Memes (cf. Part 114) are specified by their 'representational content'. As representations of a
portion of information, memes have a certain content. A representation
in the human mind is some piece of our ‘mental furniture’ that carries
information about the world. For example, a thought that ‘the object on my desk
is a book’ is a mental representation of a bit of the world (namely that book).
Therefore ‘representational content’ refers to the information that is included
in the content of our representations.
It is representational content which accounts for
the mechanisms of memetic heredity and for the influence of memes over their
phenotypic effects. Distin (2005) uses the
term memetic DNA for the
representational content. It provides the mechanism for memetic evolution, just
as DNA provides the mechanism for genetic evolution.
How is the
representational content fixed in our brains? Replicators preserve and copy
specific portions of information. For memes, we should be able to identify
precisely which bits are carried in each replicator. This means pinpointing the
exact content of any representation, and this is something determined partly by
the various properties of the object or situation being represented. Yet
representational content is determined by other factors as well, e.g. by the
capabilities and history of the organism doing the representing.
Some organisms are capable of forming
representations the content of which is determined by a combination of the
relevant properties of that which is represented, and the organism’s own
individual and social learning capacities. Such organisms are able, in other
words, both to preserve information and to transmit it among themselves.
In the case of complex representations, which have
links not only externally to perceptions and behaviour but also internally to
other representations, the resultant behavioural flexibility can enable us to
track down their content more completely. It should be possible to test all of
the links, by altering the associations that the organism encounters, and
observing the effects on its behaviour.
Only representations with this determinacy of content can count as memes, since
a crucial aspect of any replicator is the preservation of given information.
Thus memes are representations which preserve their
content in a way that can be copied between generations. As representations,
they are specifically those bits of our mental furniture which control our
behaviour in response to the information they carry. In other words, the basis
of memes in representational content is precisely what accounts for their
ability to exert executive effects on the world.
Representations gain meaning from their context
within a representational system (RS), and the uniquely human capacity
that lies at the heart of culture is our ability to copy and develop RSs, as
well as adding individual representations to our repertoire: the ability, in
other words, to meta-represent.
Natural languages, as also systems of mathematical and musical notation, are
some examples of cultural RSs, and each is peculiarly appropriate to its
particular cultural area. Human minds acquire replicators on an ongoing basis
throughout their lives, and this means that they can acquire novel RSs as well
as novel representations. Among these various RSs, the natural languages have
primacy: they alone benefit from an innate device for their acquisition. Yet
they benefit, too, from the innate ability to meta-represent – and it is this
which allows us also to develop nonlinguistic RSs, whose diverse rules and
structures are realized in media other than speech. Once these sorts of RS have
been taken into account, it becomes clear that there are many concepts that are
not available to us until the RS that supports them has been developed.
According to Distin (2005), humans are born with a degree of 'mindedness'
that includes, for example, the ‘representation instinct’: an ability
and tendency to learn and manipulate vast numbers of representations, as well
as the various systems in which they are embedded. And this innate mental
potential of an infant is realized as a result of exposure to the cultural
environment.
Genes preserve and replicate biological information
by building vehicles for their own
propagation and protection. The effects of the genes are found in the machines
that they build for their survival, and their replication also depends
ultimately on this same machinery. Memes depend for their replication on a
faculty of the human mind that is ultimately of a genetic nature, namely the representation instinct. Organisms, as
well as minds, develop via interaction between the innate potential and the
environment, and in the case of the mind a crucial part of that environment
comprises of the memes.
A
human mind is thus partly a product of the memes, but only because it has the
innate potential to interact with and develop in response to these memes. And
culture is the product of human minds, although the preservation of information
in representational content ensures that the culture we see today is mostly the
result of memes produced by human minds of long ago. The development of human
minds depends on a combination of two types of processes: their innate
potential is the result of an interaction between genes and the physical
environment, and that potential is fulfilled as a result of interaction with
memes.
The selfish meme?
'Memes are best thought about not by analogy with
genes but as new replicators, with their own ways of surviving and getting
copied' (Susan Blackmore).
Dawkins (1976) described
the essence of his ‘selfish gene’ theory as the insight ‘that there are two
ways of looking at natural selection, the gene’s angle and that of the
individual’. The essence of his selfish meme
hypothesis is the insight that there are two ways of looking at cultural
change, the meme’s angle and that of the human individual.
One of the most significant implications of
Dawkins’ selfish-gene theory is that the individual organism was not an
inevitable outcome of genetic evolution: it so happens that genes have banded
together to build survival machines,
but the only crucial feature of any form of evolution is the replicator – the
unit of selection. Although organisms clearly exist, and have a perspective
from which the world of genes is irrelevant to their everyday lives,
fundamentally their lives and evolution are determined by that world. According
to Distin (2005), no analogous insight arises from the theory of the selfish meme,
because memes do not build survival machines. Their replicative mechanisms, and
the means of their variation and selection, lie in genetically determined human
faculties, and not in vehicles that they themselves build.
Blackmore (1999), however, takes the view that we are meme machines, just as we are gene machines. Consequently, she argues
that ‘there is no conscious self inside’ those machines; and that ‘a complex
interplay of replicators and environment’ is all there is to life. Our sense of
self may not be illusory, but our sense of control over the collective products
of our minds may well be. Although our minds provide the mechanisms of memetic
evolution, there is a very real sense in which the directions of that evolution
are independent of us.
For more on memes, please click here.
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