Maybe you successfully passed your English exam today? Or have you come up with an amazing commercial project that your colleagues accepted with a bang? Or at a friendly party they sang "Oh mom, I'll give chic" no worse than Kirkorov? And you, of course, believe that this is solely your merit? Do not flatter yourself! There is no personal merit, because there is no personality, human self, ego. There are memes. These strange … either creatures, or substances, or it is not at all clear who occupied our brain. They multiply at an incredible rate and, like viruses, are transmitted from person to person. Whatever you say, whatever you do, it's not you, it's memes. All human civilization is their merit!
On the art of origami and scientific sensation
Why are the same stories played out in the tales of different peoples? Why do popular hits cling even to those who hate light music? Why does any, even the most primitive, religious teaching have so many followers? Some in academia claim to have found the answer to these questions. This answer is short: "Mem."
The action of memes can explain absolutely any phenomenon of life. How flattered must be the biology professor at Oxford University Richard Dawkins, who first coined the term!
When Richard was nine years old, his father taught him how to fold origami. From a square sheet of paper, first a catamaran was made, then a sideboard with opening doors, then a picture in a frame and finally a sailboat, ready, if not for a sea voyage, then for a bath cruise. But the most surprising thing, recalls Dawkins, was not the transformation of a sheet of paper, but how his schoolmates reacted to the boy's new hobby. The whole school rushed to fold origami! This fashion spread with the speed of the measles epidemic and affected everyone - from first graders to teachers. When the boy told about this to the culprit of the incident - his father, he was not at all surprised. On the contrary, the father said that he himself learned the art of origami during the exact same school epidemic.
Dawkins remembered this incident when he began work on the book The Selfish Gene. In the book, the author interprets Darwin's theory in his own way. We have all heard about natural selection, that the strongest survive. But what exactly does the strength or weakness of living organisms depend on? Dawkins claims: from genes. Darwinism, in his opinion, should be understood not as the evolution of animals themselves, but as the evolution of their genes. The female chooses by no means a stronger male, but one with quality genes (strength, dexterity and other qualities, without which you cannot live either in the jungle or in the Siberian taiga, they provide). With each new generation, genes are more and more improved, evolved. But this is in animals. In humans, things are somewhat different. The emergence of man and the development of civilization made their own adjustments to Darwin's theory. At the dawn of humanity, homo sapiens,certainly, physical strength was indispensable. But now it is not the most necessary human quality, much more appreciated intelligence, which also develops from generation to generation. In this case, there must be something that is responsible for the evolution of intellectual qualities. This is something Richard Dawkins called memes. He coined this word, combining the English memory - "memory" and the French me me - "the same", "the same."same"."same".
So what is a meme? Let's start from the analogy with genes, which Dawkins and all other researchers of the problem draw. Like a gene, a meme is a unit of hereditary material. But if genes are responsible for the synthesis of proteins, enzymes, etc., if ultimately they control all the chemical reactions of the body and thus determine its physical characteristics, then the concern of memes is thoughts, ideas, feelings. By and large, a meme is a unit of information, and information can be understood as anything: scientific knowledge, literary texts, anecdotes, movies, music, advertising slogans, catchphrases, fashion, etc. Memes are passed from person to person through imitation. Everything you learned by copying it from another person (drive, read, origami, finally!) Is memes. As Dawkins aptly pointed out, a meme is a "virus of the mind."
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It is difficult to say what is more in Dawkins' theory - descriptions of a really existing scientific fact or fiction, conventions with the help of which he explains human behavior? In other words, is he talking about the meme as the discovery of something that was always there but did not know about, or as an invention of something completely new? Richard himself will not answer this question, perhaps. But be that as it may, memes "from Dawkins" - an extremely interesting phenomenon! After the publication of "The Selfish Gene" (1976) they started talking about them. Just as Richard had previously infected his comrades with the origami epidemic, now he has brought the meme epidemic into the scientific community.
Susan Blackmore, an English psychologist, experienced the most severe "illness". Dawkins' book impressed her so much that she abandoned the research of the paranormal, which she had been doing for almost a quarter of a century, and plunged headlong into memetics - the science of memes. As a result, Blackmore complemented the research of her predecessor in many ways. She recently released the sensational monograph The Meme Machine. By the way, the discoverer Richard Dawkins himself wrote the foreword to Susan's work. Here's what he writes: “I was always prepared for the fact that one day the thought of a meme would develop into a beautiful hypothesis about the human mind. But, until I read Mrs. Blackmore's book, I did not even realize how grandiose and fruitful this idea would be!"
Blackmore's theory is truly grand, primarily in its novelty. In some places it seems impossible, in others - completely fictional, and even absurd. But she's incredibly addicting! Judge for yourself.
