Why the meme?
Or: Weapon of choice — Walk without rhythm…
The Dawkinsian meme (not to be confused with the Internet meme which is its namesake) is a (pre)theoretic, metaphorical cultural-conceptual and cognitive equivalent of the replicator in gene theory, and of a signal and message in Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication (TMTC).
TMTC is an applied scientific, statistical theory has had immense influence on the whole of human civilisation. There is one important difference between signal-message couplings in TMTC and the meme. The meme is about the meaning of the message — its conceptual and semantic contents — more than the syntax and symbols of the message (Blackmore, 1998, 2006; Sterelny et al., 2017).
Shannon’s TMTC is not only the technical basis of every digital communications network in existence (from the Internet to cellular networks), but heavily influenced the theories of Lévi-Strauss, Wolfgang Iser, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky, and most other serious theorists in fields from social anthropology to literary theory — not to mention all of the hard and special sciences from physics to biology — from 1948 onwards(Lesne, 2014; McMillan & Slepian, 1962; C. E. Shannon, 1948).
Want to know — essentially and basically — what TMTC says (leaving out the statistics)?
Sure, here you go:
1.
2. The messages — encoded into the signals using transducers that convert one energy form to another — go through the Channel. (Think smartphones, people conversing, tin cans with strings between them, and the entire Internet.)
Easy, right?
Pretty familiar — right?
Lots of theories in social psychology, social anthropology, cultural anthropology, and across the humanities have been influenced by TMTC. This is only natural, since the explanatory and technical power of TMTC is undeniable. It is the applied-scientific theory par excellence when it comes to all things communication, signaling, and messaging.
On one hand, Shannon himself disliked and openly criticised many of these attempts to apply his rigorous statistical theory — built for the very specific purpose of optimising the sending of messages through transmission channels by minimising time and energy per message and symbol — to the more conceptually amorphous, less mathematically rigorous disciplines in the humanities and social science (C. Shannon, 1956). For one thing, as non-philosopher Shannon himself was astute enough to notice: signals and their semantic content or meaning are not the same thing, and TMTC does not explain, nor analyse, the meaning — or what Shannon’s predecessor R.V.L Hartley called the psychological content — of the messages. (Philosophers talk about semantic content.)
On the other hand: theorists in the humanities and social sciences are often clever, somewhat scientistic people, and the significance of Shannon’s theory to their pursuits was not lost on them. They thus sought to incorporate important elements of TMTC into their theorising at higher levels of abstraction: without paying much attention to the statistical minutiae of the theory.
There’s a good chance that semantic content latches onto signals and messages in intrinsic ways anyway, although this is a matter of live debate and investigation in the philosophy of information and information theory.
So the use of TMTC for other applications outside computer science and hardware signal-communication is not as misguided as Shannon thought in all cases (although it has been in some cases.) After all — the principles of the model of the theory (given by the above diagram) are very useful, and those principles are grounded by Shannon’s rigorous, applied-scientific results. The model does provide a reliable basis for theorising as long as the theorist understands the limits, premises, and principles of the model in relation to their field and goals.
Dawkins’ Meme Theory
Like the viruses that they’re a metaphor for, memetic cultural concepts and narratives are strange things. They change, adapt, merge, and metamorphose constantly whilst keeping certain ‘genetic’ core codes.
A lot of cultural theory deploys the memetic (pre)theory of Richard Dawkins — and why not? It’s fit for purpose (Crawshaw, 2018; Gers, 2008; Heylighen & Chielens, 2008; Johnson, 2007; Lynch, 2020; Marsden, 1998; Miles, 2014; Miller, 2000; Rodríguez-Ferrándiz et al., 2021; Smith & Hemsley, 2022; Strand, 2005; Tittenbrun, 2018). You can go with contemporary psychological narratology if you like. It’s partly a case of one’s weapon of choice. However, it is also the case that memetic theory gives us tools that psychological narratology and other theories don’t (Aunger, 2012; Sperber, 2012).
Narratology in social anthropology and literary theory originated before Dawkins’ meme theory with the theories of Todorov, Claude Lévi-Strauss and other, earlier theorists working on the structure, transmission, and evolution of myths and cultural texts (Herman, 2009). So did the ideas of transmissible cultural units in anthropological diffusionism (Castelfranchi, 2001; Gatherer, 1998a; Koval et al., 2023; O’Brien & Shennan, 2010; O’Mahoney, 2007; Shifman & Thelwall, 2009; Spitzberg, 2021; Treen et al., 2020).
