Memes, ideons

Some Definitions Regarding the Particles of Culture

Sunday, I helped the emo kid move out of the emo hole he has chewed in the basement. The basement is now a powerful bastion of metal rehearsal space, full of the suggestion of creepy and dark practices. Peeling plaster has a wonderful aesthetic property to it.

The emo kid is adorable. He is the living embodiment of Parsifal, from the Wagner opera….the teutonic archtype of the wild man, innocent and powerful, who charges out of the woods. He is like the Sumerian Enkidu and just as ambiguously homosexual. It is always very difficult to get him to do the things he says he will, but that is another story.

We are carrying a plastic tub full of books out of the emo hole, and a shiny silver book floats to the top. It is Aunger’s The Electric Meme. This is all both memetic and Hegelian, dear readers, so humor me.

I recognize the title as a book as one the giantess who makes paintings of eyeballs had recommended to me. From the giantess, I already know the major thesis of the book….that a meme has a physical existence as a configuration of electrical activity in the brain of an organism. She and her ex ex ex ex lover have discussed it, on drugs. I dispute her notion that a meme in one brain would be recognizably similar to the same meme in another person’s brain…I think it most likely that we are all wired differently because of idosyncracies of our development. I am not sure this notion, of fixed configurations for memes, comes from Aunger, or from the giantess. Has the meme mutated and acquired a new ideon? I shall see.

My relationship with memes goes very far back. The first person who said “meme” in my presence, and thus, infected me with the meme that memes exist, was Robert Boyd. Boyd is a relatively obscure figure, unless you study memes. He is a legend in the meme world, as the man who co-wrote a book explaining that, in fact, the whole system of brains, memes, and culture (he never used the word meme-too much of an anthropologist for that….I think he used the saner and less sexy term, “cultural trait”), a book called Culture and the Evolutionary Process. I am one of the few people who talks about memes who has actually read that book. Like the giantess, I lend books out to people who do not return books.

So, I grab the shiny book off the stack. The shiny cover made it “stickier” to me, though the title of the book was already an ideon in my mind-part of the collection of books that have been written about memes. This book might actually make it back to the giantess. It displaced Hegel on my task list. Hegel’s writing is so densely packed with memes, and their smaller ideons (soon, soon, I will define), that it takes much more thought to read than Aunger’s salesmanlike, often pedantic, memetic tract. Hegel is dead and Aunger is alive, I think. It does not matter for the purposes of this argument, because I am experiencing the ideas of the two authors in the form of latent memes (soon, I will define). They authors wrote the ideas down, so that they could be found, on top of plastic tubs, or in Borders….and later, infect other minds. Unlike genes, memes modify themselves as they pass from one person to another. I think this is because they acquire new ideons as they enter a new mind, harvesting ideons from the mind of the bearer to reach either a stable structure, or to fall apart and fail to persist.

I have actually mulled over the ideas in this passage since 1990, the year Boyd first introduced me to the Meme, Richard Dawkins, and other things too numerous to mention. Robert Boyd might actually read this, if he compulsively googles himself (seems out of character for the man though)…and he would realize that I am invoking his idea because I am documenting the horizontal transmission of information, though since he is an academic father of sorts, it is vertical in some sense as well. In Culture and The Evolutionary Process, he details the process of horizontal transmission of cultural traits. Vertical is favored in stable environments, horizontal is favored in rapidly changing environments. The mere mention of his name makes my ideas “sticker”, because any person who googles “Robert Boyd, meme, Dawkins, etc…will find this, and also, since I name drop a known figure, read.

Horizontal transmission. That is what I am attempting to perform here. This is the first time I have sat down to write them. I will proceed to create several novel memes, inspired by a single meme. Even better, the original meme will acquire numerous new ideons in the process of my writing this.

Memes are composed of smaller units. There must be a point at which an idea can be broken into a series of smaller ideas which are simple enough as to be essentially dichotomous, categorical, or refutable by a competing idea. These fundamental particles are called ideons. Many ideons together, in one of several possible stable configurations, and you have a meme. There must be thousands of potential unstable configurations for every stable configuration, so only certain memes are allowable.

Ideon. This term is both mine, and not mine. I remember it from a science fiction story I read in the 1980’s. It was serialized in Analog magazine, and had Babbage engines. Mostly, I remember that the terms meme and ideon were used, in a single throwaway sentence, to define particles of culture in an imaginary plan to control history via primitive computers. As a reader, I was inspired by Asimov’s Foundation novels tremendously, and loved the notion of a particulate, gas-law-like theory of culture. Here were two names for particles (I had not yet read Dawkins, though there was the term meme, early in its existence, in front of me, having already spread from The Selfish Gene). I preferred ideon. Here, it is my fundamental particle.

