Jaron Lanier Disagrees with Dawkins' Memes and Kurzweil's Singularity

Jaron Lanier Disagrees with Richard Dawkins' Meme Theory and Ray Kurzweil's Singularity

As a goat farmer, Jaron Lanier supported his way through college. While growing up, he lived far from cities and near Mesilla, New Mexico, with his father in tents until they built a house centered around a hippie-esque geodesic dome designed by Jaron. 

Belief in No God Is Also Irrational

In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett hopes to break the spell--not of religious belief, but of the conviction that it is not a fit subject for scientific inquiry. Never the twain shall meet--this is a bad idea according to Dennett. Stephen Jay Gould wrote of "non-overlapping magisteria," of both science and religion as worthy of respect in their own rights, but unbridgeable, the one to the other.

The DNA Evidence for Nonduality

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
(September 1, 1939, by W.H. Auden)

And the world continues on its mad way, while occasionally a few begin to question their quiet desperation and ask, What else? There is nothing else. It's all right here. You are what you are looking for, as St. Francis said. Or, what you are looking for is not behind you, as Jean Klein quipped. When this is realized, when only that day dawns to which we are awake, as Thoreau put it, life changes for the better.

That is not so much mystical mumbo-jumbo. The understanding is available as you go about the bustle of your daily life.

A scientific slant on what I mean can be found in the material below. But I provide this because it is not just about DNA; it is about you. DNA is an object, something observed as a word in print or thought, or under a fluorescence microscope. You are not an object.

Richard Dawkins, apostle of materialism and atheism, argues that DNA uses organisms to perpetuate itself and that we exist to serve it. That is, he means we are objects, you and I, and he is big-hearted enough to include himself among us. Although his The Selfish Gene is a brilliantly clever book, it manipulates evidence, as Mary Midgley has noted. Here is a counterpoint to his view. The author I quote, John Stevenson*, speaks outside the centuries-entrenched scientific paradigm, and with regard to DNA and deathless one-life he has this to say:

~Tradition is very strong in human thinking. A lifetime of learning that life consists of being born, having offspring and then dying produces a mind set. Relationships within families such as sister, mother, father, etc. are fundamental in our thinking. A human, we believe, is an individual, another human is a separate life. Conclusion 5 presents an entirely different story. It says that all life in all living things is the same life. This violates all previous teachings about life.

Mary Midgley & The Solitary Self

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Among moral philosophers Mary Midgley has a razor-sharp mind, and when she speaks I listen. Her new book is The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene. As the title suggests, in the book she takes up her long-standing disagreement with Richard Dawkins and his The Selfish Gene, an extremely important book which nonetheless appeals to a rather limited understanding of Darwin, according to Midgley. In the video below, she points out that Dawkins' title is anthropomorphic and therefore off the mark.

In the video she discusses the linkage between a rather shallow but prevalent societal view of individualism and Darwin's concerns about evolution and human morality. I will add that in the USA, both the politics of economics and politics in general are based on a flawed, Spencerian understanding of human nature. What do I mean? In The Descent of Man, Darwin points out that humans are aware of their life as a whole and the effect of their actions, good or bad, upon the entire culture, unlike other animals. This is Darwin's understanding of human nature and it does not imply modern market economics ideology in which Ayn Rand's Nietzschean and wealthy superheroes save the masses from themselves. (19th Century America "unfortunates" have become "losers" in the 21st, so to distinguish them from the only other possibility, "winners.")

The Selfish Gene, Midgley argues, represents an extreme neo-Darwinism. She allows that Dawkins didn't invent this view, but piggy-backed upon a Spencerian survival-of-the-fittest myth prevalent in society since the Nineteenth Century. (These are not her words, but I am sure she would concur.) The success of Dawkins' book stems from its resonance with  post-industrial myth.

She challenges a reduction of human motivation to self-interest. Human psychology is not so neat, she says. Instead, reductionist individualism can be traced to the Eighteenth Century and, before that, Thomas Hobbes' contribution to Enlightenment thought. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged represents a heroic independence that is not a realistic aim for Homo sapiens. Darwin called it right. As natural selection reveals over and over, "fittest" does not mean "strongest," but an ability to adapt, often through "cooperation" with other organisms. We humans evolved to cooperate, to interact constantly with one another and as a dependent and tiny part of complex and huge ecosystems. Too bad that a more enlightened understanding of human nature has not found its way into economics and politics.Tweet

Steven Pinker on Moral Progress

Critics have scoffed at atheism evangelist Richard Dawkins for his belief that humankind has made moral progress over the centuries. Dawkins, of course, uses his contention to argue that religion is not needed to control moral behavior. (For Naysayers to Dawkins, see my 11 June 2009 post.)