A meme has settled in your head. And one more. And further…
The main purpose of memes is reproduction. The more there are, the faster they will be able to capture an individual person, all of humanity, the planet, the Universe. They need world domination. And there is no doubt: they will get it, with their persistence! People use memes in the most shameless way. A person for them is a carrier, helping to spread around the world. Call them parasites - you can't go wrong!
Memes spread both vertically, from generation to generation, and horizontally, within one generation. We receive or transmit them all the time: when we read a book or listen to the radio, when we tell a funny story or dance, when we play tennis or have dinner. Every thought, emotion, habit is a meme, and our brain is their focus. So now, if an original idea dawns on you, you should know: another meme flew into your head. Our consciousness is generally nothing more than a complex of learned memes. It’s a pity that Susan Blackmore doesn’t explain on what basis memes are chosen to host people. Why, for example, did Einstein "pick up" the brilliant meme of the theory of relativity, and Ivan Petrovich Sidorov all his life "hooks" on memes of vulgar jokes and nothing more?
By the way, memetics, the first of these memes would be classified as exceptional, and the second as mediocre. That is why the meme of the theory of relativity has settled in the head of only one person, because it is unique in its complexity and significance. Remember, with what difficulty you were given physics at school! This is because exceptional memes are not easily transmitted! But some extremely common meme of a popular song can be picked up in no time. Or another example: you can read a thick scientific journal and do not understand a thing (here they are - exceptional memes!), Or you can look through a collection of anecdotes with one eye and, without much effort, remember it from cover to cover. In general, memes of scientific knowledge or poetic rhymes, like greenhouse plants, require special conditions: in order to grow them in your brain, you need to work hard. But mediocre memes, for example, memes of obscene expressions, like weeds, are growing everywhere. That is why both a drunkard and an academician can swear or sing a dirty ditty with equal success: common memes do not care in whose head they are, there are so many of them that they amaze absolutely everyone. Easy-to-remember memes are lucky! They quickly find their home in the form of a human brain. Only memes affecting our physiological needs can compete in prevalence with them (and you wondered why erotic films and collections of culinary recipes are so popular).in whose head there are so many of them that they amaze absolutely everyone. Easy-to-remember memes are lucky! They quickly find their home in the form of a human brain. Only memes affecting our physiological needs can compete in prevalence with them (and you wondered why erotic films and collections of culinary recipes are so popular).in whose head to be, there are so many of them that they amaze absolutely everyone. Easy-to-remember memes are lucky! They quickly find their home in the form of a human brain. Only memes affecting our physiological needs can compete in prevalence with them (and you wondered why erotic films and collections of culinary recipes are so popular).
Some memes are in our head throughout our lives. Others only stay there temporarily. Remember, maybe this has happened to you: you had a favorite bike that you told in companies, but suddenly you … forgot it. From the point of view of memetics, this is quite natural. A certain meme used your brain as a temporary carrier and left, passing on to another person. By the way, don't be surprised if someday you hear your bike in a completely rewritten version: as the memes spread, the memes vary. This is due to the fact that the process of imitation is imperfect, a person cannot copy something one to one, he necessarily brings changes to this “something”. Broadcasting memes can be compared to playing a broken phone: misunderstandings and errors that arise from it when transmitting a meme alter it.
Sometimes memes manage to break free: on the way from one carrier to another, they linger in free space. Then there are rumors, widespread beliefs. Usually this happens in a crowd, with a large crowd of people, and therefore memes. They say about these cases: "Ideas are in the air."
Memes are not eternal, they are born and die. The idea, which now excites the minds, will not be remembered in a hundred years: the meme of this idea will die. By the way, unique, rare memes usually live the longest. With mediocre memes, the situation is the opposite: there are many of them, but their lives are short. Some memes can die, so to speak, for a while. People did not know anything about the cultural monuments of antiquity, but archaeologists unearthed Troy and other ancient cities, thereby excavating and reviving the memes of archaeological finds.
To make it easier to multiply and attack people, memes are piled up. Scientists call a structure consisting of many memes a meme complex, or for short, a memplex. Memplexes are languages, religions, scientific theories, political ideologies, etc. Memplexes are extremely tenacious. Over the millennia of their existence, they have developed immunity with the help of a simple trick: they do not allow either to prove themselves or to refute, it remains only to believe in them, as, for example, church members believe in God, and mathematicians believe in axioms.
