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.
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://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/ecointen.htm#In_BriefThis 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.