NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/alt/cyberspa/960

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-29 | 31.3 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!hkhenson
From: [e-mail] (H Keith Henson)
Newsgroups: alt.cyberspace
Subject: Re: MEMES (was: RE: Cybrspc Grvty, Def of Cybrspc)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 93 20:29:50 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world
References:  <[e-mail]>
Lines: 546

(Friend of mine pointed me to this discussion.)
---
William C. Hulley writes:

>rez, can you or someone else point me to something more formal on memes
>and memetics. i am having some trouble figuring out if this "theory" is a
>real set of tools that we can use to recon cspace or just a distraction.

Staying within Dawkins' definition, a meme is a replicating
information pattern.  To differentiate a meme from an idea, an idea
which you have but never pass to another person is at most a potential
meme.  It's "memetic essence" show up as it spreads out to more minds
(or computers, or pages in books, or . . . .)

So, computer viruses fall within this definition of a meme, but so do
copies of Word Perfect, and urban legions.  A successful meme (by
definition one which exists in a lot of copies) subverts its hosts to
the minimal extent that they pass it to other potential hosts.  Memes
range from helpful symbiotes to really nasty parasites.  In people the
range is from information on how to make shoes to the kind of
infectious craziness that induced Jim Jones and Co. to kill
themselves.  In computers it ranges form the destructive computer
virus to all those shareware programs.

I have written a good fraction of the total on memes, but it has never
been put together in a book.  An early and much reprinted article was
in Analog in Aug of '87.  Will post one or two others here.

Keith Henson

PS re the net, successful memes are the ones you can find in any
archive.  And remember, meme = replicating information pattern.
(Memetics is the study of memes and their interaction with their
carriers.)
[This thing was finished three or four years ago and has become kind
of dated.  Sorry, I am just to busy at the moment to update it. 1/92]

                          Memes Meta-Memes and Politics

                               By H. Keith Henson


    "For philosophically committed people, politics is primarily a
contest over public policy.  The measure is not what people, but what
ideas win."
                                                 --Morton C. Blackwell

   "If you would understand politics, study evolution first."
                                                 --H. T. Watcher


   Richard Dawkins, perhaps the foremost evolutionary biologist of our
times, starts Chapter 5 of his recent book, The Blind Watchmaker with
"It's raining DNA outside."  He goes on to describe a willow tree that is
shedding fluffy seeds far and wide across the landscape.  The paragraph
ends:  "The whole performance, cotton wool, catkins, tree and all is in
aid of one thing and one thing only, the spreading of DNA around the
countryside.  Not just any DNA, but DNA whose coded characters spell out
specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new
generation of downy seeds.  Those fluffy specks are, literally, spreading
instructions for making themselves. They are there because their
ancestors succeeded in doing the same.  It is raining instructions out
there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading
algorithms. That's not a metaphor, it is the plain truth.  It couldn't be
any plainer if it were raining floppy disks."

   The paradigm of life as the propagation of genetic information and of
Darwinian evolution as resulting from the selective survival generation
after generation of some part of that information is an outgrowth of the
computer age. This paradigm has led to a number of remarkable advances in
evolutionary biology.  For example, seemingly "altruistic" behavior of
worker bees is now understood as a consequence of the improved survival
of the "selfish" DNA they share with the queen.  About a decade ago in
the mind of the same Dr. Dawkins this line of thinking led to a new way
to view the spread and persistence of the ideas that make up human
culture.

   The new study is called memetics after "meme" (which rhymes with
cream). "Meme" is a coined word from a Greek root for memory, and
purposefully similar to "gene."  Dawkins devoted the last chapter of his
earlier book, The Selfish Gene, to defining memes and discussing the
survival of these replicating information patterns within the meme-pool
(roughly culture).  "Meme" is close to "idea," but not all ideas are
memes.  An idea which fails to propagate beyond the person who first
thinks of it is not a meme.  "Beliefs," especially organized and promoted
beliefs, are memes, or, depending on how you think about them,
cooperating groups of memes.  I will use memes, ideas, replicating
information patterns, and beliefs as similar terms in this article.