Roger Scruton allows that while institutions are no longer medieval and, indeed, have progressed, human beings have not. Their institutions hold them in check. Just read the news to find daily examples, either among individuals or with countries, of cruelty and violence. He cautions us against looking on the bright side, saying it can be a dangerous tendency. More. In short, Scruton would have a lively "discussion" with Dawkins and Pinker.

Critics of Dawkins and Pinker could cite Auschwitz, Buchenwald, the Armenian Massacre, Stalin's Ukraine Famine,Darfur, East Timor, Idi Amin and Uganda, and on and on. I would add the Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA, of Uganda, which has no agenda--certainly not religion--and serves only its own barbaric appetites, such as kidnapping school girls, raping them, and turning them into prostitutes. One girl refused a commander, and he ordered other children to bash her head in. The girl's sister was forced to participate. Atrocities such as this leave me shuddering, and I know that for some children life is a vale of tears. They are not part of any statistics for moral progress.

For all that, statistics seem to bear out Dawkins' argument, though I would add, not support his atheism. (Atheism, like theism, comes about by a leap of faith, not through numbers.) Steven Pinker has entered the fray, and argues that human violence has indeed declined and, of course, Pinker has no need of religion to explain it.

I quote: "social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth."

What causes people to think our times are so horrific? Well, the Associated Press, Cognitive Illusion, and rising expectations, among other factors. More

Naysayers To Richard Dawkins

A reviewer (Terry Eagleton) on Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be.

Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain.

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects. More

Then there is Alvin Plantinga. Among his comments, Plantinga says this in his review:

One shouldn’t look to this book for evenhanded and thoughtful commentary. In fact the proportion of insult, ridicule, mockery, spleen, and vitriol is astounding. (Could it be that his mother, while carrying him, was frightened by an Anglican clergyman on the rampage?

You might say that some of [Dawkins'] forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class.

Plantinga dances rings around Dawkins' thinking on matters theological. He points out a central flaw in Dawkins' reasoning, which I have phrased differently: We know of no irrefutable evidence that God exists. Therefore God does not exist. Correctly reasoned, Dawkins could only say that he thinks God is improbable and that materialism is probably true. In a book supposedly based on reason, he offers no compelling argument.

As for probability, Stephen Hawking has observed that "fine-tuning" was needed for life to exist at all. The question arises, How probable was this fine-tuning to have occurred strictly by chance? More at Plantagina's Review, "The Dawkins Confusion."

Student to Richard Dawkins: What if You're Wrong?

A Student Asks Richard Dawkins, "What if you're wrong?" She says hers is "the most simplest question," and poses it to him. Her solecism drew attention to her rather than the empty-minded response Dawkins gave. Once again, he simply proves himself an evangelist for atheism. His campaign against religion has a very emotional element to it. (For somebody who claims to be a rationalist, there is little that is rational about his evangelism.) He begins by presuming that the girl is a Christian, and continues with humor about believing in Flying Spaghetti Monsters. His point is that each believer with her religion and her God is a product of her environment. He doesn't bother with the implicit question--What if Dawkins is wrong about the existence of a higher intelligence regardless of religious belief? Instead, after a minute of his whimsical response he asks her, "What if you're wrong about the Great Ju-Ju Monster at the bottom of the sea?" This fits propaganda though it drew admiring whoops and applause from the student audience at Randolph-Macon College. Although he has one, he provided no reasoned explanation of his own position as an answer to a serious question from a young mind. Somebody not an ideologue could have explained that natural selection can still allow for that intelligence, although it would probably affect her view of the intelligence's attributes. (I make no brief either for or against a higher intelligence (which might be conscious or it might not be) ; I only point out Dawkins' tactics.)

God & Materialism: John Haught, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, On Three Ways of Heating Water

God & Materialism: John Haught, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, On Three Ways of Heating Water

Among other points, theologian John Haught, Georgetown University, says that scientific materialists use a different kind of metaphysics when they claim that life is meaningless, has no purpose, and that the physical is all there is.

As for Richard Dawkins, celebrated evangelist of atheism (The Selfish Gene, et al.), Haught says that Dawkins tricks-out the game. Dawkins starts with "Okay, let's play by the rules. God is a designer, right? Well, then, I win, obviously all the design we see needs no God." John Haught does not understand God quite this simply.

