| |
|
Yeah, the Meme Machine doesn’t aim to present a theory of consciousness- so steers clear of neurological issues pretty much- PoS’s opening comment is slightly misleading. Blackmore suggests that the ‘self’ may be an illusion, or rather a very enduring meme, or memeplex (a cluster of memes- other examples being a religion or field of science), a hypothesis supported elsewhere by the likes of Hume and Buddha and so on, as well as neurological findings that it's difficult to locate the seat of consciousness as being anywhere in particular.
The central insight I suppose – looking back on some notes I made on the book a couple of yrs ago- is that who/what we are is a result of both genes and memes and looking at things in this way helps to resolve mysteries like how and why language developed and why humans have such large brains (it being very dangerous to give birth to bodies so endowed, not to mention that fact that it uses a huge proportion of the body’s energy supply).
Blackmore’s thinking is that imitation (the picking-up of memes from others) is the skill that would probably have been most critical to the survival of primitive man – most would try to imitate or mate with those who could make the best tools etc. Incremental improvements in imitation ability with each generation would have driven the increase in brain size. As people’s skill at imitation increased, those memes that were good at getting copied would have spread far and wide.
One such meme is the facility for copying sounds for communication purposes- sounds can obviously be transferred from one mind to many at once, and from there language would have developed, as those sounds were grouped into units that permitted a higher fidelity of copying and allowed the expression of a wider range of memes.
An interesting end point of all this discussion is that it allows evolution to be viewed as a series of advances in the way information is transferred. While genes are the information medium that allow physiological changes/advances in the organisms they inhabit, memes drive changes in the mechanisms by which information is transferred, stored etc.
So while these information transfer processes started with self-replicating molecules, memes are the latest stage in the process, which is still ongoing- writing, fax machines, the internet- it’s all headed towards improvements in meme-transfer, for the benefit of the memes (and us, I suppose). |
|
|