   The study of memetics takes the old saw about ideas having a life of
their own seriously and applies what we know about ecosystems, evolution,
and epidemiology to study the spread and persistence of ideas in
cultures.  If you come to understand memetics, I expect your view of
politics, religions, and related social movements to be changed in much
the same way the germ theory of disease changed the attitude of the
medical profession about epidemics. Memetics provides rational
explanations for a lot of seemingly irrational human behavior.

   A meme survives in the world because people pass it on to other
people, either vertically to the next generation, or horizontally to our
fellows.  This process is analogous to the way willow genes cause willow
trees to spread them, or perhaps closer to the way cold viruses make us
sneeze and spread them.

   Collections of organisms make up ecosystems.  Human culture is a vast
collection of memes, a memetic ecosystem.  The diagram below is in terms
of increasing complexity.

                      Memes  (groups form culture, stabilized by meta-memes)
                  Organisms (groups form ecosystems)
               Cells
            DNA (informational though embedded in material)
-------------------------------------
        molecules                  material
     atoms
 sub atomic

   Once the informational boundary is crossed, biological models of
replication and survival become applicable.  Most of the memes that make
up human culture are of the shoemaking kind.  A rationale for the spread
and persistence of these ideas/skills seems obvious:  they aid the
survival of people who in turn teach the same ideas and skills to the
next generation.

   But a good fraction of the memes that make up human culture fall into
the categories of political, philosophical, or religious.  A rationale
for the spread and persistence for these memes is a much deeper problem.
The spread of some memes of these classes at the expense of others is of
intense concern to many readers of Reason.  If we are to be effective at
judging ideas and promoting the spread of ones we think are more
rational, it would be useful to understand how memes come about, how they
use people to spread, and why the self-interest of the people who spread
a meme and the meme's "interest" are not always the same.

   Study of these concepts may provide insight into why some ideas are
more attractive than others and into what "rational" and "objective"
mean.  Much of the recent progress in understanding evolution came from a
viewpoint shift: biologists started looking at the world from the
viewpoint of genes. Because genes influence their own survival (via
causal loops) the ones we observe seem as if they were "striving" to be
represented by more copies in the next generation.  Memes too seem to
"strive."  Of course, this is metaphor, since neither genes nor memes are
conscious.  In the process of making more copies of themselves in human
minds memes sometimes work at cross purposes with human genes.  At least
three different and conflicting viewpoints for determining "rational" and
"objective" exist: from the viewpoint of the genes a person carries, from
the viewpoint of the memes they carry (or are infected with) and from
their conscious mind, shaped by both genes and memes.

     Memes and humans have co-evolved.  Pre-human minds were, like
current human minds, the substrate for memes.  Pre-human minds were the
memetic equivalent of the "primal soup" in which genetic life started.
Replicating information patterns such as the ones which built mental
structures for chipping rock or (much later) controlling fire improved
the survival of certain human genes. These genes in turn built bodies and
minds able to learn and pass on the memes.

    The result was a double positive feedback cycle where memes for
survival- enhancing behavior and genes for mental hardware able to learn
and pass along memes were both favored.  The combination is so successful
that human beings and their complex cultures inhabit the largest
ecological range on the planet (at least for animals of our size).

   Any ecological success becomes a fertile ground for parasites.  The
environment of the cell nucleus with its raw materials and enzyme systems
for replicating DNA/RNA is hijacked by viruses.  Likewise, the
human/memetic system is beset by biological and memetic parasites.
Successful parasites (that is the ones which don't kill off their host)
evolve into mutualistic symbionts. The host also evolves to be resistant
to parasites. I think both genetic and memetic responses to parasitic
memes can be recognized.

   Parasitic memes have been strongly selected to fit the strange quirks
that developed in human mental systems as they evolved. For example, the
ability to plan into the future confers a strong survival advantage,
especially since the introduction of farming. But being able to think
about the future (and past) generates troubling problems when this
ability is applied to questions such as where-was-I-before-birth or
where-will-I-go-after-death.  The attractiveness of religious belief
systems largely stems from providing "plausible" answers to questions
that would not be asked except for the hyperdevelopment of this mental
skill.

   To illustrate the lifelike quality of memes, here is my story about
how a meme was introduced to a sub-culture, how it thrived, evolved, and
finally became extinct.

