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. 

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.