What is the Meme-ing of Life? And – there is no “I” in Temes.

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I misunderstood memes when I first riffed on science vs. religion. (science IS religion and vice versa, as I now understand it). So I got to the core of it and bring it to y’all: MEMEs (a concept by Richard Dawkins in his The Selfish Gene) – information that copies/replications with variation and selection; that which is imitated – according to Susan Blackwell. It is that which is imitated. Wearing jeans, eating peanut butter with jelly – ideas that are passed on from person to person. Selfish information packets that will get copied if they can. Like viruses…

Dan Dennett has an interesting take on memes (“an information packet with attitude”); how ideas can hijack our brains, not much like viruses, but AS viruses. Ideas that we decide that we are willing to die for are, essentially, pathogens to the human psyche. They are infectious. Its interest, as a virus, is to replicate and to survive, whether or not it is damaging the body or mind of its host. The thing is, viruses/memes do not care whether or not the body/mind of its host deteriorates, for its primary interest is to replicate itself and to spread. That is its aim.

Not to say all infections are bad. There are good bacteria and bad bacteria, like cholesterol. Some can be utilized to save the body of the host or build the host’s immune system. Think of and thank all the helpful bacteria swimming around in your gut that helps you digest the many germs that enter your system every day.

What I find interesting is his focus on responsibility. We are responsible for ourselves, our ideas – their intended effects and their possible misuses. When we are the vectors of specific memes, we should also take upon ourselves the responsibility for their possible mutations. When people are afraid of ideas that make them confront the mortality of their own belief systems, it is common to “caricature” – as Dennett puts it – or mock these ideas so that they are taken out of context. Infecting the idea of the idea with a mutated understanding of it.

The thing is, once an idea is out of your mouth or hands, it is open to be interpreted by whoever decides to engage with it. I think the tactic is not to combat this specifically. Allow for it to happen. Resistance, in a sense, is futile. But this isn’t to say that we should give up. If anything, remain vigilant and acquire new ways in order to return to the source of the creation of this idea – its intended core.

So how can we tell the difference between “good” memes and “bad” memes? The toxic and the helpful? Here’s where we go into the idea of utilizing one’s own consciousness in order to discern the helpful from the harmful. Discernment via becoming very conscious of an idea and its intended effects. Paying attention to the aim of this meme beyond self-replication.

Like viruses, we can build immunity to specific memes via a scientific process that Dennett underscores – find out the source of the memes, how it spreads and gather the facts. From there, one can build new mutations.

For me, when listening to his talk, it brings me to see mutations of memes that spread on “both ends” of a political spectrum. While the Christian, conservative Right prepare for the Rapture, the grassroots, radical Left prepare for a Revolution – both ideas that members of both sides are prepared to die for, and both ideas that will probably never manifest in their lifetimes. Because they can’t. Because the meme calls for a “moral passion” that calls for its affected and infected to not think or process, but to prepare. To wait. To get caught up in the cogs of a virulent machine that will never come into a physical or concrete manifestation, but will harm the lives of many in its wake.

Susan Blackwell - what catches my attention – that she glosses over – is how memes and temes may be affecting the cosmos – life beyond our very planet. This is a topic I would like to return to in the near future. As the week has been fairly busy and overly social for myself, I do need time to sit and reflect, contemplate and release thought upon thought so that I can come to a better understanding of ideas apart from the immediate emotions associated with them.

Us as meme machines is an interesting concept that Blackwell brings out. The idea that everything that’s ever come about – language, culture, belief systems – all come back to genes, that they benefitted the passing on of genes. An idea that is limited to the material as its source.

The idea of mimetics is interesting to me because a new replicator that was “let loose” was the spreading of mimicry to forward the passing on of an IDEA. Something immaterial. And yet connected to the material. These memes – her idea, not mine – are what drove for a biological push for bigger brains in the evolutionary process so that they can better take in and replicate memes. MIMETIC DRIVE, she calls it. And if you think of it, really – what IS the biological benefit of wearing earrings or speaking a certain way?

What Blackmore (from my POV) is suggesting/saying is that as we are outgrowing the passing on of things for the primary aim of spreading genes into flourishing into the passing on of ideas – MEMEs – there is something going on that is outgrowing our physical bodies as meme machines. (In a very Keanu Reeves Matrix sorta way.) TEMES she calls it.

I suppose the crux of it makes me wonder if there is a functioning hegemony going on in gene, meme and teme variation, selection and replication? That we are choosing to let them choose FOR us? That we are unconsciously giving consent to our own domination? That we only THINK we’re choosing to “improve” technology or ethical ideas, but that these are, in actuality, choosing US?

This also makes me wonder if these are all horrible. Probably not, but it possibly can become just so if we do not become aware of it – what it is, how it functions, what are its aims. Because it isn’t until we Pay Attention to it, until we become Conscious of what is going on, that we can exercise the Free Will to actually CHOOSE, selfishly, I suppose, what will benefit ourselves.
Like Blackwell ends when she asks if we will pull through, “Maybe we will. Maybe we won’t. I have no idea.”

As with a lot of forward-thinking ideas of science, religion and spirituality, I think it would be unwise to dismiss these ideas/memes at face value. WHEN we dismiss things, my plea is to ask yourselves WHY. WHY are you dismissing this idea? Is it because you think it may destroy the very memes that you are comfortable with? Is it because they don’t fit in with your idea of a reality?

Remember, a reality is made concrete only via consensus. So if another meme spreads, it can threaten your reality by becoming a new consensus.

STILL – what I want other humans to do is ask the WHY and WHAT FOR. WHY do we dismiss it, WHAT function does this SERVE? This doesn’t destroy a virus or a meme, much less, build immunity to it. For it will exist until it finds another replicator.

But Paying Attention to and becoming Conscious of its Source, its intent beyond replication – that, I think, is a better way of discernment, choosing which memes you will allow to spread or “hijack” your ideology. I think right now, most humans are selfishly and dangerously stuck on the ego and the material. Everything revolves around a sense of control – we MUST be able to control the world around us, or at the very least, ourselves. So it’s a scary prospect – the idea that we may not even be in control of our own ideas. And maybe we never will be.

But Choice still exists if we let it. Choice comes via Process. But how can one Process when one Dismisses whatever foreign meme it comes into contact with – or worse – imbibe without careful examination? Such has been the role of pop culture as of late in the very culture of reality shows. Which I would like to talk about, but I think if I go off on any more tangents, this will come off as increasingly rambly so that not very many – if any – will be able to make any sense of it.

But something is happening here. In Human Consciousness that is manifesting in the Material and connects to something beyond the scope of our planet. But I’ll get into that on another post about a lot of cool/inneresting/weird/scary/amazing revelations as of late of life that don’t fit into our current understandings of biology and civilization.