   When I went to college in 1960, the University of Arizona registration
material included a punch card for religion.  I figured (correctly) that
they would sort this card out and send it to the 'church of your choice'
so the churches could send around press gangs on Sunday morning.  At the
time, I was drifting away from the church in which I had been raised.
(My intellectual and social development had simply become incompatible
with churches of any kind.)  I wasn't expecting this question, hadn't
given any thought to what I would put down, and was in a hurry to get
through the lines of registration checkers. I remembered an old SF story
that hinged on a mystery word, Myob, later explained as an acronym for
Mind Your Own Business.  Why not?  I put down MYOB in the religion space,
and got away with it when they asked me what it meant.

   By the next semester I had thought up a better answer.  The high
school crowd I ran around with had used runes to write silly messages on
the blackboards, and we actually knew quite a bit about old religions.
So I put down Druid, and got away with it.  In fact, the harried
registration checkers who asked what was a Druid didn't let me get more
than a sentence or two into my prerecorded rap about how the Druids had
been around a lot longer than the upstart Christians.

   It was far too good a prank to keep to myself.  Several of my old high
school buddies were also at the U of A and imitated my "Druid
registration behavior." After a few semesters, there were hundreds of
people doing it, and in several mutated forms.  Of course, there had to
be "Reformed Druids," and that opened a niche for "Orthodox Druids."
There were "Southern Druids." There were the "Primitive Druids" at one
point, and several variations on "Church of the nth Druid."  One of the
best was the "Zen Druids."  They worshiped trees that may, or may not,
have been there.  Winner for the best take-off was the "Latter Day
Druids."

   For modeling, this "replicating information pattern, manifesting as
behavior of students claiming to be members of a defunct religion" could
be considered as a fad, a group of fads, or (from the point of view of
annoyed school administrators) a '60s MOVEMENT.  My spies in the
University administration reported that it peaked in the late '60s with
about 20 percent of the student body claiming (almost all tongue in
cheek) to be some sort of Druids.  This memetic infection was faithfully
passed down from year to year infecting the incoming students, many of
whom thumbed their noses in this small way at the administration for the
rest of their college years.  At one point there were three or four rival
Druid Student Centers, and the Bandersnatch, an off-campus humor
newspaper, was published by the Druid Free Press.

   University administrators created vast amounts of unnecessary
paperwork for the students every semester.  There was one card that took
at least half an hour to fill out.  They wanted your life history in six
point spaces to "create accurate publicity about you."  I very much doubt
that one in a thousand of those were ever used.  While wasting student
time was irrelevant to administrators, it was not to the students, and it
was easy to get annoyed.  In a rough biological analogy, this created a
niche for a meme inducing behavior that got back in a small, safe way at
the administrators.

   Once introduced, the "Druid" meme was subject to a large number of
small variations, mutations if you will, but was still recognizable. My
introduction of this idea was not particularly original, but most "new"
memes are just old ones with the serial numbers filed off and a new coat
of paint.

   In a very lifelike way, the Druid meme in this subculture grew
exponentially over several "cycles" exactly the way an epidemic does.
When the susceptible population was mostly infected it became very much
like an endemic disease, with only the newcomers catching it.  It may
have jumped to other schools through transfer students, but I have no
direct knowledge.

   Did U of A Druids turn into a persistent fad, like illiterate
graffiti?  Sorry to say, but no.  In the early seventies some smart
people in the university administration removed this question from
registration for four years and interrupted the chain of infection.

   I would have considered my Druid example as entirely harmless, but in
the mid '70s I met someone in the same city who had made a serious
commitment to the old religions.  I doubt that the memetic infection I
introduced had much to do with the resurgence of pagan religions in the
US, and little if anything to do with activity in England, but it
certainly gave me pause to find someone about to move to a remote place
in Iceland where he thought the old religions were still being practiced.
"Replicating ideas" are always changing in the minds of those they
infect, and they can mutate (sometimes a lot) with every new person they
infect.  It is hard to predict exactly what behavior a particular meme
will be inducing next week, because you never know how the meme may
interact with other memes, or mutate.

   My next example of a meme at work was clearly harmful, in fact lethal.

