Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id RAA06464 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sun, 10 Feb 2002 17:23:55 GMT Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.0.20020210120014.02c88260@pop.cogeco.ca> X-Sender: hkhenson@pop.cogeco.ca X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1 Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 12:20:15 -0500 To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk From: Keith Henson <hkhenson@cogeco.ca> Subject: Memes Meta-Memes and Politics 3 of 3 (1988, updates 2002) In-Reply-To: <160D5CA0-1DCF-11D6-BA5D-003065B9A95A@harvard.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Though the evolutionary origins of our susceptibility to memes is
fairly obvious, it is instructive to examine the actual mechanisms of the
mind that are engaged when we are infected with a meme.
Recent research in neurology and artificial intelligence has produced
a remarkable model of the mind. Minds are beginning to be viewed as
vast parallel collections of simpler elements, called "agents" or
modules.*
[Without detracting from the work of Marvin Minsky, William Calvin has done
remarkable work right down to the hardware the cortex uses to create
thoughts and maintain our sense of being. See his web site and especially
his more recent books on the brain.]
Memes are information patterns which, like a recipe, guide the
construction of some agents, or groups of agents. A "walking under
ladders leads to bad luck" meme has successfully infected someone when it
has built agents that modify a person's behavior when walking near
ladders.
Some mental agents are "wired in". The most obvious ones pull our
hands back from hot things. Others are not so obvious, but one which has
considerable study is often called "the inference engine." Split brain
research has established it to be physically located in the left brain of
most people, close to or overlapping the speech area. This module seems
to be the source of inferences that organize the world into a consistent
whole. The same hardware seems to judge externally presented memes for
plausibility. This piece of mental hardware is, at the same time, the
wellspring of advances, and the source of vast error. ----- *The new
models even offer an explanation for that difficult problem, the origin
of consciousness. Each agent is too simple to be conscious, but
consciousness incidentally emerges as a property of the interconnections
of these agents. In Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky uses the analogy that
consciousness emerges from non-conscious elements just as the property of
confinement emerges from six properly arranged boards, none of which (by
itself) has any property of confinement. (And you thought Ids and Egos
were complicated.)
Being able to infer, that is to find new relations in the way the
world is organized, and being able to learn inferences from others must
rank among our most useful abilities. Unfortunately, outputs of this
piece of mental hardware are all too often of National Enquirer quality.
Unless reined in by hard-to-learn mental skills, this part of our minds
can lead us into disaster. Experiments detailing the kinds of serious
errors this mental module makes can be found in Human Inference by
Nesbitt and Ross and in The Social Brain by Michael Gazzaniga.
(Sidebar) *****************************************
Gazzaniga demonstrated the activity of the inference engine module with
some very clever experiments on split brain patients. By the module
failing, we can clearly see how it is doing the best it can with
insufficient data.
What Gazzaniga did is to present each side of the brain with a simple
conceptual problem. The left side saw a picture of a claw, and the right
side saw a picture of a snow scene. A variety of cards was place in
front of the patient who was asked to pick the card which went with what
he saw. The correct answer for the left hemisphere was a picture of a
chicken. For the right half-brain it was a show shovel.
"After the two pictures are flashed to each half-brain, the subjects
are required to point to the answers. A typical response is that of
P.S., who pointed to the chicken with his right hand and the shovel
with the left. After his response I asked him 'Paul, why did you do
that?' Paul looked up and without a moment's hesitation said from
his left hemisphere, 'Oh, that's easy. The chicken claw goes with
the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.'
"Here was the left half-brain having to explain why the left hand was
pointing to a shovel when the only picture it saw was a claw. The
left brain is not privy to what the right brain saw because of the
brain's disconnection. Yet the patents's own body was doing
something. Why was it doing that? Why was the left hand pointing to
the shovel? The left-brain's cognitive system needed a theory and
instantly supplied one that made sense given the information it had
on this particular task . . . ."
The inference engine was a milestone in our evolution. It works far
more often than it fails. But as you can see from the example, the
inference engines will wring blood from a stone; you can count on its
finding causal relations whether they exist or not. Worse yet, the
inference engine probably can't detect when it doesn't have enough data.
Even if it could, it has no way to tell that to the verbal (conscious)
self.
(end sidebar) *********************************************
There are both genetic and memetic controls on the dangerous beliefs
that arise in this module, though they don't always work. I can't point
to genes for skepticism but (provided it did not interfere too much with
necessary learning) this characteristic would be of considerable survival
advantage. Being entirely uncritical of the memes you are exposed to can
be a fatal trait, or it can result in reduced (or no) fertility. The
classic example of a genetically fatal belief is the Shaker religion,
but intense involvement with a wide variety of memes (or derived social
movements) statistically results in fewer children. Unlike the Shakers
(who practiced total abstinence), the Rajneesh cult in Oregon practiced a
sexual free-for-all. However, they discouraged births--and children--to
the extreme of sterilizing the barely pubescent children of their
members. From the meme's viewpoint, the more effort its host puts into
promoting the meme (living example, proselytizing, etc.) the better.
From the host gene's viewpoint, memes that reduce fertility are a
disaster.
