> Unless I am mistaken I believe Dennett states it is the meme hosts (in
> the case of the whale song, the whales) who replicate the meme and not
> the memes themselves that replicate.
In the essay (link below) Dennett partially characterises it as a parasitic
relationship - the meme requires a vehicle to exist and propagate within,
but is analogous to a bacteria.
> I have never read this essay,
> however, and am going by what he says in his book "Darwin's Dangerous
> Idea". I ran a quick search to see if I could find the essay online but
> only found dead links. Do you have a working url?
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/memeimag.htm
> Do you really think so? From what I've read, Dennett fails to bring
> morality to the forefront and follows the (pretty much) established
> scientific doctrine that our "stone age" ancestors were idiots living
> little better than animals.
I'm afraid I haven't read 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea' as yet and so will have
to take your word for it. This may be simply be due to my comparative lack
of familiarity with the moq, but I'd be grateful if you could briefly
explain the relevance of morality to the context of whales song (which I
would have viewed as a purely aesthetic issue). I would assume moral and
aesthetic value to be similar, but how close would the relationship be?
> Susan Blackmore writes: "...if Dawkins is right and memes are
> replicators, then memes serve their own selfish ends."
<snip>
> Memes are not "out there" floating around, just waiting to infect a host
> in a selfish manner.
But surely that is the point of the entire parallel to 'the selfish gene' in
that, in Blackmore's words they 'compete to get copied for their own sake.'
Or as Dennett puts it, after stating that memetic evolution is not just
analogous to genetic evolution, but that the two are subject to exactly the
same principles of natural selection; 'there is no necessary connection
between a meme's replicative power, its "fitness" from its point of view,
and its contribution to our fitness.' In other words, we may value the meme
as being beneficial or inimical (or merely neutral to any notion of our
welfare), but there is no intrinsic relation between that and the success of
the meme.
>If this is what you mean by "the
> dichotomy between reason and 'un-reason' that appears to have infected
memetics" then I
> believe we are basically on the same page.
Yes: I think that seeing memes as units of values resolves many of the
issues I have with memetics. The other problem was simply the tendency
within memetics to privilege rational modes of thought as being non-memetic.
It seems to me that a meme can be any unit of information, rational or
otherwise. This isn't necessarily the same thing as saying that science is
memetic of course, in that there are extremely elaborate 'artificial'
mechanisms to determine the falsifiability of an idea (or otherwise). But I
think that's a question of culture rather than philosophy. I suspect this is
akin to what Blackmore means, in the excellent article you linked to, when
she refers to Dawkin's emphasis on viral memetics 'n any case, we must not
make the mistake of thinking that all memes are viruses. The vast majority
make up the very stuff of our lives, including languages, political systems,
financial institutions, education, science and technology.'
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