   Remember Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple incident?  Jones started out
in his youth infected with a fairly standard version of fundamentalist
Christianity. Later this belief was replaced with--or mutated into--as
strange a mix of socialism, Maoist communism, and personal lunacy as you
are likely to find. Jones first promoted his new beliefs from within the
organized outer shell of his previous one.  He moved those he had
infected from Indianapolis to Oakland, and than to an isolated patch of
jungle.  Jones and his group kept cycling ideas between the leader and
his followers.  There was little correction from re- ality, and, like a
wild rumor, the memes got weirder at every cycle. Eventually, these
beliefs (more accurately the mental structures built or programmed by
these memes within the minds of Jones and his followers) reached the
point where they had so much influence over them that their personal
survival became an insignificant influence.

    The mass suicide was an unusual (and thus newsworthy) episode.  But
history records a number of similar incidents, with similar memetic
origins.  The Children's Crusades of the Middle Ages and the mass
starvation in the 1850's of the Xhoas in South Africa are typical
examples.  Mass suicide episodes do not seem rational from either a
memetic or genetic viewpoint. But they make sense as a consequence of
human susceptibility to beliefs that happen to have fatal outcomes. They
are close analogs of diseases that overkill their victims--like Dutch elm
disease.

   Consider the "Killing Fields" of Kampuchea.  The people who killed
close to a third of the population of Kampuchea do not seem to have
profited from their efforts much more than Jones. In the memetic view of
history, ideas of influence are seen as more important than the
particular people who hold them.  Some memes (for example Nazism) are
observed to thrive during periods of economic chaos just as diseases
flourish in an undernourished population.  Thus it is not much of a
surprise that Nazi-related beliefs emerged in the Western farm states
during the recent hard times.

   Beside being utilitarian and dangerous, memes can be fun.  Fads, such
as hula hoops or pet rocks can be considered as the behavioral outcome of
memes. Memetics links the pet rocks fad, the Nazis, drug "epidemics," and
the problems in Belfast, Beirut, Iran, and Central America.  *ALL* result
from replicating information patterns which lie behind the whole range of
social movements.  This is not to downgrade the effects of population
pressure, ecological limits, or the marketplace.  But while these provide
substrate and predisposition, the specific form of social response which
emerges in a crisis depends on memes, either already present or imported,
and how well they replicate in the pre-existing memetic ecosystem.

    Why do these "replicating information patterns" jump from mind to
mind, sometimes setting off massive, and occasionally dangerous, social
movements? Memes that are good at inducing those they infect to spread
them, and ones that are easy to catch, simply become more common.  Since
this is circular reasoning, I need to restate the question.  What, in the
evolutionary prehistory of our race, has predisposed us to be a substrate
to memes that can harm us?

   The ability to learn from each other is strongly rooted in our
evolutionary past.  Mammals are generally good at this, primates depend
on it, and we are the absolute masters of passing information from person
to person and generation to generation. In fact, the amount of data
passed on through human culture is much, much greater than the vast
amount of information we pass on through our genes. We are obligatory
"informavores," and simply could not live in most of the world without
vast amounts of information on how to survive there.  I am not talking
just about the need to read The Wall Street Journal if you are in the
financial business, but the need for a little child to learn (without
using trial and error!) that cars make streets dangerous places.

    Though the evolutionary origins of our susceptibility to memes is
fairly obvious, it is instructive to examine the actual mechanisms of the
mind that are engaged when we are infected with a meme.

    Recent research in neurology and artificial intelligence has produced
a remarkable model of the mind.   Minds are beginning to be viewed as
vast parallel collections of simpler elements, called "agents" or
modules.*

    Memes are information patterns which, like a recipe, guide the
construction of some agents, or groups of agents.  A "walking under
ladders leads to bad luck" meme has successfully infected someone when it
has built agents that modify a person's behavior when walking near
ladders.