[Of course the other end of the spectrum with an end at "utterly
uncritical" is to be so skeptical of what you are told that you don't
believe those who tell you streets are dangerous places to play. So the
bell curve gets trimmed on both ends.]
Many memes take the shortcut and spread from person to person. Others
spread in concert with the host genes, promoting fertility. Several
religious memes fall into this category: Hutterite beliefs spread
exclusively with the genes of the believers. Mormon memes take both
routes--both are long term success stories. (Though ecological limits or
social upheavals will eventually stop exponential growth in these cases.)
There are other defenses against the uncritical acceptance of
potentially dangerous memes. Most common is the trait of rejecting all
newfangled ideas, where "newfangled" is usually defined as any to which
one has not been exposed before puberty. Societies have similar defenses
against new ideas. There are also powerful meta-memes, that is, memes
used to judge other memes. Of these, the scientific method is perhaps
the most effective. Logic is another system by which memes can be
tested, at least for consistency.
In historical times a meta-meme of tolerance (especially religious
tolerance) has emerged in western culture. This is a remarkable event,
since memes inducing tolerance to other memes would be expected to lose
in the competition for mind space to memes which induce intolerance to
other beliefs. Within small, isolated social groups, this is still the
case.
But in larger cultural ecosystems, when traders come with obnoxious
ideas and customs, but desirable goods, at least limited tolerance is a
requirement if any trading is to be done. There were many other factors
in the development of modern western tolerance such as the Renaissance
and the indecisive religious wars that swept back and forth across
Europe. Still, the advantage of trading goods may have been the primary
force at work in the memetic ecosystem which caused many belief systems
to adopt a tolerant-toward-other-beliefs component. Cooperative behavior
is known to spontaneously emerge from groups (even groups at war) when
certain conditions are present. Free trade may be similarly linked to the
emergence of the meta-meme of tolerance, and in turn to the
respectability of free thought. Testing these speculations would require
rating the trade/tolerance of many groups and seeing if there is (or was)
correlation.
With respect to the USSR, trade and tolerance are both at a low level.
Historically trade was a much smaller part of the economy during the time
the rest of Europe was undergoing the Renaissance. The recent attempts
to introduce tolerance to other modes of economic systems in the USSR
have more than a superficial similarity to the Catholic church finally
deciding to live with the Protestants. A modern-day Renaissance in the
USSR may be based on the free exchange of information through computers
and free(r) trade.
[Remember I wrote this in 19881]
China presents a classic case of innovative memes spreading from the
ports. Until England intervened and opened a weak China the rulers tried
to quarantine dangerous foreigners and their infectious ideas near the
ports. To this day the most productive parts of China are where
capitalist/free market memes spread from the seaports. It may be that
homogeneous, closed groups without the influence of outsiders reinforce
their belief systems into the ground, burning heretics and stagnating
economically, until they are forced to open their ports.
A full analysis may eventually determine that tolerance, innovation,
combating cultural and economic stagnation are *all* dependent on free
trade.
[Similar idea can be found in the later chapers of Origin of Virtue by Matt
Riddley.]
Memes and trade are coupled the other way as well. The feedback loop
for many memes is closed through goods made for the marketplace. Better
ideas for how to make shoes, or computers, or (you name it) spread best
when they are tested in the marketplace. Closing the ports (currently a
popular idea in Silicon Valley) to either ideas or goods is a memetic
disaster. Bad products and bad ideas are weeded by market place
competition.
Study of ecosystems usually leads to a great deal of appreciation of
the complexity that has been worked into them through evolution. Our
actively evolving memetic ecosystem (culture) has been shaped over many
centuries by the rise and fall of the replicating information patterns
which have come down to us. These memes that make up our culture are
essentially living entities. They struggle against each other for space
in minds and lives, they are continually evolving. New memes arise in
human mental modules, old memes mutate, and many become confined to
books. The ferment is most noticeable on the edge of new scientific
knowledge, pop culture, and the ever shifting of ascendant political
ideas. Western culture is as complicated as a rain forest, and deserves
no less respect, admiration, understanding, and care.
The vast majority of the memes we pass from person to person or
generation to generation are either helpful or at least harmless. It is
hard to see that these elements of our culture have a separate identity
from us. But a few of these replicating information patterns are clearly
dangerous. By being obviously harmful, they are easy to see as a separate
class of evolving, parasitic, lifelike forms. A very dangerous group
leads to behavior such as the People's Temple suicides, or similar cases
that dot our history. The most dangerous class leads to vast killings
like that of the Nazis in WW II, the Communists in post-revolutionary
Russia, and the Kampuchea self-genocide.
The development of memetics provides improved mental tools (models)
for thinking about the influences, be they benign, silly, or fatal, that
replicating information patterns have on all of us. Here is a source of
danger if memetics comes of age and only a few learn to create meme sets
of great influence. Here too is liberation for those who can recognize
and analyze the memes to which they are exposed. If "the meme about
memes" infects enough people, rational social movements might become more
common.
-----
The author gratefully acknowledges ideas and editorial assistance from
Arel Lucas.
===============================================================
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