By the way, according to Blackmore, the applied meaning of memetics lies precisely in recognizing memplexes. For example, memetics is extremely important for understanding the essence of various kinds of cults and ideologies. This is how Susan describes the cult: a self-isolating group of people infected with one meme considers serving this meme as their main task, moreover, the clergy regularly brainwash each other, i.e. over and over again impose their chosen meme. Alas, cult memplexes cannot be destroyed. Fighting with them, you can kill a couple of the weakest memes inside the memplex, but the strong will certainly survive, and even tempered in the fight, develop immunity. However, memetics helps to distinguish harmful from harmless memplexes. Researchers urge people to be on the alert all the time, to remember that at any moment they can be forced upon a harmful memplex, and not to succumb,comprehend all the information received and weed out suspicious memes.
Susan Blackmore also includes models of human behavior as memplexes, for example … a tendency to contraception. Moreover, she claims that contraception was invented by … the cunning memes themselves, because childless people can spend all their energy on spreading memes, and not be distracted by raising sons and daughters. A paradoxical situation arises: the birth rate is falling, despite the fact that magazines, television and the Internet are full of sex memes, to which, as already mentioned, a person is especially susceptible for physiological reasons. It turns out that different memes compete with each other, among them the same struggle for survival takes place.
Memes gave people the Internet … in exchange for life
For their convenience, memes not only forced a person to protect themselves. They "invented" a host of other tricks to help spread. For example, it is no coincidence that the human brain is so large (in relation to body weight, the human brain is three times larger than the brain of the most highly developed animals). Memetics are absolutely sure: memes have enlarged the human brain. Throughout their history, people have imitated each other. At first it was not difficult - the great-man imitated the actions of his kindred necessary for survival: he learned to hunt, kindle a fire, and make mammoth skins. In order to copy all this, and therefore, to adopt the corresponding memes, special mental abilities were not required. It was enough to see how the other was doing and repeat the same. Therefore, the ancients had a relatively small brain. But in the process of evolution, memes have become more complex, and after them the brain that perceives them has become more complex. In addition, memes feel more comfortable in a large space, and since their home is a human brain, it simply has to be large. Who would like to live in a cramped apartment ?!
Language and speech also appeared solely to serve memes. In the process of memetic evolution, memes became not enough of the ability of people to copy each other's actions; it was necessary to come up with something new. And the memes came up with it! They invented sound, and then different groups of sounds, i.e. the words. Speech is the perfect way to broadcast memes, as it allows you to broadcast them to multiple people at once and increases the fidelity.
Altruism, which until recently was a blank spot in the theory of evolution, is also necessary for the spread of memes. For a long time, Darwin's followers could not explain where and why such human qualities as kindness, selflessness, and the ability to compassion arose. It would seem that under the conditions of natural selection, such weaknesses should not exist. Susan Blackmore has cracked this tough nut: memes spread much faster between friends than between enemies, which means that memes are beneficial for people to be altruists. As an example, she cites the activities of various charitable foundations. Blackmore writes, for example, that the Princess Diana Memorial Fund is formally doing a lot of good, but the real purpose of the organization is not in this, but in replicating Lady Di's memes on videos, posters, T-shirts, umbrellas.
Such achievements of civilization as writing, printing, radio, television, mail, faxes, etc., memetics are also unconditionally put at the service of memes. People in vain amuse themselves with the thought that they have invented all of the above for their convenience. They would have done just fine without it. Memes are another matter: they need to spread, and for this they provoke technical inventions.
The real prosperity for memes came with the advent of the Internet. Now they have all the opportunities to conquer the world! By the way, according to the testimony of the founder of memetics, Richard Dawkins, the word "meme" itself and its derivatives are found 5042 times on the Internet. The Internet has an incredible number of memetics sites, articles with titles such as Memes, Metamemes and Politics, Memes and the Press, and even Meme Gardening. But all this is small compared to the religious movement of memetics fanatics! The sect also operates on the Internet, called the "Church of the Virus" (the memes themselves are sometimes called "viruses of the mind") and honors Saint Darwin as its patron and patron.
We were not exaggerating when we said that memes seek to take over and dominate humanity. Moreover, according to memetics, domination over people is the minimum program of memes. By and large, they want to destroy humanity altogether. How will memes spread if there are no more people? There is such a theory on this score. People have long been talking about creating artificial intelligence. But we already know that the uttered thought is a meme that has escaped to freedom. That is, the idea of artificial intelligence, like all other ideas, does not belong to humans, but to memes. They can perfectly do without humans when they create a replacement for them - intelligent robots. If this happens, memes will become independent of the person, no longer need him and …
Fantastic? Perhaps not, because examples of the cruelty of memes are numerous. The era of artificial intelligence is still far away, and memes are already destroying people. How, if not the cruelty and selfishness of memes, can explain the ideas and behaviors that adversely affect people? Drugs are the greatest evil that killed thousands of people. But the memeplex of drug addiction is not interested in whether its carriers die or survive, one thing is important for it: that there are as many carriers as possible. Therefore, drug addiction continues to spread. Many political ideas require kamikaze victims, again, the memes of these ideas, spreading, use a person and do not care about his life at all. Susan Blackmore calls these memes auto-toxic, i.e. harmful, destructive to the wearer. To protect yourself from them, according to the researcher, there is only one way - to clog your brain with other memes. It's like with genes: the more there are, the healthier a person is. If you have a lot of good memes in your head, taken from books, films, conversations with smart people, your immunity to infection with dangerous memes will increase: there will be no time or space for stupidity in the brain.