With regard to physicalist Daniell Dennett (Consciousness Explained, among other books), Haught disagrees with Dennett's conception of consciousness, considered by Haught as narrow. Haught's response is that there are three ways of looking at a pot of water being heated for tea. (1) Electrons in the water are moving around, becoming increasingly excited or that H2O molecules are transitioning from a liquid to a gaseous state. (2) I turned on the gas burner under the pot. (3) I wanted tea. Dennett's philosophy of consciousness is the kind that belongs to number one, yet there are three points of view for the same phenomenon.

Here is a Video interview of Haught by Robert Wright. I have opinions, but don't want to prejudice your viewing.

The Altruism of Vampire Bats

The Altruism of Vampire Bats

Altruism (al' troo-iz-em) n. regard for the welfare of others; benevolent practices. al' tru-is' tic, adj. al'tru-is' ti-cal-ly, adv.

Here is a word that evokes a puzzle for sociobiologists. If the gene is selfish, to use Richard Dawkins' concept, why do we witness unselfish behavior? * Altruism involves helping others at the cost of our time, our effort, and our resources. Sociobiologists puzzle over this behavior because they see individuals of species struggling for self-survival, and it simply does not promote that end.

Yet altruism is not a phenomenon observed only among human beings. Many animals live social lives, in bonded cooperation. They lavish devotion on offspring and spend hours grooming others. Why?

At one time, speculation had altruism as behavior for the greater good of the group, a position held by many during the early Twentieth Century. Since then, however, it has fallen out of favor. Of course, on the surface such behavior would seem to promote the survival of a species. If individuals give up their own lives to protect the lives of others, this would help insure continuance of their kind into the next generation.

With a deeper look, the explanation appears less plausible. Assume a tribe of wolves in which each member catches rabbits for every other wolf. Yes, the pack would live in harmony, but not for long. Assume now that an interloper arrives and when he is fed, he never bothers to feed others. He simply does not hunt, but waits for his meal. He has more time on his hands, including time to mate with alpha bitches. His pups will inherit this selfish gene, and they will again pass it on. Over generations the pack eventually becomes selfish as the altruistic individuals die out, unable to compete against those who take rather than give.

Current sociobiologists find that the selfish gene helps explain altruism. Your children are the only way your genes can survive beyond your lifetime. Parental care, then, becomes an important means to accomplish this. The behavior also works with kin. Monkeys share food and other resources with their relatives because they thereby have a better chance of getting more of their genes into the next generation. Of course, recognition is key to altruism. The individual must be able to perceive his kin, an ability that not all animals have. Primates do possess it, as well as elephants, dolphins, and vampire bats.

These bats are tiny and cannot go without blood or a meal beyond two consecutive nights, otherwise they die. Blood meals, though, are usually feasts, and more than any individual bat needs at one time. They are shared between vampires in an arrangement wherein score is kept--who owes what to whom.

Priest and scientist, Pierre Tielhard de Chardin would have had a different view of altruism, and his position on reflective thought sets him apart from modern sociobiologists. He maintained that reflection is what distinguishes man from other species. He argued that a discontinuity exists between man and the other creatures. As I say in the article on him, "If he is right, then sociobiologists are wrong." (See Tielhard de Chardin, 21 March 2004.)

Apart from de Chardin's theories, an issue remains. Clearly, we cannot, must not, confine ourselves to a moral view circumscribed by genetics. That served for tribes, but will not do so for the future of humankind. Survival-of-the-fittest has become part of economic theory, with corporations vying to become top dog, only taking care of their own, else go under. Nations are manipulated by them while Islamic fundamentalists see a new kind of threat, dollar imperialism, and retaliate with terrorism. (Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal and Pervez Musharaff's hold on power does not inspire confidence.) In the meantime, the planet gets warmer, the rivers dirtier, and the skies greyer.

Is the brain hard-wired, as many sociobiologists contend? If so, we are doomed. But I don't think it is. I hold that our minds are conditioned by our beliefs.** We are our meanings. Evil can only prevail if good people do nothing.

Beyond Memes

Beyond Memes

Memes and genes have much in common. Both are selfish in that each "wants" itself replicated.

As memes develop in human culture, itself a product of mind, they carry only information, which requires consciousness to convey them for further replication. In themselves, memes are part of a blind force.

