The meme and the mime

In chapter 11. (Into the meme pool) of 'The Information' Gleick shows himself to have been heavily influenced by the ideas of Richard Dawkins. We might say he becomes a Dawkins mime. Painful as it is, I need to respond to this chapter in quite a bit of detail.

Quotes and comments;

305. 'Rhyme and rhythm help people remember bits of text. Or: rhyme and rhythm help bits of text get remembered. Rhyme and rhythm are qualities that aid a meme’s survival, just as strength and speed aid an animal’s.

- The chapter has become a parade of stupid remarks. The pathetic fallacy marches on.
Just as? Hardly. The conflate a biological organism with an abstract object violates all we know about doing science. (The next thing we know, he'll tell us that memes also bleed. "Do I not bleed?" said the meme.)

Since Gleick is so big on science, maybe he can tell us how we could determine whether the meme idea is scientific. Obviously if one wants to, one can think of the meme as alive; but is it? and is that a scientific idea? Is it testable? Is it falsifiable? This is nothing more than an intellectual game (hopefully it's just a hula hoop type fad.)

We see in the meme idea how vitally important one's perspective is; ie. it determines what a person will make of the data. (If the meme idea is true, then anything can be true; all one has to do is claim that it's true. What couldn't be true if our standards for truth are set this low?

Are martians real because some people believe martians exist? Are aliens real because some people think they exist? Are aliens an invading virus? (i.e. is the meme alien an invading virus?)
Is time travel real because we have the time machine meme?
Is evolution true because we have the evolution meme? (I think m2m evolution is about as valid a concept as the meme concept.)

305. 'Like genes, memes have effects on the wide world beyond themselves: phenotypic effects.

- Like genes? I don't think so. There's a load of presuppositions embedded in that one small word. Memes aren't like genes at all... at least not in any real sense. This is poetic licence at best. Are memes made of code? do they produce proteins and cells? do they have error detection devices? Do they have code for writing code? Are they composed of chemicals?

If we want to bring at least a little common sense into this meme discussion we should take note of the fact there is no such thing as a generic meme. There are only memes created by human beings. Memes don't have an independent existence; but yet this is how dawkins speaks of them.

This is a deeply anti-human way of looking at the world. Dawkins likes the idea because it allows him to call god a virus. ie. people don't believe in god because of evidence, or reason, but because they (helpless victims) were attacked by a nasty virus. His meme idea is demeaning, degrading and offensive. It dehumanizes people. (The more offensive an idea is to christians the more dawkins is attracted to it. This focus seems to control what ideas he adopts or rejects in his so called 'science'. The direction his 'science' goes is controlled by his hatred of christianity. That this should be called neutral science is a farce.)

The reason some people are christians and some are not is due to the unknown vagaries of virus infection. No idea could be more demeaning, more uncivil... or more demented. (Does dawkins thank his lucky stars he never got infected? Why does he give himself any credit for his atheism if it's all dependent on not catching a virus?)

In dawkins we have the bizarre picture of a person who claims to be a Humanist, but who has formulated the most inhuman (anti-human) ideas ever dreamt of. (eg. the selfish gene scenario and the meme/virus scenario)

306. 'Memes can replicate with impressive virulence...'

- Nonsense. Things don't do anything with virulence. Good grief. Only people act with virulence (one of them is lurking in the background of this discussion.) This is another example of anthropomorphism and personification. (The whole meme idea depends on this bit of confusion.) Gleick is confusing science with poetry.

Virulent;
1. 'Bitterly hostile or antagonistic; hateful: virulent criticism
2. Very bitter or spiteful; malignant: as, a virulent invective
- it's true that people refer to diseases as virulent, but this is a metaphor. Matter has no will; it's impersonal. It has no feelings.

306. ''When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking...'' - NH

- It seems H. doesn't understand the meme project all that well. He should have written; "when a meme plants itslef in my mind, it literally parasitizes my brain...'' See the difference?

In just the way a virus? Not even close. This is more poetry.
A fertile meme? Only living organisms are fertile. Ideas are not fertile. They have no ovaries.
Yes Nick, this Is just a way of talking. (If it's not, prove it with a scientific experiment. Show me a way to falsify it. Show me a way to test it.

What a hopeless dead end this meme project is. Nothing good will come of it. It's just more of the dehumanizing project gifted to us by reductionism.

