Hello everyone
Richard Ridge wrote:
>
> > 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.
Hi Richard
Thank you for the link! I found this bit particularly telling:
"...Mozart famously observed of his own
brainchildren:
When I feel well and in a good humor, or when I am taking a drive or
walking after a good meal, or
in the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind as easily
as you would wish. Whence
and how do they come? I do not know and I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
[emphasis added] Those
which please me I keep in my head and hum them; at least others have
told me that I do so.
Mozart is in good company. Rare is the novelist who doesn't claim
characters who "take on a life of
their own"; artists are rather fond of confessing that their paintings
take over and paint themselves,
and poets humbly submit that they are the servants or even slaves to the
ideas that teem in their
heads, not the bosses. And we all can cite cases of memes that persist
unbidden and unappreciated
in our own minds." (Memes and Exploitation of Imagination)
Here we see the presumption that if memes are not subjective (inside of
us) then they must be objective (outside of us) infecting the subjective
"us", replicating themselves like a virus and then moving on to infect
any others the meme as an independent object comes into contact with. It
is extremely difficult for me to find the value in such an outlook so
obviously rooted in subject/object metaphysics but I do enjoy the
challenge! :)
>
> > 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?
Perhaps it would be helpful here to refer to Robert Pirsig's Subjects,
Objects, Data and Values paper (available to read in the moq.org forum).
Pirsig writes:
"In the third box are the biological patterns: senses of touch, sight
hearing, smell and
taste. The Metaphysics of Quality follows the empirical tradition here
in saying that
the senses are the starting point of reality, but -- all importantly --
it includes a
sense of value. Values are phenomena. To ignore them is to misread the
world. It
says this sense of value, of liking or disliking, is a primary sense
that is a kind of
gatekeeper for everything else an infant learns."
It is a sense of value that produces the whale songs and these values
are the phenomena of likes and dislikes that is a kind of gatekeeper for
everything learned. What struck me about the whale article was the
researchers conclusion that the whales sang this particular song in a
manner suggestive of their simply liking it. This seems in line with the
MOQ when it states:
"The Metaphysics of Quality...says that Dynamic Quality -- the
value-force that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious
one, or a brilliant experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one -- is
another matter all together. Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order
than static scientific truth and it is as immoral for philosophers of
science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it is for church
authorities to suppress scientific method." (Lila, paperback, pg. 418)
This passage bothered me for quite some time as it seemed to me Phaedrus
made a mistake here by allowing Dynamic Quality could be a moral order
in itself until I realized the "higher moral order" of Dynamic Quality
is beauty. So to answer your question, the relationship between
aesthetic value (beauty) and morality (static quality) can be summed up
as a pursuit of happiness. "How close" the relationship is governs
everything.
>
> > 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 memes are viewed as patterns of value (in essence beyond definition)
we then begin not from an in-here/out-there approach of a subject/object
metaphysics but rather from experience. Memes are patterns of experience
and as such are sharable on social and intellectual levels and therefore
in a subject-object metaphysics, memes would have to be considered
subjective if not objective:
"A conventional subject-object metaphysics uses the same four static
patterns as the Metaphysics of Quality, dividing them into two groups of
two: inorganic-biological patterns called 'matter' and
social-intellectual patterns called 'mind.' But this division is the
source of the problem." (Lila, pg. 177)
Memes are not objects, nor are they entirely subjective either. They are
patterns of value.
>
> >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.'
Thank you for your thoughts.
Dan
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