   Some mental agents are "wired in".  The most obvious ones pull our
hands back from hot things. Others are not so obvious, but one which has
considerable study is often called "the inference engine."  Split brain
research has established it to be physically located in the left brain of
most people, close to or overlapping the speech area.  This module seems
to be the source of inferences that organize the world into a consistent
whole.  The same hardware seems to judge externally presented memes for
plausibility.  This piece of mental hardware is, at the same time, the
wellspring of advances, and the source of vast error. ----- *The new
models even offer an explanation for that difficult problem, the origin
of consciousness.  Each agent is too simple to be conscious, but
consciousness incidentally emerges as a property of the interconnections
of these agents.  In Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky uses the analogy that
consciousness emerges from non-conscious elements just as the property of
confinement emerges from six properly arranged boards, none of which (by
itself) has any property of confinement.  (And you thought Ids and Egos
were complicated.)

    Being able to infer, that is to find new relations in the way the
world is organized, and being able to learn inferences from others must
rank among our most useful abilities. Unfortunately, outputs of this
piece of mental hardware are all too often of National Enquirer quality.
Unless reined in by hard-to-learn mental skills, this part of our minds
can lead us into disaster. Experiments detailing the kinds of serious
errors this mental module makes can be found in Human Inference by
Nesbitt and Ross and in The Social Brain by Michael Gazzaniga.

   (Sidebar)  *****************************************

Gazzaniga demonstrated the activity of the inference engine module with
some very clever experiments on split brain patients.  By the module
failing, we can clearly see how it is doing the best it can with
insufficient data.

    What Gazzaniga did is to present each side of the brain with a simple
conceptual problem.  The left side saw a picture of a claw, and the right
side saw a picture of a snow scene.  A variety of cards was place in
front of the patient who was asked to pick the card which went with what
he saw.  The correct answer for the left hemisphere was a picture of a
chicken.  For the right half-brain it was a show shovel.

    "After the two pictures are flashed to each half-brain, the subjects
    are required to point to the answers.  A typical response is that of
    P.S., who pointed to the chicken with his right hand and the shovel
    with the left. After his response I asked him 'Paul, why did you do
    that?'  Paul looked up and without a moment's hesitation said from
    his left hemisphere, 'Oh, that's easy.  The chicken claw goes with
    the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.'

    "Here was the left half-brain having to explain why the left hand was
    pointing to a shovel when the only picture it saw was a claw.  The
    left brain is not privy to what the right brain saw because of the
    brain's disconnection.  Yet the patents's own body was doing
    something. Why was it doing that?  Why was the left hand pointing to
    the shovel?  The left-brain's cognitive system needed a theory and
    instantly supplied one that made sense given the information it had
    on this particular task . . . ."

   The inference engine was a milestone in our evolution.  It works far
more often than it fails.  But as you can see from the example, the
inference engines will wring blood from a stone; you can count on its
finding causal relations whether they exist or not.  Worse yet, the
inference engine probably can't detect when it doesn't have enough data.
Even if it could, it has no way to tell that to the verbal (conscious)
self.

(end sidebar) *********************************************

    There are both genetic and memetic controls on the dangerous beliefs
that arise in this module, though they don't always work.  I can't point
to genes for skepticism but (provided it did not interfere too much with
necessary learning) this characteristic would be of considerable survival
advantage. Being entirely uncritical of the memes you are exposed to can
be a fatal trait, or it can result in reduced (or no) fertility. The
classic example of a genetically fatal belief is the Shaker religion,
but intense involvement with a wide variety of memes (or derived social
movements) statistically results in fewer children. Unlike the Shakers
(who practiced total abstinence), the Rajneesh cult in Oregon practiced a
sexual free-for-all. However, they discouraged births--and children--to
the extreme of sterilizing the barely pubescent children of their
members. From the meme's viewpoint, the more effort its host puts into
promoting the meme (living example, proselytizing, etc.) the better.
From the host gene's viewpoint, memes that reduce fertility are a
disaster.

   Many memes take the shortcut and spread from person to person.  Others
spread in concert with the host genes, promoting fertility.  Several
religious memes fall into this category: Hutterite beliefs spread
exclusively with the genes of the believers.  Mormon memes take both
routes--both are long term success stories.  (Though ecological limits or
social upheavals will eventually stop exponential growth in these cases.)

   There are other defenses against the uncritical acceptance of
potentially dangerous memes.  Most common is the trait of rejecting all
newfangled ideas, where "newfangled" is usually defined as any to which
one has not been exposed before puberty. Societies have similar defenses
against new ideas.  There are also powerful meta-memes, that is, memes
used to judge other memes.  Of these, the scientific method is perhaps
the most effective.  Logic is another system by which memes can be
tested, at least for consistency.

