Memes

Using Parables to Link Memes to Meaning

Formal Paper by Teresa Troutman

(Accepted to be read at the Hawaii Humanities Conference in January 2011)

The brain of the rat—and also mine, and yours—is not the same [as] it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away. So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms of consciousness? Last week’s potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago—a mind that has long ago been replaced.” (Feynman 144).

If asked, most people can remember a time when an advertising jingle or the theme to a half-observed television show began bouncing around inside their mind, the tune replicated in a bit of memory. The lyrics might be fragmentary as the music fails to complete itself,beginning over and over again at the original spot where it first intruded into conscious awareness. The bearer of this repetitious and possibly most annoying of advertising tactics may, at some level, realize that he or she has been infected by a self-replicating thought pattern. Until recently, these “thought contagions” gained little notice even though it was as reasonable to hypothesize the huge impact such thoughts would have on the evolution of cultural consciousness (Lynch vii).

In our modern era of science and medicine, few doubt that, after being sneezed upon by a person afflicted with a cold, a virus had been transmitted. It is through an airborne vector (bodily fluid propelled by the sneeze) that a virus contaminates and then most often replicates within the new host. Within a few days, the victim goes on to develop viral symptoms and to sneeze onto other unsuspecting victims, first housing and then transmitting the replicating germ onto others who will continue to assure virus’s survival. Just like the analogy of a biological infection, cultural patterns of imitated information, now commonly called “memes,” and the science of memetics, are being studied with applications to psychology, cognition, communication, semiotics, religion, advertising, politics, folklore, etc., just about any realm that utilizes human communication and the cultural transmission of information (Dawkins 192).

Scholars in the Humanities, even those with a only a small background in biology and the rigors of scientific method, have already begun to test the hypothesis that consciousness is the scaffold upon which memes create the structure for our species’ theory of mind. This mind, both in the individual and collective zeitgeist and Weltanschauung, depends upon narrative and the condensation of narrative to its simplest form of metaphor and analogy can be found in the use of parable. Richard Dawkins, the natural historian credited for the origin of memetic theory, described parables as “thought experiments… to clarify our thinking about reality” and he and other theorists agree how parables offer a tautological reference point for individuals to mold their thoughts to pre-test their behavior for future scenarios (Boyd, B. 194). Taking a look at how storytellers use parables to transmit the memes of cultural social interaction, the ontological infrastructure of an entire belief systems are exposed for study and reality testing. A good parable, just like a good sneeze, can change the entire health of a civilization and modern parables are how human minds test the past ways of thinking of life, the universe and everything.[1]

In 2002, science fiction, environmental and satirical author Douglas Adams’ lectures, interviews, journals and short narratives were posthumously

published as a collection in the under the meaningfully titled The Salmon of Doubt. Best known for his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (a trilogy containing 5 published novels with a soon to be published 6th novel, continuing the series even regardless of the fact that he died in 2001), Adams argued, mused, exposed and otherwise narrated his experiences and discoveries as a true Renaissance man of the new millennium. While much of his short, non-fiction stories about computers and the coming evolution and revolution of the digital age have now come true in reality (much of his forecasting had been written in the late 1990’s, and his sardonic rants, as such, are now outdated) his true narrative gift is revealed in two of the parables he tells, and then supports with true life examples, about a new way of seeing our combined sense of reality.