"I" is not "I", but I am a plex
So, any phenomenon in the life of Susan Blackmore explains the action of memes. Science, culture, art, religion, civilization itself - all this is a product of memes. Man has absolutely nothing to do with it. The researcher denies him the slightest independent thought. It seems that she does not consider a person a living being at all, since she calls him nothing more than a "meme machine" (hence the name of the book). In Susan's view, the human ego does not exist at all. “The ego is a giant memplex. Perhaps the most insidious and all-pervading of all, she writes. “Of course, if you look at it from the traditional point of view, it seems that people are individuals capable of thinking and putting forward ideas. But if you look at the world, remembering about memes, it becomes clear that a person is just a host organism that carries memeplexes. People themselves do not have thoughts, do not generate ideas, but only imitate,save and transmit them. " Blackmore even suggests a special term - "I-plex", which combines the concepts of "I" and "memplex".
The center of the self-plex is what we call our inner self, individuality, consciousness. Our most beloved memes are grouped around the self. Any meme entering the human brain undergoes a kind of selection: we either accept it or not. Disliked memes can immediately fly out of my head or lie around somewhere in the backyard of memory. It happens, by the way, that a meme (even the most harmless one) is not liked so much that it causes a real allergy. Meme allergy manifests itself in various kinds of phobias: homophobia, pornophobia, xenophobia, etc. Signs of a severe meme-allergic reaction: the requirement of strict censorship, acts of vandalism, rudeness and even physical violence towards carriers of an objectionable meme. In general, all those who are categorically against (no matter what) are meme allergies. But if we liked the meme, we take it into the i-plex, bring it closer to the "I"how the emperor draws his favorites closer to him. And then, if this is a meme of some political movement, we will vote only for this movement in all elections. If this is a meme of a band, we will only listen to it. If this is a meme of a "Sprite" advertisement, we will blow "Sprite" in liters so that - God forbid! - do not dry out, even then we will have to go to the hospital with gastritis! In a word, our convictions, beliefs, addictions, all our most beloved are memes, favorite memes, grouped around a certain center in the brain.even then we have to go to the hospital with gastritis! In a word, our convictions, beliefs, addictions, all our most beloved are memes, favorite memes, grouped around a certain center in the brain.even then we have to go to the hospital with gastritis! In a word, our convictions, beliefs, addictions, all our most beloved are memes, favorite memes, grouped around a certain center in the brain.
This center is conditional, which is confirmed by the discoveries in the field of neurobiology. Neuroscientists have proven that there is no so-called inner self. There is no flight control center in the human brain, but there are many equivalent fragments.
The idea of the inner "I" is denied not only by science adjacent to memetics, but also by some philosophical teachings and religions. The 18th century philosopher David Hume compared “I” with a group of sensations linked together by a common history, that is, “I” for him was not a stable entity, but rather a story about an “I” that does not exist in reality. Buddhists believe that only actions and their consequences exist, and the one who performs them does not exist.
But, if all this is so, if the ego does not exist, then why has humanity been mistaken for millennia, naively believing that it creates history, has intelligence, makes scientific discoveries and creates cultural masterpieces? It turns out that all the same memes forced us to deceive! They made people believe that human individuals do exist. Having given us the illusion of real existence, the memes huddling in our heads pursued one and only (they have no other) purpose - to multiply, spread and create all new phantoms. It is much easier for them to do it secretly, while remaining unknown to people.
Susan Blackmore and her fellow memetics intervened in the plans of the memes, told about them to all mankind, made the secret clear. And how the memes will react to this is anyone's guess!
Mem-theory was greeted with a thunderous ovation by many modern scientists. For example, philosopher Daniel Dennett and sociologist Edward Wilson use the term "meme" with might and main in their scientific works and lectures. But so far not a single adept of memetics can explain how to measure memes (what to count as a unit), how exactly memes are transmitted from person to person, how they coexist in the brain, whether they have a physical shell, whether they mutate during evolution, etc. etc.
However, such particulars do not bother the author of "Meme Machine" Susan Blackmore. She knows that her captivating monograph has the potential to become a bestseller, giving her idea meme great opportunities to spread.
N. Soinova