As with genes, successful memes beat the competition. They get copied. In a day we meet countless numbers of them, words on a Wheaties box, songs on the car radio, news on television. Remembering maybe less than five percent of a day's experiences, we see or hear Tony Blair, George Bush, John Kerry, Martha Stewart, Big Bird, Mickey Mouse, Teletubbies, Jay Leno, Fords, Chevies, Jaguars, Toyotas, Oscar Mayer weiners, Heinz Catsup, Starbucks Coffee, Bach fugues, Beethoven sonatas, Justin Timberlake, Janet Jackson, Dixie Chicks, McDonalds, email messages, newspaper captions, street posters, the family dog.

Consciously or subconsciously, those that get remembered have a chance for survival. Others eventually die, their only hope dwindling as fewer and fewer leap from human brain to human brain.

Poets once wrote of the good, the true, and the beautiful as that which is worthy of survival. Although it can be, this is not necessarily the case with memes. Think of them as viruses.

Viruses, either biological or computer, seek a host. Memes, then, can be a kind of parasite in that they "piggy back" until one brain passes them on to another.

Sometimes they survive best in groups of memes.

Richard Dawkins uses Roman Catholicism as an example of meme groups. By this group, the religion grows. Memes are church teachings, including the catechism and prayer. During mass one sings hymns. Worshippers feel nearer to God as they walk into a catheral with high, vaulted ceilings, the organ music resonating off stained glass windows. These become part of memetic gospel, to have many children so that the faith can be passed on generation to generation. Of course, the pinnacle meme is the promise of everlasting life or its counterpart, fear of eternal damnation. Attendant upon this group is faith in Church dogma and doctrine. God's invisibility is also part of the meme group. Observing people, He notices their deeds and numbers their days. This meme group has been remarkably successful, surviving and prospering for hundreds of years.

Memes arise in the mind without invitation. They come and go. A tune may haunt somebody for days, its lyrics or melody returning each morning until it wears away and something replaces it. Often planted by society, culture, or religion, they shape entire peoples and dominate lives. They offer no escape from themselves and whole populations become their willing servants.

Such a meme in the United States is individualism. It evolved out of American history and the struggle to tame the land. Settlers, pioneers, and immigrants of all kinds found themselves in the wilderness without societal resources and dependent only on their own grit. Neighbors lived on the other side of the mountain, in the next valley, down river. When a Nebraska sod farmer saw chimney smoke on the horizon he might pack up his family and move further west because he disliked civilization's encroachment. (Also see Mother Cultures: Individualist and Collectivist, 19 January 2004 at a companion site.)

Today in the United States, people remain steeped in the myth of individualism, a kind of tough self-responsibility, to the neglect of the ties that bind. Unlike Europeans, Americans think less of their mutal interdependence and more of their own responsibility to make it in the world. This has fostered great respect for the self-made, the billionaires who command corporate empires, but it has blinded them to their need for one another, thereby affecting social institutions.

As for memes, they continue to arise as unbidden viruses, our minds hosting them. They are welcome guests for minds, although some people know them for their true nature. Memes reveal to us that, for the most part, we don't think. Instead, we are thought. We have no understanding unless we recognize memes for what they are.

To do this, consciousness must empty itself. Meditation allows one approach; another depends on dwelling upstream from where memes enter. The first, is done by sitting, say, in Buddhist Zazen; the second, by turning the "flashlight" of consciousness on thoughts. Either approach requires months, or years, perhaps decades, of application. Eventually, the investigator may discover that mind itself is the meme of memes, the matrix that sustains them, and is as illusory as they are.

Meme theorists such as Dawkins and Dennett will continue to manufacture memes disguised as theories about mind, and well they should, for their reasoning has promoted new ways to think about mind. But unless they steadfastly apply themselves to methods known in the East for centuries, they will never really know whereof they speak. Given the tenor of their thought, they might regard "beyond memes" as naive intuition, unsupportable by sophisticated inquiry, but they have achieved no breakthroughs in consciousness study. Instead they ingeniously marshal evidence in new ways. Only investigation into the "beyond meme" concept would allow understanding, not labels. Intellectual work on consciousness is absolutely necessary but much of it misses the point because thinkers and researchers think about it rather than direct attention to experiencing it. Let them get away on a Zen retreat, or put them somewhere in solitude for extended periods, and always with their resolve to pay attention to what happens.