The term “meme” was originally coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, in which he revealed a working analogy of the evolutionary aspects of human culture to the replication processes of biological genes in natural selection. Genes are reproducible units of genetic material and, with an understanding of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Dawkins elaborated on how it is that the most successful genes are the ones that get replicated, and how DNA doesn’t necessarily replicate for the good of the individual or the good of the gene pool. Genetic material’s sole purpose is to replicate and to do it better than the competition. Through an algorithm of mutation, variation, and competition, the biological designs created by these successful replicants create more complex and more diverse organizations of genes: “bacteria and plants, fish and frogs, duck-billed platypuses and us” (Waking… 3). While genes are exchanged between organisms during sex, memes are exchanged, according to Dawkins, via imitation through the “spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art” (Selfish Gene… 193). Memes work internally inside of an organism’s consciousness as “self-reinforcing” ideas and also in the competitive external environment of “radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper ads, magazine column-inches, and library shelf space (Hofstadter 51-52). Just as genes that fail to replicate in the pool eventually disappear, so it is true for the memes

that fail to be imitated from person to person and from generation to generation will also become extinct. For example, the meme that the world is flat failed to be replicated when a new meme became more successful as men began returning from sea-faring journeys that took them beyond the observable horizon. However, that the flat world meme survived at all and replicated for centuries demonstrates the characteristic of memes that they may not necessarily be “the best, truest, most hopeful or helpful ideas” (Waking…5). As Richard Dawkins first realized in describing memes as an evolutionary force in directing human culture:

Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically, but technically… when you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. (Selfish Gene… 192)

Memes have been transmitted through civilizations through art, literature, laws, myths and folklore, theater and, in modern civilization, the advanced technologies of newspapers, television and radio and the World Wide Web in an ever-expanding bubble of influence. Genes need the nutrient-rich environment of the biosphere to evolve from the simple patterns of chromosomes into the complex gathering of organisms while memes need an environment of thought that supports the transmission and imitation for greater growth and complexity. This environment has been given names such as “the ideosphere” (Hofstadter 50) or even “the memesphere,” where conglomerations of simpler memes adhere together into a complex set of “mutually assisting” ideas or “co-adapted meme complexes” creating greater “memeplexes” (Meme Machine… 19). In 1883, Frederik Nietzche published Thus Spoke Zarathrustra and spoke the phrase that began the deconstruction of God and was one of the first benchmarks that defined the postmodern era:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: "I am looking for God! I am looking for God! As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter …

Have you lost him, then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances … Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I (author’s italics), (108).

In the 1978 preface to his translation of Thus Spake Zarathrustra, Walter Kaufman tried to encapsulate Nietzsche’s thoughts:

Zarathrustra speaks of the death of God and proclaims the overman. Faith in God is dead as a matter of cultural fact, and any “meaning” of life in the sense of a supernatural purpose is gone. Now it is up to man to give his life meaning by raising himself above the animals and the all-too-human. What else is human nature but a euphemism for inertia, cultural conditioning and what we are before we make something of ourselves. (xiii)

The Ubermensch ideal is a scaffold for culture memes. The mythological narrative of the man who would be God, and of everyman’s subsequent fall, runs through religious text and cloaks social memes within each moral parable.

Douglas Adams, in BBC interviews and within The Salmon of Doubt's many stories, he tells two parables of life in a social reality which contains no godhead. Appealing to both scientific reductionists and students of the emerging philosophies coming out of neuroscience and of creativity’s possible seat in the brain, Adams tells first the story of the worldview of the puddle:

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. (131-132)

Puddle Parable 1 of 3 from Teresa Troutman on Vimeo.

While this is a parable with a social moral, and Adams himself stated the moral explicitly as a meme to break apart the memetics of religious dogma. Adams told the puddle parable in a lecture given at the Digital Biota 2 conference in Cambridge in 1998 to answer his own rhetorical question: “Is there an artificial god?” To interpret this small narrative as a theological metaphor, the memes become visible as a puddle is only one state of being and the world really is a comforting and conforming feature of the landscape of given to Adam and Eve by God. By the end of the metaphorical day, a Judeo-Christian worldview might further instill the belief in a metaphysical aspect from whence the puddle is created and has no idea of where it is going.

