I thought I'd clarify the concept of memes and my views on their evolution.
Part of this is to respond to Mark's following claims:

2) Memes are simply another version of *television* advertising which have
been "weaponized."  This is why the Russian "interference" in 2016 was
primarily to promote them and why Facebook &al are now trying to "police"
them (behaving more like broadcast television).  They are psychological
warfare and we'd all be much better off if we simply ignored them (which
has largely been the case on this list.)  As some have said about the best
way to deal with the *effects* of TELEVISION in our lives, "Just turn it
off."  Memes are manipulation, pure-and-simple.  Just say no to memes.

3) Far too much is made of "consciousness" (which is itself a "meme.")  In
fact, as neuroscience documents, most people have little-to-no awareness of
what they are doing or why they are doing it.  Overwhelmingly, our lives
are dominated by psychological activities that are not-conscious.  In
particular, our pre-conscious "perception system" -- where we assemble our
"ground-level" understanding of the world, including our "intuitions" and
"biases" -- is inaccessible to most people.  Psychoanalysis was invented to
try to deal with this problem but, alas, *memes* only make things much
worse.  Unfortunately, most people chasing them are driven away from the
"truth," not towards it.

I believe these claims are made from a complete misunderstanding of how
memes are supposed to be understood. But as it happens, in a previous
email, Mark actually provided an extremely informative site on memetics
that I greatly appreciated:
The Ecology of Intentions: How to make Memes and Influence People:
Culturology
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__ase.tufts.edu_cogstud_dennett_papers_ecointen.htm-23In-5FBrief&d=DwIBaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=cBilOl57w6i57ImMcem9YdmBrp9g4plkWDc__PQCYjg&s=jyXcc40-hhgHJsBcwrSy3OuXYc_H9XKt7P-SnL5mqrI&e=

This is one of the best papers I've ever read on memes. Here is a defintion
it offers:

Memes are "patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the
artificially manufactured products of brains - books, computers and so on".
Memes replicate themselves (Dawkins holds) like genes: "by imitation ... in
the broadest sense"

I believe that memetics is the best way to understand Culture and is
crucial to understanding consciousness.

An advantage of the meme concept is that

1) Memes are the units of selection in cultural evolution. This explains
the appearance of group selection, because groups are organized around (and
largely defined by) memes. Memes are selected by* shared intentions*, which
to me is the basis of justification. Eventually, the world will unite
around a set of universally-shared intentions, and all memes that work
against that system will be cropped.

2) Memes help a great deal to explain how consciousness functions in the
world. Memes are the 'software' of minds. The psyche is made out of
accumulated meme-ware mixed in with neural hardware. Jungian explanations
of myth can be explained by how memes were selected by the architecture of
the unconscious brain. (which has to be added to what we mean by
'justification' in memetic selection)
Your brain (especially your Default Mode Network) is constantly mutating
meme-ware (thoughts) to which the fitness landscape is a goal or intention.
One, general feature of human intelligence is that it is Darwinian: Your
brain is constantly generating pseudo-random patterns to fit an intention.
When there's a fit, you get that Aha! moment. Technologies are
manifestations of memes. If you look at the evolution of any given
technology and see how it improves, you can tell that an intentional
Darwinian process created them. Random thought patterns are generated with
fitness into an intention. The first generation technology is the basic
idea, and as you see generations of the same technology emerge, you see how
random thought patterns were shaped into the intended purpose (which is
also often discovered along the way)




Understanding this basic pattern allows us to envision how the future will
form. Humanity is a giant machine that pseudo-randomly generates patterns
to manifest behaviors and technologies to fit intentions....and the
intentions themselves are discovered from conquering previous intentions.
If a goal or intention selects from random thought patterns, and humans are
cooperating creatures, we can understand that shared goals are the basis
for justification. We can thus further explore justification as the
selection process of memes.

3) By keeping memes conceptually separate from people, it allows us to
examine some of their intrinsic characteristics which cannot be reduced to
those of the human individual (the fact that this actually works is
justification for using a meme-centered ontology).
You can understand that memes domesticated us when they emerged from us and
became part of the fitness landscape selecting our genes (as well as the
genes of every other organism domesticated by culture).
Also, by uncoupling memes from people, we can see how everyone is possessed
by memes.
The self-reflective person has carefully scrutinized all of his values and
beliefs and justified them according to universally shared interests to
become maximally justified.

Memes do so much work in explaining culture and consciousness that to not
use memetics is to fail to understand crucial aspects of how culture and
consciousness work. For instance, by understanding Culture at the level of
the meme, and knowing how memes are selected, one can explain history as
well as make general predictions.

I personally think memetics can go a long way in explaining religion in
very wise and sensible ways that would surprise many secular thinkers. If
you understand that the gods were memes and that people can be 'possessed'
by a spirit or an idea, religion starts to make more sense. I have a ton of
ideas about how religion can be explained by memetics in ways that could
inform a modern system of subjective values.

The primordial meme was mere imitation occurring in ancient vertebrates. It
required complex behavior, communication, and cooperation for memes to
vary, reproduce, and be selected according to shared intentions.

That's what I would clarify about the justification hypothesis: *shared
intentions* are the basis for selection and justification. The trajectory
of shared intentions is the pragmatist Truth that is being unveiled as
Culture progresses.

Lastly, memes have always been socially engineering us. They made us more
transparent when humans first formed, and they're making us more
transparent today. The technium is a giant manifestation of memetic
evolution, and it's accelerating memetic evolution as well as refining it.
Memes can reproduce now faster than ever. They can live longer. They
reproduce with more fidelity.

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