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The Memetic Stance:
The Position and Paradigm of a New Discipline
By Joe E. Dees
1. The Idea of Memetics
In 1976, Richard Dawkins published a book entitled THE
SELFISH GENE, the object of which was to extend the principles
of mutation via mutation and natural selection to sociocultural
behavior. To solidify the parallel, he coined the term "meme" to
represent that which is passed on during the process of intentional
or inadvertant intersubjective communication, communication being
understood as comprised of transmission plus reception. The term
is a truncation of the greek root "mimeme", meaning "to imitate"
(and indeed the imitation of one's behavior by another is how it is
seen that a meme has propagated), and is also connected, by
Dawkins, with memory. He stated that memes possess internal
instantiation as memory traces, and are stored in the neural nets of
their carriers. According to Dawkins, to be successful, memes
must possess three attributes; longevity, fecundity, and copying-
fidelity. As with genes, fecundity is asserted to trump longevity;
the life span of a particular memetic token is unimportant so long
as it survives long enough to replicate itself widely with
descendents that will do the same. However, the longevity of the
type of which any particular memetic instantiation is a token
depends upon the meme type's (or memotype's) ability to perdure
and maintain some kind of inhabitable niche in a changing
sociocultural environment. It does so by evolving; mutational
variants are produced in individual minds through adaptation to, or
assimilation by plus accommodation with, the cognitive
environment in which they have been received. The variants then
compete with each other when their hosts attempt to transmit
them; the variants that are more transmissable, that is, more
amenable to reception by others, outpropagate their competitors.
This entails that while a high degree of copying-fidelity is
necessary for memes to reproduce, such fidelity cannot be
absolute, for if all copys were perfect replicants of their
promemitors, there would be no variants produced upon which
selection could operate, and thus memetic evolution could not
occur.
2. Various Memetic Paradigms
Dawkins proposed two models for the operation of memes; the
genetic paradigm and the viral paradigm. The genetic paradigm
envisages memes as passed from one person to another via
communicative rather than sexual reproduction. The point at which
this analogy breaks down is that of the structural character of the
reproduction of memes; when two members of a species engage in
successful reproduction, at least one other member that
possesses some of the genes of each progenitor results, but when
two or more people engage in successful memetic reproduction,
the meme(s) possessed by one of them (but not the other or
others) are transmitted to and received by an other or others; in
other words, memetic reproduction may be one-to-many rather
than being restricted to being between two, and other members of
the species are not created in the process.
The viral paradigm envisages memes as infecting their hosts
and co-opting their behavioral capacities to produce more copies of
themselves. This analogy breaks down at at least two points.
First, while viruses produce copies of themselves using hijacked
cellular reproduction capacities, the behaviors produced by memes
are not exact copies of themselves, inasmuch as the encoding is
different in cognitive neural nets, in behavior, and in behavior-
produced artifacts. Second, viral infections do not compete with
other viral infections in the host, but memes must compete with
other memes to gain and maintain their niches in the cognitive
environment.
The paradigm I favor I call the species paradigm; in this
paradigm, memes are analogous to species, and the cognitive
environments within which they exist and between which they
reproduce are analogous to ecologies, populated by other species
of memes with which they must compete for their niches. The
basic difference between this paradigm and its referent, species
competition, is that there is not just one cognitive environment
involved; each transmitted and received meme finds itself in a new
cognitive ecology, complete with a different set of memes with
which it must compete for its niche. The analogy to species
competition would be precise if there existed many different worlds
with dissemination occuring between them.
3. The Life Cycle of a Meme
Memes are comprised of internal instantiations (within minds)
and external instantiations (between minds). Both of these modes
are necessary for memetic evolution to occur. Internal
instantiations of memes are required for the mutational production
of meme variants, as it is here that competition and recombination
between memes within the cognitive gestalt provokes memetic
mutations that can more successfully secure and maintain their
niches. External instantiations are required for differential selection
to occur; variants transmitted via their encoding in imitatible
actions, such as performances, communication and the production
of artifacts, are more or less successfully received by other
cognitive environments. Both mutation and selection are
necessary for memetic evolution to occur.
4. Memetics; Hard Science, Soft Science, or Philosophical Stance?
The selfsame tokens of a memotype must be encoded
differently in different cognitive environments, due to the necessity
of defining their identities with respect to the differing sets of
competing memes to be found there. This necessity entails that
memetics cannot aspire to the hard science status of disciplines
such as physics or chemistry, where all particular electrons, atoms
of an element, and molecules of a compound are exact tokens of a
type. This exact duplication is not necessary in soft sciences,
such as sociology, anthropology, political science or economics,
so memetics logically could attain soft science status.
Pragmatically, however, the isolation and identification of various
neural configuration in multiple brains as tokens of a particular
memetic type is far beyond our current or near-term future
capacities; therefore, for the forseeable future, memetice must
remain a philosophical stance with soft science tendencies.
5. Memetics in Relation to Other Philosophical Stances
Phenomenology and genetic epistemology are philosophical
stances in relation to the realm of the being of consciousness,
while semiotics and memetics are philosophical stances in relation
to the realm of conscious meaning, or that which the being of
consciousness contains. As phenomenology and genetic
epistemology are complementary disciplines with relation to the
being of consciousness, so semiotics and memetics complement
each other in relation to consciously held meanings.
