Memes

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So you're saying only the simplest "memes" are "selected"?

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)17:48, 29 January 2012

No, that all "memes" would actually be simple enough to transfer, Any complicated piece of cultural information can be broken down into smaller ideas - although, as always, defining the "smallest unit of cultural information" is difficult, if not impossible to do, which is the major inherent problem. The memes that propagate successfully would be the ones that find a good home on the receiving side, i.e., someone most willing and accepting of them. We're well aware that people are picky and choosy over what aspects of a religion they take on board. So when trying to assimilate the Bible some people will happily latch onto the parts that say gay sex is wrong, but will happily ignore the bit about shellfish.

Scarlet A.pngsshole21:32, 29 January 2012

Yeah, the definition of meme itself has been one of the big points of contention. The gear shift for example -- is this even one singular meme? Why not the individual settings of "drive," "reverse," "park," etc.? Memetics proponents tend to give handwavey responses along the lines of "Ah, but it doesn't have to be so well-defined to be useful." True enough, but that part about actually being useful is pretty important. Memetic approaches haven't actually shown to have any advantage over previous models such as gene-culture co-evolution.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)01:23, 30 January 2012

Yeah, you see you can do things like gene-centered evolution when you can actually point to a gene and draw a ring around it.

Scarlet A.pngsshole01:46, 30 January 2012

That is pretty handy isn't it? My main problem, though, isn't that they don't "exist" per se -- lots of models don't truly exist in the "real" world, but they do provide useful predictions. I can't see the useful aspect of memetics. It doesn't give much in the way of predictive value, and what predictions it does make seem to end up being either trivial and tautological (ideas spread, no shit!) or totally cranky and false (e.g., Blackmore's contention that the big brain evolved as a "meme machine," a just-so story if there ever was one).

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)01:53, 30 January 2012

Prediction is the problem. Although I suppose the prediction is that ideas that can be most easily bolted onto someone's existing beliefs will spread more than others. Thought that's almost so obvious it's not worth stating. I just like it in terms of how you can break ideas down into smaller units and see what looks the same in apparently very different activities. Then there's no more need for it to predict anything than music notation needs to predict anything, really. Again, handwavey, but no prediction is better than predictive qualities that are useless.

Scarlet A.pngbomination09:52, 30 January 2012

Though as another point, until we've hacked the brain apart and can understand it I don't think we can call the brain an anything machine. We have ideas about how it works, but the intricate details you need to know to call it a "meme machine" just aren't available yet. You never know, perhaps the neural networks that flash up with ideas will be analogous to genes in that you can point to them and draw a ring around them, then we'll have found the "meme", but that's not terribly likely.

Scarlet A.pngnarchist10:04, 30 January 2012

If it has no predictive power, it's not exactly a science in and of itself then, is it? I guess there are somewhat meme-like units in memory psychology called chunks, which are defined by their associational strength with other chunks, e.g. in a random assortment of letters ("ahnwvsnxccd"), each letter would count as a chunk, but familiar abbreviations ("JFK NASA UK CIA KGB") would count as one chunk because of their associations.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)18:51, 30 January 2012

I came across that a while ago and figured it made more sense. It seems like the brain can only cache so much at a time. Probably why you get that low fidelity of transmission.

Scarlet A.pngbomination20:48, 30 January 2012