However, even Claude Lévi-Strauss’ information-theoretically influenced six actants (subject, object, sender, receiver, helper, and opponent) do not really do the work of the Dawkinsian meme. The six actants are about the elements of the narrative transmission systems, and are influenced by Shannon’s TMTC (see the above diagram). Dawkins’ memetic theory is about the semantic signal-borne messages that get transmitted and their ability to influence cognitive contents — both epistemic and doxastic.
Narratology doesn’t really have what it takes to handle the modelling of the transmission of ‘viral’ cultural concepts (it only has some of what is required) and ironically — it has more of a basis in the humanities than it does in the sciences, whereas memetic theory draws mostly on information theory (with the caveat that the analysis of meaning must be based upon the psychological sciences and neuroscience.)
Cultural concepts and narratives multiply, wax, wane, move, evolve, and change. Political, religious, scientific, and ideological narratives operate the same way. Moreover, all these kinds of memetic, socio-culturally transmissible concepts and narratives — classified according to the kind of semantic content that they have — interact and merge with each other to varying degrees. There are concepts about the concepts, and narratives about the narratives (metanarratives), and these too combine and interact (in terms of concepts and meanings) at different levels of detail and abstraction.
These ideas are nothing new. Francois Lyotard’s concept of a metanarrative — denoting an overarching ‘control’ narrative for other cultural narratives — has been around for a while, and it is a survivable and serviceable theoretic construct and concept. Moreover, it is itself a survivable semantic-informational and conceptual meme: a coherent, transmissible conceptual unit useful for understanding and expressing the way that narratives are constituted and how they influence each other and the beliefs and behaviour of doxastic and epistemic agents (humans — in this case.)
In information-theoretic and psychological scientific technical terms I have suggested one definition for social and cultural narratives. They are a set of messages with semantic content that picks out — or is determined by and grounded in — a set of information sources of various types (Long, B. Information and Scientific Metaphysics, Forthcoming). As such they can be reduced to selected information in the set of information sources in question. That set of sources will be finite for all practical purposes.
Science — including the molecular bioscience of Richard Dawkins and the psychological science in which I am primarily interested — tends to cast a mean critical eye upon theories that are not based upon rigorous experimentation and evidence, and that are instead based upon metaphors. (Not that metaphors are not widely used in scientific theorising!) (Fomin, 2019; Fracchia & Lewontin, 1999, 2005; Gatherer, 1998b; Hampe, 2017; Hintikka, 1994; Kroon, 2011; Machamer, 2000). That’s certainly the view that Shannon had of the deployment of TMTC for other means such as the social sciences and literature (although this did not stop Wolfgang Iser from using it to develop his concepts of repertoire and reader reception, which were revolutionary in literary theory.) So it is only fair that memetic theory — really only a largely metaphorical pre-theory in Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene — gets the same treatment.
However — some pretheories of the meme-theory kind are built to survive this kind of meaningful and necessary critical appraisal more than others. I suggest that the more they are grounded in hard scientific principles the more survivable they are themselves as scientifically coherent ‘memetic replicators’. Dawkinsian memetic theory is not just a metaphorical pretheory that maps to concepts of the genetic replicator. It is also a theory which sticks close to the precepts of TMTC, and this matters to its coherence, utility, and survivability.
So as a philosopher of information and a philosopher of psychology I am here to tell you that memetic theory has high survivability (Chesterman, 2021; Vada, 2015).
One of the reasons that this is not always apparent is that the concept of information itself, and people’s understandings and definitions of the nature of information (including the degree to which they think it is a natural thing that objectively exists apart from cognitive and perceptual agents at all) varies a great deal from person to person and discipline to discipline. Yet there is good reason to endorse a physicalist and somewhat reductionist conception of the nature of both information and semantic information that retain the principles of TMTC and can have measurement applied to them according to that theory.
Moreover, there is good reason to consider that other applied mathematical and applied scientific theories like Andre Kolmogorov’s complexity theory can be fruitfully applied to such naturalistic conceptions of information, which conceptions often endorse such unusual theses as the oft-maligned idea proposed by computer scientists Rolf Landauer that information and its representation are necessarily physical, or at least require physico-logical substrates of a certain kind.
With respect to the philosophy of psychology, cognitive science, and psychological science — and especially cognitive psychology and neuropsychology: the challenges for the application and adoption of naturalistic memetic theory map to challenges presented by theories of representation, and challenges for understanding how semantic memory, mental imagery, executive function, and various associated information-processing aspects of perception and cognition operate (Grundlingh, 2018; McGlone et al., 2014; Nanay, 2012, 2018; Pütz et al., 2006; Schoeller & Perlovsky, 2016). Yet there is no good reason in-principle to reject the idea that narratives comprised of messages — and individual concepts considered as messages — cannot move between cognitive agents in group epistemic updating and individual communication very much as types — and even natural kinds — of memetic replicators.
References
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