306. '...the pioneering ethologist W. D. Hamilton, reviewing the book [Selfish Gene]for Science, ventured this prediction:
"Hard as this term may be to delimit—it surely must be harder than gene, which is bad enough—I suspect that it will soon be in common use by biologists and, one hopes, by philosophers, linguists, and others as well and that it may become absorbed as far as the word “gene” has been into everyday speech.''

- Why would anyone have such a bizarre hope? He hopes to see the dehumanizing of man? (Of course people like Dawkins can only imagine the meme idea as a weapon to attack Christians (etc.) they don't foresee it being used as weapon against them. Make no mistake; the meme was invented as weapon to attack christianity.)

You can't define (limit) meme because it doesn't exist. A gene is real, and a meme is not. The gene can be an object of scientific study, while the meme cannot.

If these people love science so much, why are they favoring such non-scientific claptrap as the meme idea? (But perhaps it's only some genes at work; prompting them to make fools of themselves against their will.)

If dawkins is correct about his view of the gene (as master of its human slaves) he cannot be right about the meme. Why? This can't be a true idea, because there could be no truth in a selfish gene model of the universe. ie. if the only reason we think, say or do anything is the influence of genes, the concept of truth disappears.

307. '...for most of human history memes and language have gone hand in glove.

- Seems strange the meme was only invented in 1976 then doesn't it?
A meme is like a gene the way a hand is like a glove :=}

307. "Well, now, Walton’s own viral text, as you can see here before your eyes, has managed to commandeer the facilities of a very powerful host—an entire magazine and printing press and distribution service. It has leapt aboard and is now—even as you read this viral sentence—propagating itself madly throughout the ideosphere.'' - Hofstadter

- The meme idea is evidence for me that intellectuals in our day are not serious thinkers at all. They prefer playing games to seeking the truth; being silly to be serious; having fun rather than being logical; etc. (They sure haven't spent much time critiquing materialism or evolutuion theory.)

A meme has 'commandeered' the staff of a magazine! Oh what fun we're having now. Break out the beer and noise makers.

308. 'Hofstadter gaily declared himself infected by the meme meme.'

- My point exactly. (see comment above)
If he's been 'infected' by anything, it's silliness.

309. “The computers in which memes live are human brains.”

- The brain is not a computer for one thing; memes aren't alive for another. The man has been self-deluded into taking his reification as real. He's trapped within the confines of the pathetic fallacy. (But I guess we can't blame him, all this nonsense is only the work of his selfish genes after all, and what can a poor slave do but obey his masters?)

310. 'In bioinformatics, chain letters are an object of study. They are memes; they have evolutionary histories.

- Apparently the word evolution no longer has any meaning.
Maybe it's only as real as memes are; i.e. an invention of the human mind; simply a way of looking at things. People capable of treating memes as real and alive are clearly capable of inventing something as impossible as macro or cosmic evolution. It's clear to me that neither reality nor logic has any restraint on their speculations.

We've seen how the meme mavens don't mind engaging in personification and reification, so why would the darwinists have minded a few logical fallacies and inventions? Natural selection gets reified, and turned into a creative agent (rather than a banal weeding out process). Time is the hero of the plot sounds a lot like a meme doesn't it? Uniformitarianism is just a way of looking at things after all; it's certainly not true.

310. “And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life” [Revelation 22:19].

- This is clearly proof the bible is a meme. It's a scientific fact, as real as the earth orbiting the sun.
Gleick just couldn't resist the temptation to disparage the bible and christians could he? You see, people don't believe the bible because they're convince it's true. Oh no. They believe it because they (poor helpless victims) were infected by a nasty virus. He might as well spit on them. (The motivation for this game is hatred, and a desire to attack christians and Christianity.)

I don't suppose evolution or atheism are nasty viruses attacking innocent victims are they? (I guess there's some scientific method that allows them to distinguish good viruses from bad ones :=} What a farce.

311. “These [chain] letters have passed from host to host, mutating and evolving,” they reported.
"Like a gene, their average length is about 2,000 characters..."

- Like a gene eh?
A letter is like a gene is it? That would mean that an intelligent agent composed it wouldn't it? These people are having so much fun they don't see what the implications of what they're saying.

I can't believe anyone takes this stuff seriously; but then again, it is academics we're dealing with here... and nothing is too silly for them to study and waste their time on.

311. "Like a potent virus, the letter threatens to kill you and induces you to pass it on to your “friends and associates”

- Like a potent virus? I don't think so. This 'equation' they've made exists only in their mind. There is no real identity here at all. There isn't any real similarity. These people have deluded themselves. This equation is not in the data, but in the (fanciful) interpretation of the data.