(Also see Enlightenment Gene, 3 March, Memes and Why Evolution Favored The Irrational Brain 26 February, Memes, Genes, and God, 31 December.) Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of The Leisure Class wrote about memes without having a name for them. Read him on Dogs as a meme 27 May 2004.

Memes and Why Evolution Favored The Irrational Brain

Memes and Religion

To what do we owe the persistence of religion in human affairs? Some people have called it wholly irrational and have said that the sooner the species evolves into rationality, the better. They attribute the troubles of humankind to religious fanatics and enthusiasts. During the Crusades of the Middle Ages, Arabs fought in the name of Allah to rid the world of the Infidel Christians. Europeans fought in the name of Christ to rid the world of the Infidel Muslims. (Also see Gott Mit Uns: Zen at War, 5 February.)

Is religion a meme whose time has come and gone? Or whose time should never have come at all? First, though, what is a meme?

Originally proposed in biologist Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, 1976, memes can be defined as any self-referential belief system with inherent instructions for its own propagation. As Dawkins explained, they can be "tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. . . . . "

Memes are analogues for genes, which is to say they are analogues for natural selection, the two reinforcing one another or coming into competition. Celibacy is a meme but as a gene has no biological survival value, although culturally it may have such value. Priests or nuns transmit the meme to young boys or girls who are trying to make a life choice. Suppose the celibacy meme made better priests and nuns because they are not distracted by family duties. If this supposition is true, then celibacy does have better cultural survival value. On the other hand, a gene for celibacy almost by definition would not produce celibate offspring. Rather, no offspring would ensue from it.

Okay, now to the questions, (1) To what do we owe the persistence of religion in human affairs? and (2) Has its time come and gone?

In my 31 December article, Memes, Genes, and God, I have this to say: "Dawkins and other meme theorists regard religious memes as dangerous to human futurity. The idea of God is a particularly strong meme, and has persisted from before recorded history until the present day. It has extremely high survival value. According to Dawkins, its survival results from its psychological appeal. He says that it 'provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. . . . God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or ineffective power, in the environment provided by human culture.' " (See A Footnote below.) *

Geneticist Mark Ridley places religious memes in a differerent perspective. To do so, he asks, Why aren't we more rational? He proposes a thought experiment involving evolution. Suppose that in the course of evolution the population consisted of two brain variations:  Rationalists, and Irrationalists. Rationalists did everything according to reason; Irrationalists often followed impulse and emotion. Rationalists weren't superstitious; the Irrationalists were.

Since reason is more efficient than irrationality, natural selection should favor the rationalist brain variation. The Irrationalists can dream of people flying through air. They can believe that they see one another across great distances, They can be astounded by seemingly miraculous cures to diseases. The rationalist types can eventually devise means for airborne transportation, distance-looking, and disease cures.

If that is the case, how come the mass of humanity is descended from the Irrationalists?

Take another look at the Infidel Arabs and the Infidel Christians. They went sword to sword for a piece of real estate, say, Jerusalem, because it had meaning for them. On the other hand, Rationalists would have regarded it only for the resources it offered, and thereby avoided conflict over such an arid piece of dirt. They would not take irrational risks while their counterparts would.

Humans need to filter life into meaning. As William James observed long ago in The Will To Believe, nobody can take a neutral position on anything. Even neutrality implies a belief.

We will not be stirred into grand action without a belief in meaning. It is this trait that had survival value for the human species. Dawkins applauds science as a valuable meme, while regarding religion as a dangerous one. Science, though, belongs to rationalism, and consider how the brain type would have fared in evolution against the Irrationalists.

( Elsewhere in this blog, I have discussed spirituality without religion as a means to rid the world of dangerous, foolish, dogma and doctrine, but if given a choice I would rather see a world with religion than one wholly devoid of spirituality.)

* A Footnote:

From memes to genes. Dawkins would have no problem if I said that individual organisms, "selfish" or not, reveal a compulsion to perpetuate their genes and that this compulsion is a dynamic of biological regularities not apparent in an isolated system. The dynamic cannot be described in terms of DNA biochemistry. In fact, no definitive explanation can be found in any isolated system. Yet we observe among organisms the selfish gene, as Dawkins calls it.

Would he have a problem if I replace "a compulsion to perpetuate their genes" with a phrase about a compulsion to seek God? The only difference between accepting one statement and rejecting the other is not logic but mind set.

