exactly does Blackmore mean by the learning being for the individual and not being passed on? What happens when that child gets a little older, has friends, and decides to teach one of them to ride a skateboard? Is that a meme? Skateboarding is not a behavior programmed into our repertoire but rather a component more of social learning I would think. I may have missed it or I just did't get it but I definitely would like to better understand the learning component of copying from individual to individual and what really constitutes this. That component of this argument seems very important to understanding memes.
The article introduces the concept of memes as a new form of replicator akin to, but crucially distinct from, genes. The author suggests that one primary claim about replicators in general, and thus why memes should be considered one to begin with, is that if we can distinguish a unit of information such that it can be passed for multiple generations with some integrity - i.e. we can see it's a similar trait over a period of evolutionary time - and is susceptible to variation, selection, and heredity, then we must get evolution.
ReplyDeleteI have two questions in light of this primary structure of replicators (or at least this part of their primary structure). First, while the trio of factors above are necessary and sufficient elements for evolution, is the specific, Darwinian processes that guides the natural evolution of genes necessarily the same mechanism which guides the evolution of memes? In other words, is it possible that an alternative type of evolution may be at play in the cultural sphere?
Second, in regards to the general language of purposiveness that seems to drive the literature and debates on this topic (i.e. the "selfish" gene, "selecting" traits for "its own" benefit and survival), should we understand these claims in particularly teleological fashion? If so, how should we relate it to the fact that the two replicators are mutually constrained at the same times as they work together? Or, to put the latter point in slightly different terms, there are moments of chance and environmental factors that make the talk of "fit" into a static place for a solution seem problematic. Is there more fitting language to talk about the dynamical process across memes, genes, and world or no?
I think that the talk about memes is a peculiar. The following is something like an intersection between a Marxist and an enactivist position. It doesn't really seem to me like *ideas* are the sort of things that move us through cultural history. An idea is only intelligible within a system of ideas, and systems of ideas are only intelligible within the practices that constitute them (or scaffold them, if you prefer...). The things that humans learn, teach, impose, appropriate, pass on etc., are not unitary ideas, transmutable in and of themselves. But instead we transmit information people how to do things--how to engage in certain practices--whether technological, social, ritualistic, epistemological, agricultural, and so on. Memes, or individual ideas, are really only something that we can contemplate in abstraction from the practices that we find ourselves situated in.
ReplyDeleteI don't think memes are the units of cultural transmission; practices and activities are. I think that Blackmore is touching on this insofar as her memes involve imitation. But practices aren't individual; practices are situated in systems of practices. So I find it difficult to see where one unitary meme or cultural meaning ends and another begins.