A letter doesn't threaten to kill someone, a person does. (These are the same people who claim it's guns that kill; apparently they mean it literally.)

312. "Like an inheritable trait, it promises benefits for you and the people you pass it on to. Like genomes, chain letters undergo natural selection and sometimes parts even get transferred between coexisting “species.

- Maybe some of the radical deconstructionists are correct, and words really don't have any meaning. That's the only conclusion I can make from this incoherent statement.

You can get an idea from this how loose the current generation is with their language and their thinking. Apparently anything goes... as long as people like it; as long as it's user friendly. This explains for me how so many people can believe in a materialist creation of the life forms on this planet. ie. they believe the impossible; they believe it because they want to. Cosmic evolution is just words on a page; that's the only 'reality' it has. If people can believe the quote above, they can believe anything.

313. “Memes have not yet found their Watson and Crick,” said Dawkins; “they even lack their Mendel.”

- We see a frightful example here of scientism; the idea you can study all subjects (even human experience) with the same methods you use to study a rock.
More anthropomorphism by the world's favorite mystic.

313. 'In the competition for space in our brains and in the culture, the effective combatants are the messages.

- There's a mindless stupidity in the claim messages compete (compete for brain space yet). People compete, messages do not. People may (and do) use messages to facilitate competition but that's a different matter. If a person can't realize a category mistake, there's not much you can say. (Maybe we should charge some memes with false advertising, and let the business owners go free. Maybe some memes should be charged with racism, and that great sin homophobism :=}

314. “The human world is made of stories, not people,” writes David Mitchell.

- It's hard for me to imagine a more stupid, absurd statement.
The human world doesn't have any humans in it? Good grief. I thought this man was supposed to be able to write.

I wonder if stories bleed. ("Do I not bleed when you stick me with a pin,'' the story said.)
This is more death of man theology. (When I first heard RJR say that the death of god theology will lead to the death of man theology I couldn't figure out what he meant. I've since learned.)

314. “The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed.”

- That's clever David. It's also meaningless. (Only when people play with words do stories have selves.)
That's the whole point of the meme idea (as I said earlier) Memes mean never having to say you're sorry. Memes mean no one is responsible for their actions.

In that case why do we still have laws, courts and jails? We have them because you can't live in conformity with a false idea. e.g. materialism.

If people want to look at the world this way (and stand on their head to do it) I can't stop them. If people want to believe in materialist origin scenario I can't stop that either.

314. 'Margaret Atwood writes: “As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before.

- The biblical writers were well aware of man's propensity for self-deception. "And imagining themselves to be wise, they became fools." This isn't knowledge, it's a self-serving delusion. (Few things could be more comical than a 'science' of memes. I wonder if it will conform to the Dover judge's definition :=}

314. 'Fred Dretske, a philosopher of mind and knowledge, wrote in 1981: “In the beginning there was information. The word came later.”

- Is that empirical science I wonder. Anyone observe this? If by word he means intelligence, I disagree. There can be no information with an intelligent source. (This at least is what we observe, when we do investigation of the real world.)

Actually the information in the cell is many (many) times more complex and sophisticated than the human alphabet. There's really no comparison.

315. He added this explanation: “The transition [from molecule to man] was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind.” Now we might add, thanks to Dawkins, that the transition was achieved by the information itself, surviving and perpetuating its kind and selectively exploiting organisms.

- There you have it; the world turned upside down... and all to defend materialism.
There isn't a molecule of real science in this view. This is merely metaphysical speculation. Dawkins has abandoned empirical science, and has become a kind of secular Swedenborg. Only he hears the true word, only he possesses the truth.

314. 'When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?'

- In the PC world it's forbidden for man to be a slave master, but it's okay for him to be a slave. Apparently we're all robots being controlled by memes and by genes. This is surely the most bleak view of mankind that there has ever been.

Summary;
Ch. 11. of this book (Into the meme pool) is probably the stupidest, nonsensical, fallacious chapter I've ever read.
"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools..." (Romans 1:22)

Notes;
1. The Information - James Gleick
2. Mime;
"a buffoon who practices gesticulations" [Johnson], c.1600, from Fr. mime, from L. mimus, from Gk. mimos "imitator, actor, buffoon," of unknown origin. The verb meaning "to act without words" is from 1610s; the transferred sense of "to imitate" is from 1733 (Gk. mimeisthai meant "to imitate").