Temes
If you thought memes were bad . . .
Darwinian evolution is at the center of my structure of understanding. It's an algorithm that was first discovered in biology and was later found to apply in other situations. It's a fairly simple algorithm.
We see it throughout nature.
There is a loop involved:
Parents have offspring but the offspring aren't exact duplicates of the parents. Some of the offspring are better at responding to the selection pressure of their environment and parenthood than others. The loop is closed. After many iterations of that loop the replicators evolve to become better and better at meeting whatever selection pressure the environment presents.
This is an algorithm.
Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene pointed out as his central theme that the replicator here is not an individual or even something like a species. The replicators are genes in our DNA, It's the genes that get passed on from generation to generation. Each individual has a unique set of genes that determine the individuals' capabilities and form. Some sets of genes make bodies that are better at having offspring than others.
Dawkins was being a bit provocative by calling genes selfish - but his point was that the purpose of a body (plant animal bacteria fungus) is to replicate and make more genes. Dawkins continued the provocation by calling bodies 'robots' carrying genes into the future.
This is analogous to a robotic spaceship carrying humans to another star. The purpose of the journey is found in the people - not in the ship.
Dawkins noted that the algorithm of natural selection was substrate neutral. That whenever the conditions of continuous replication with variation combined with selection pressure would evolve so that the replicants get better and better at meeting the selection pressure.
He wondered if there were other substrates that would support evolution. He saw that when people copy each other they create a substrate where things will evolve. The replicant is the behavior that one person copies from another. Each copy has variations that make the behavior more or less effective and the most effective copies are copied most.
A clear example were the 'nigerian letters' sent out years ago. These were scams but some people got suckered and lost thousands of dollars. The scammers would send out thousands of letters. They would vary the letters hoping to increase the haul from suckers. I watched them evolve from pretty crude effort full of grammatical errors to smooth things that seemed to come from lawyers.
Dawkins coined the term 'meme' for these imitated behaviours. The practice of wearing baseball caps backwards was a meme. Hijacking airplanes was a meme. Everyone was shocked the first time it happened but it was a behaviour that was quickly copied.
One can say that evolution introduced purpose into the world. The purpose of fur on arctic animals is to keep them warm. But what is the purpose of arctic animals. There is none. The are there because they have evolved to prosper there and that isn't a purpose.
Memes are purposeless that way. They evolve because they prosper in the substrate of human society where they replicate. Memes are not always good for people but the memes don't care and can propagate anyway.
Memes are intricately involved in human culture. One of the purposes of education is to pass on memes to future generations for instance. Learning to speak starts with a baby imitating parents. I think that memetics can account for the commonalities that distinguish one culture from another. There is a bit of a parallel between memes and genes in that they both work by the same algorithm. But the substrate of human society is nothing like the substrate of molecular biology. When DNA replicates there are pretty sophisticated error correction processes at work. Memes have nothing like that.
I think that technology provides another evolutionary substrate.
Consider the automobile. Using a car to get around with can be considered a meme - but what of the car itself as a mechanical thing? Various technologies were tried like steam engines and internal combustion engines and electric motors. Once long ago I drove a car and did my own mechanics. The detailed mechanics from America and France and England and Germany were all quite different but you could see that each style seemed to have evolved from a common ancestor.
I forget who invented the term - but 'teme' is the word I use when thinking about how technology evolves. And that evolution is not always good for people. Once E=MCsquared was discovered then the atom bomb was inevitable. Once one country has the Bomb then others are forced to make one too out of self defence.
Warfare produces lots of horrific temes. Medicine produces lots of beneficial temes.
Once the teme of the car got going that pushed other technologies along that support it. More powerful engines required better roads and a network of fueling stations. And for a while that was 'forcing' cities to cut neighborhoods apart with superhighways to cope with the traffic. At that point people started regretting the ascendance of the car teme - but by then it was too late.
My conception of memetics and temetics has them as things that exist because they can - not because they fulfill a purpose. A logical problem with both is that their substrate is people and people definitely have purposes.
Why do we have the teme of airplanes? Because the Wright brothers wanted to fly and had the skill to invent an airplane. I'm fascinated how their basic design has evolved but you can see the basic structure in all modern airplanes from ultralights to supersonic fighters. With airplanes, the purposes of the designers provide the selection pressure on the design of airplanes - but many designs are not selected for replication even though the designers very much wanted them to succeed.
I'd take AI like the chatbots as a teme. Who knows what the tech will produce? And once its out of the box it's very hard to control. And it's evolving so fast you can almost see it happening in realtime.
I'm sanguine. Here we are; the naked apes who have taken over the planet. Memetics is one of our most powerful capabilities. It's true that maybe the temes will run amok and we'll overfish the oceans and nuke ourselves - but then - maybe not.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.