The voice of the puddle has an ontological ring to it and whenever there is ontology, Dawkins might argue, there are memes. In 2000, psychologist and memeticist Susan Blackmore wrote in The Psychology of Awakening, “Waking from the Meme Dream,” that inner voice humans hear in their head which expresses itself in terms of, “I think…” or “I believe…” is that ontological voice of the meme and memeplexes at work

The narrative of the parable is meant to be interpreted and a storyteller can shift the moral of the story any way he, she or even they choose to when they re-tell it. The entertainment industry’s creative talent plays with the embedded memetic messages of narrative as its bread-and-butter for maximizing profit. A director can option a story directly from a writer and then turn the denouement into a message with no correlative to the original enlightenment. However, in The Salmon of Doubt, Adams was able to use his parable of the puddle for a strictly non-theological moral lesson. On page 130, as he stated in the text of his original speech, picking up where the puddle left off:

Now imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a happy day's tool making. He looks around and he sees a world which pleases him mightily: behind him are mountains with caves in -- mountains are great because you can go and hide in the caves and you are out of the rain and the bears can't get you… I mean this is a great world, it's fantastic.” (130)

Douglas describes early, thinking man in a manner commonly used as the icon for pre-literate Homo sapiens, an intelligent mind but with the worldview limitations no better than that of a rhetorical puddle. Given so little exterior data to build his case, Douglas enlightens the moral parallel of the caveman’s and the puddle’s theory of existence:

Douglas Adams’ exposes the metaphysical memeplex of a created world that has been passed down from its ontological origins in the faulty thinking of Paleolithic man to the global problems mankind is working to correct today. Adams expresses what he expects is the true moral of the story, a parable narrative that came from his unconscious mind to his conscious storyteller after contemplating why so many species were facing extinction and why the natural resources of the planet were being rendered to service the human biomass. Douglas finished the new moral meme he hope could be repeated from mind to mind:

But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, 'well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in' and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a question which is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his world and says 'So who made this then?' Who made

this? - you can see why it's a treacherous question.” (131).

Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, 'This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely' and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him. (131)

This parable of the puddle was repeated by Richard Dawkins himself at Douglas Adams’ funeral, in a eulogy. Douglas and Dawkins had become great friends after both had already published their foundation of books: Dawkins with his “Selfish Gene” and accompanying meme theory and Adams with his “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” trilogy. They met, according to Dawkins in the preface to the audiobook edition of The Salmon of Doubt, when Dawkins wrote a fan letter to Adams about his first trilogy. The puddle parable, while it hasn’t exactly become a viral meme (not judging the narrative as good or bad, only that as a meme, its existence is simply to replicate) continues to expand even as the author of this paper types this text beneath her fingers.

The example of a tremendous memeplex is the idea of the Judeo-Christian God, which can be analyzed as a collection of organized memes supported by the mass production of one book, the Bible, are further reinforced and repeated via the institutional and social structures and rituals of the church or synagogue. Likewise, the memeplex of science is supported by a strong scientific methodology curriculum taught in most schools from pre-school through post-graduate and reinforced by the success of those groups that control the scientific application of technology. In the 21st century, technology will define and expand the dominant memeplexes even further through the venues of virtual realities of the digital environment and the revolutionary advancements in interactive communication. Richard Dawkins stated it this way;

They are patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains – books, computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computers exist, these new replicators… can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer to computer. As they propagate, they can change – mutate… Evolution under the influence of the new replicators – memic evolution – is in its infancy. It is manifested in the phenomena that we call cultural evolution. (Blind Watchmaker… 158)

Puddle Parable 2 of 3 from Teresa Troutman on Vimeo.

The invention of the printing press heralded a shift in power from gene evolution over to meme evolution as various texts became widely available to a larger population that had, prior to the new technology, been entirely dependent on the clergy for the transmission of the imitated information that governed their lives. The mass replication of text guaranteed new understanding and new mutations of the original meme of the religious code and, in the exponential learning curve of the highly imitative and newly literate civilization; it held that more successful mutations of the imitated knowledge would replace the older, more limited cultural memes.