This implies that the "God meme" has a basis not in superstition, but in an intuitive, innate human recognition, a recognition that mimetics derive from the source of all memes. To determine that, of course, Dawkins and others must learn attitudes, mental skills and concentration currently unknown to them; they must stop theorizing and immerse themselves in an initially alien perspective in order to experience directly whether the "God meme" is superstition or not. (To understand this, see my comments on experiential expertise in Francisco Varela and the Emergent Self, 6 January. The paragraph begins with this sentence: "Western cognition science, according to Varela, doesn't know enough about experience.")

Finally, this: ". . . I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking simply as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind. . ." Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond

Memes, Genes, and God

Memes, Genes, and God

Originally proposed in Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, 1976, memes can be defined as any self-referential belief system with inherent instructions for its own propagation. As Dawkins explained, they can be "tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. . . . . As [Dawkins'] colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up . . . 'Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically'."

Memes are analogues for genes, which is to say they are analogues for natural selection. The two may reinforce one another or come into competition. Celibacy is a meme but as a gene has no biological survival value, although culturally it may have such value. Priests or nuns transmit the meme to young boys or girls who are trying to make a life choice. Suppose the celibacy meme made better priests and nuns because they are not distracted by family duties. If this supposition is true, then celibacy does have better cultural survival value. On the other hand, a gene for celibacy almost by definition would not produce celibate offspring. Rather, no offspring would ensue from it.

Like genes, memes rest on one fundamental principle. All life evolves by varying survival abilities of replicating entities.

When we die we leave behind memes and genes. Of the two, our genes will be forgotten in three generations. Our child, maybe our grandchild, can bear a resemblance to us in face or musical talent, but our characteristics soon become negligible in succeeding generations. If we have memes such as Shakespeare's we become part of deathless literature. The same can be said for Einstein, Socrates, or Leonardo da Vinci.

Dawkins and other meme theorists regard religious memes as dangerous to human futurity. The idea of God is a particularly strong meme, and has persisted from before recorded history until the present day. It has extremely high survival value. According to Dawkins, its survival results from its psychological appeal. He says that it "provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. . . . God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or ineffective power, in the environment provided by human culture."

Here, Dawkins is bent by his Western understanding. Some, as in Christianity and Islam, claim to have the one true meme. It and it alone must be propagated at the risk of damnation by God. He doesn't understand that Buddhist memes make no claim to exclusivity and Hindu memes espouse tolerance.

When Dawkins says religious memes provide "a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence," he reveals a rather rudimentary understanding. Superficially plausible? Without Dawkins' intensive study, meditation, and effort, Buddha's teachings would not be immediately accessible to him because Buddha speaks of the quality of various experiences. Science tends to ignore the qualities of experiences and assumes all experience to be the same for its purposes. Once studied, pondered, and filtered through life experiences, the implications of Buddha's teachings open an entirely new way of seeing, one which reveals the flaws in conventional world views, particularly those which assume all experience is equal and only objective observation is necessary. Those views are superficial. (See the discussion of experience quality in Cartesian anxiety: Francisco Varela, 6 January.)

Dawkins would attach little or no credence to people such as Nisargadatta, Ramana Maharshi, or medieval Germans, Meister Eckhart or Jacob Boem as they all spoke about what might be called the "God meme." The single interesting facet of their contribution has much to do with all memes, however.

Each of them, Nisargadatta, Maharshi, Eckhart, and Boem, said that human beings can reach a point when mimesis is realized as empty phenomena. That is, they observed that the mind replicates as its natural function, but that this replication can be seen through.

This implies that the "God meme" has a basis not in superstition, but in an intuitive, innate human recognition, a recognition that mimetics derives from the source of all memes. To determine that, of course, Dawkins and others must learn attitudes, mental skills and concentration currently unknown to them; they must stop theorizing and immerse themselves in an initially alien perspective in order to experience directly whether the "God meme" is superstition or not.

From memes to genes. Dawkins would have no problem if I said that individual organisms, "selfish" or not, reveal a compulsion to perpetuate their genes and that this compulsion is a dynamic of biological regularities not apparent in an isolated system. The dynamic cannot be described in terms of DNA biochemistry. In fact, no definitive explanation can be found in any isolated system. Yet we observe among organisms the selfish gene, as Dawkins calls it.

Would he have a problem if I replace "a compulsion to perpetuate their genes" with a phrase about a compulsion to seek God? The only difference between accepting one statement and rejecting the other is not logic but mind set.*
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* ". . . I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking simply as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind. . ." Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond

Meme theory is not a science, nor at present has much chance of becoming one, although it does provoke stimulating and lively discussion.