Meme complexes result from the combined action of many memes. Just as ideons cluster into memes, so do memes cluster into meme complexes. For instance, Christianity is a meme complex, composed of thousands of smaller memes. Recognizably different versions of this meme complex have been given different names by different people. These competing versions are sects of Christianity. They compete for meme space with other religions. Most of them have key memes encoded within them to ensure 1) transmission (both vertical and horizontal; evangelism is adaptive for horizontal transmission, and the rule that children must be raised within the faith is good for vertical transmission), and 2) exclusion of other doctrines (to avoid corruption by incompatible ideons, and to increase fidelity of transmission), 3) fidelity (laws against heresy are essential for this.

The notion of immaculate conception, of Jesus, by Mary, is probably a meme. Within this single meme are hundreds of ideons. These include the notion that Joseph was visited by Gabriel before the conception, her status as an embodiment of divine mercy, etc. Many of these ideons come from the New Testament, obviously, others do not. Perfectly stable versions of the Virgin Mary exist without some idons (For instance, the Gabriel visit-not everybody accepts the story, but it is not essential for her existence), but some ideons are not permissible, because the would cause the meme to fall apart (for instance, Jesus must exist for Mary to have any relevance). There are millions of possible Mary memes that do not exist at the moment (For instance, the one where she wields a sword and fights monsters in Hell, and the one where she and her nemesis, the black virgin, are twins. I just made these up, though obviously, the black Madonna is another meme that has existed for hundreds of years). Meme complexes must cross over into other meme spaces as well, at least occasioinally.

Memes must share ideons with other memes, and meme complexes must share memes with other such complexes. Altering one meme, or even one ideon, can have far reaching effects on other memes. For example, the dichotomy; Mary conceived immaculately/Mary had sex with Joseph (there seem to be no alternate possibilities at the moment that I know about) are alternate ideons. They cannot coexist. Alternating between these two ideons has vast consequences to the meme, to the meme complex, and other memes in other meme spaces.

Latent meme. Aunger has spent a lot of space on the notion that memes cannot be objects, and I am only a few chapters into The Electric Meme. I will contradict him here. Latent memes are memes, in nonliving form, that can incite the existence of an actual meme in the appropriate target. I am creating an interconnected series of latent memes right now as I type this.

Meme space. This is akin to a habitat in ecology. Memes occupy, spread within, and compete for, meme space. There are different meme spaces. Cookware norms are one meme space, and as I will mention later, so is the notion of what constitutes an appropriate rock band. Some cultures have more meme spaces than others. Some cultures completely lack meme spaces that are very important in other cultures. For instance, many cultures have meme spaces associated with tattoos, the rituals associated with getting them, the appropriate rituals, etc…others lack them. Same for tobacco.

Memes have certain traits.

Adaptive value. I cast this in terms of the change in Darwinian fitness conferred to the bearer by possessing the meme. Whether or not a person benefits from the meme, independent of their fitness, is a larger and tougher issue.

Social Consequences. At the moment, societies do not seem to undergo radical group selection, such as the kind that Wilson (not E.O., the other one, D.S. Wilson, the group selectionist) imagined…but perhaps they can. Today, human groups are too changeable and temporary to act as targets of selection. If such selection existed, memes would affect the fitnesses of such groups, sometimes at least, and thus memetic selection would exist on multiple levels. Independent of that, memes have social consequences, and in many ways, they affect the transmissibility of other memes, their stickiness, etc.

Stickiness. This is not my term. It is an expression of how likely a meme is to be picked up by the appropriate target once it has found on.

Transmission rate. Not the same thing. An entity can broadcast nonsticky memes continuously. This is the rate at which the bearer of a meme, consciously or unconsciously, tries to infect other individuals.

Resistance to replacement from a competing meme. Fairly self-explanitory.

Memetic fitness. This, of course, is the ability of a meme to go about creating more copies of itself. It might be a function of the three attributes above.

Memes exhibit a memetic epistasis and memetic pleiotropy. Epistasis is the genetic term for the situation where multiple alleles at different loci interact to produce a phenotype. Pleiotropy is the attribute of an allele such that it affects multiple phenotypic traits. Some memes interact epistatically so as to render the target susceptible by other memes, or immune to invasion by other memes.

At some point, if I stay on this track, I will obsessively show how the notion of what constitutes an appropriate metal band is composed of memes, ideons, etc….