As the modern age opened and expanded the facilities of human beings to communicate and the success of the meme of freedom and human rights allowed more memes to replicate freely, the genetic home for the memeplexes, namely human brains (both humorously and frighteningly called by Daniel C. Dennett “meme-nests”) have become more dependent on language and multiliteracies to distinguish which memes are beneficial and which memes, with the advent of scientific rationality, can consciously be discarded as useless (Darwin’s… 349). In Darwinian biology, what is essential in evolution is the vertical transmission of genetic material in the form of strands of DNA but, for culture and consciousness, memes are the driving force of human existence. As Douglas Adams discovered when the “parable of the puddle” distilled from the ether of competing memes into his mind and onto the paper, it may not be that the best of our thoughts that move forward through time, only the most virulent of memes be the survivors.

In art, in theater, in cinema, in education, in politics and in spirituality, the epistemology of what essentially makes us the way we are shows us at the gene and meme crossroad of what we might become, if only we can take an objective look at the memes we are currently imitating and passing on to others, consciously or not, through the language of cultural communication.

Beneath the Weltanschauung of civilization lies a collected force of memes and associated memeplexes whose sole purpose is not to do what is best for our species or our planet, but what is best to keep them moving forward in space and time. No one has yet to discover where the meme resides in anything other than as an evolutionary metaphor but, like dark matter and black holes, there is evidence of their existence and look for these replicators at work whenever a human expresses an idea as narrative, especially in the simplest forms, such as a parable. Susan Blackmore asserts in Waking from the Meme Dream, that it is the “I” of what we perceive as our individual “self” that is, in reality, just a driver for “a vast conglomerate of successful memes… we all become unwitting hosts to an enormous baggage of useless and even harmful meme-complexes.” Richard P. Feynman, noted physicist and author, recognized the dance between the mortality of our self’s atoms and ideas and the struggle for immortality for our genes and our memes 30 years before the meme meme was named for discussion and thought infection when he was fascinated by the fact that the half-life of phosphorus in the brain of a rat was only two weeks long:

To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance… the atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out—there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday. (Feynman 244)

Becoming aware of and understanding the meme complexes driving both individual and cultural consciousness allows for inspection and questioning of their validity. Knowing the nature of selfish replicants and rejecting those memes that harm us is like refusing to dance to someone else’s choreography. Douglas Adams, by questioning these “cultural viruses,” has given our minds a better chance to dance in a way that better suits our true nature and strains our metaphorical hole in the ground, or “deep gravity well” (Adams 128) although even the idea of free will may just be another self-serving memeplex (Brodie 64).

Puddle Parable 3 of 3 from Teresa Troutman on Vimeo.

WORKS CITED

Adams, Douglas. The Salmon of Doubt. New York: Harmony Books, Completely Unexpected Productions, 2002. Print.

Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print.

---.“Waking from the Meme Dream.” The Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Science and Our Day-to-day Lives. Ed. G.Watson, S.Batchelor and G.Claxton;

London, Rider, 2000, 112-122 Google, October 14, 2006. Web. http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk

Boyd, Brian. The Origin of Stories. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press, 2009. Print.

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. (30th Anniversary Edition) New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.

Distin, Kate. The Selfish Meme. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.

Feynman, Richard P. What Do You Care What Other People Think, Mr. Feynman?. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988. Print.

Hofstadter, Douglas. Metamagical Themas. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Print.

Nietzsche, Frederik. Thus Spoke Zarathrustra. New York: Penguin Press, 1978. Print.

---.God is Dead quote. The Gay Science, section 108. Uploaded from Google. Oct. 1, 2009. Web. http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosopher/friedrich_nietzsche_quote...

Renshaw, Ken. Everyday Magic: The Power of Memes. Cambria, CA: Constellation Press, 2004. Print.

[1] Adams, Douglas. Life, the Universe and Everything. The Fourth Book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy oddly

numbered ‘trilogy.’

Wierd Al explains memes (if YouTube doesn't pull the video... again!)

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