   In historical times a meta-meme of tolerance (especially religious
tolerance) has emerged in western culture.  This is a remarkable event,
since memes inducing tolerance to other memes would be expected to lose
in the competition for mind space to memes which induce intolerance to
other beliefs.  Within small, isolated social groups, this is still the
case.

    But in larger cultural ecosystems, when traders come with obnoxious
ideas and customs, but desirable goods, at least limited tolerance is a
requirement if any trading is to be done. There were many other factors
in the development of modern western tolerance such as the Renaissance
and the indecisive religious wars that swept back and forth across
Europe.  Still, the advantage of trading goods may have been the primary
force at work in the memetic ecosystem which caused many belief systems
to adopt a tolerant-toward-other-beliefs component. Cooperative behavior
is known to spontaneously emerge from groups (even groups at war) when
certain conditions are present. Free trade may be similarly linked to the
emergence of the meta-meme of tolerance, and in turn to the
respectability of free thought.  Testing these speculations would require
rating the trade/tolerance of many groups and seeing if there is (or was)
correlation.

   With respect to the USSR, trade and tolerance are both at a low level.
Historically trade was a much smaller part of the economy during the time
the rest of Europe was undergoing the Renaissance.   The recent attempts
to introduce tolerance to other modes of economic systems in the USSR
have more than a superficial similarity to the Catholic church finally
deciding to live with the Protestants.  A modern-day Renaissance in the
USSR may be based on the free exchange of information through computers
and free(r) trade.

    China presents a classic case of innovative memes spreading from the
ports. Until England intervened and opened a weak China the rulers tried
to quarantine dangerous foreigners and their infectious ideas near the
ports.  To this day the most productive parts of China are where
capitalist/free market memes spread from the seaports.  It may be that
homogeneous, closed groups without the influence of outsiders reinforce
their belief systems into the ground, burning heretics and stagnating
economically, until they are forced to open their ports.

    A full analysis may eventually determine that tolerance, innovation,
combating cultural and economic stagnation are *all* dependent on free
trade.

    Memes and trade are coupled the other way as well.  The feedback loop
for many memes is closed through goods made for the marketplace.  Better
ideas for how to make shoes, or computers, or (you name it) spread best
when they are tested in the marketplace.  Closing the ports (currently a
popular idea in Silicon Valley) to either ideas or goods is a memetic
disaster. Bad products and bad ideas are weeded by market place
competition.

    Study of ecosystems usually leads to a great deal of appreciation of
the complexity that has been worked into them through evolution.  Our
actively evolving memetic ecosystem (culture) has been shaped over many
centuries by the rise and fall of the replicating information patterns
which have come down to us.  These memes that make up our culture are
essentially living entities.  They struggle against each other for space
in minds and lives, they are continually evolving.  New memes arise in
human mental modules, old memes mutate, and many become confined to
books.  The ferment is most noticeable on the edge of new scientific
knowledge, pop culture, and the ever shifting of ascendant political
ideas.  Western culture is as complicated as a rain forest, and deserves
no less respect, admiration, understanding, and care.

    The vast majority of the memes we pass from person to person or
generation to generation are either helpful or at least harmless.  It is
hard to see that these elements of our culture have a separate identity
from us.  But a few of these replicating information patterns are clearly
dangerous. By being obviously harmful, they are easy to see as a separate
class of evolving, parasitic, lifelike forms.  A very dangerous group
leads to behavior such as the People's Temple suicides, or similar cases
that dot our history.  The most dangerous class leads to vast killings
like that of the Nazis in WW II, the Communists in post-revolutionary
Russia, and the Kampuchea self-genocide.

   The development of memetics provides improved mental tools (models)
for thinking about the influences, be they benign, silly, or fatal, that
replicating information patterns have on all of us.  Here is a source of
danger if memetics comes of age and only a few learn to create meme sets
of great influence. Here too is liberation for those who can recognize
and analyze the memes to which they are exposed.  If "the meme about
memes" infects enough people, rational social movements might become more
common.

 -----

The author gratefully acknowledges ideas and editorial assistance from
Arel Lucas.