Phenomenology and semiotics are synchronic, or statically
structural (the focus-field-fringe structure of perception is one such
phenomenological structure; the signifier-sign-signified structure of
signification is a semiotic structure); genetic epistemology and
memetics are diachronic, or dynamically functional, developmental
and evolutionary. Phenomenology does not address the question
of how self-conscious awareness could have evolved, but accepts
its developmentally matured structures as ground conditions to be
derived and described; genetic epistemology, by studying the
emergence of the structures of self-conscious awareness in the
developing child, can offer insights into how such an awareness
might have evolved during the evolution of the species. Likewise,
semiotics does not adress the question of how symbolic capacity
could have evolved, accepting its fully matured structures as
ground conditions to be extracted and diagrammatically delineated,
while memetics, by studying the transmission of symbolicity from
the caregiver to the child and its progressive internaization by that
child, implicitly offers suggestions as to how a species possessing
symbolic capacity could have evolved - suggestions which I
pursued in my paper TOOLS, LANGUAGE AND TEXT.
Both phenomenology and semiotics aspired to the status of
rigorous theoretical science, but both failed; phenomenology due to
its inability to plumb the depths of sedimentation - the
preconscious structures underlying the structures of self-conscious
awareness, semiotics due to its inability to extricate itself from the
semiotic web wherein meanings mutually define in relation to each
other and get beneath the sign to anchor those meanings in actual
concrete lived world referents.Genetic epistemology is considered
a soft science (a main branch of developmental psychology) due to
its grounding in the logical induction of successions of developing
cognitive structures from the experimentally controlled observation
of behavior in children, and does not have to concern itself with the
neural traces which encode specific structure (or memes).
6. Memes and Memeplexes
According to Dawkins, A meme is the minimum imitatible that
possesses copying fidelity; variants may differ, but must be similar
enough to be recognizable as tokens of a memotype. Daniel C.
Dennett, in his 1995 book DARWIN'S DANGEROUS IDEA,
disagrees, viewing each variant as sui generis, and a different
meme. I tend to side with dawkins in this dispute; individual
people, while different, are similar enough to be identifiable as
members of Homo Sapiens Sapiens; genetic, viral and species
paradigms, while different, are similar enough to be identifiable as
models of evolution, and each can thus not only be said to be a
variant of the meme 'evolution', but also remain capable, like
humans on the genetic level, of cross-fertilization.
Groups of memes frequently associate into mutually assisting
systems termed memeplexes when their interrelation increases the
propagational chances of all components of the memeplex. Some
memes may be components of several memeplexes; for instance,
the proselytization meme is found in several religions and political
ideologies, and indeed must be associated with other memes that
can furnish it with a content it may proselytize.
7. Memes, Language and Meaning
The most obvious way in which memes are propagated in our
culture is through spoken, signed and written language. It has
been asserted that the search for basic memes should concentrate
not on the levels of words or of phrases, but beneath them, on the
level of the morpheme. While there are memetic values to many
morphemes, such as prefixes and suffixes, these are in reality
syntactic shorthands for ideas semantically grounded in words and
phrases, such as past, present, future, lack of, surplus of, in favor
of, in opposition to, beneath, beyond, singular, plural, and so on.
What is important in memetics is not the syntactic form of a
meme, or how it is encoded, but its semantic content, that is, its
significance or meaning; this comprises the identity of a particular
meme, as well as its differentiation from other memes. This is why
the extraction of the structures in which meaning is presented, in
isolation from the meaning so encoded, does not address
memetics per se, and has more to do with linguistics or semiotics.
Here certain parallels can be drawn to genetic epistemology; it is
not the structure of perception (as in phenomenology) which are
pertinent for genetic epistemology, but the principles they reveal,
such as identity, permanence, conservation of quantities,
reciprocality, contingency, causality, possibility, necessity,
negation and opposition, which become progressively more
apparent during the sequential succession of developmental
structures. There is a bridge here between being and meaning;
although they are based in the perception of the being of the world,
these principles which are drawn from world-perception
meaningfully inform and organize it in turn. By categorizing
perception and characterizing the perceived as structured in certain
ways and not others, these principles are a primordial source of the
meanings recursively imposed upon being; meanings the
imposition of which is valid precisely because they are grounded in
and derived from that very being
upon which they are subsequently imposed.
9. What Use Is Memetics?
Most of the academic empirical work that is recognizeably memetic in nature so
far was done in othe fields before memetics, as a discipline, was born. This
is hardly surprising, such fields as the diffusion of innovations, kinship
theory, linguistics, information theiry and the sociology of knowledge have
been around for quite some time, and the very term 'memetics' is only a quarter
century old. Its main use in the near term most likely will be to provide a
common theoretical framework within which the fruit of the labors of these far
flung disciplines may be interrelated, so that the sum of this work, taken
together, may provide us with insights which none of the parts,
taken alone, can proffer. Its methodology will almost certainly be
statistical, and it has a good chance of revolutionalizing one
discipline in particular - the discipline of social psychology. The
going will not be easy; the subject matter of memetics - the
problems of the genesis, evolution, and communication of meaning,
are, due to their complexity, some of the most intractable in the
field of academic endeavor. But if the utilization of the unifying
evolutionary perspective and principles of memetics serves to
render merely very difficult that which has heretofore been
insoluble, it wlll have more than fulfilled its promise.
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