SUNDAY, 13 OCTOBER 2024

I have problems understanding memes. I have no problem if ‘meme’ is just a fancy, sciency-sounding way of saying ‘idea’: then it’s fashionable, but superfluous, jargon. On the rare occasions when attempts are made to tie down the definition of a meme, though, they seem to run all the way from its being little more than a cultural unit that spreads through cultural processes to something that is a ‘real’ entity operating physically within a material universe. Certainly people like Dawkins or Dennett at times seem to understand the term, and want it to be understood, in this more ambitious way, which is logically consistent with their underlying metaphysics of physicalism, but which seems to me to create a different set of logical difficulties.

In my own attempt at a working definition, memes are cultural ideas that spread from one brain to another through a kind of viral process, but this process is more than merely a metaphor and operates in some unknown way at the level of the material. Physical viruses, however, transmit physically. There is a point of contact at which a material object – a virus – enters another material object – the nose or mouth or broken skin of a human being. I struggle to understand how this is possible of an idea, which has no physical reality. I recognise that there are mediums of transmission – sound waves in the case of speech or markings of black ink on white paper in the case of writing – but how can non-material ideas somehow leave body A and travel on one of these magic carpets to enter body B?

It might be argued (although I am sceptical) that every idea has a physical correlate in the brain – neural or electrical or chemical activity, or a mixture of these – which in some way builds that idea from matter, but this still does not explain how this physical correlate could continue to exist once outside the brain nor how it could be transported though space. In Dawkins’ view, everything is ultimately matter. Mind is perhaps an epiphenomenon which evolved because it helps genes to replicate, but it cannot exist outside of a material environment (i.e. a brain and body). This is presumably the reason, for example, why Dawkins believes that telepathy is an impossibility. So how can a meme suddenly become paranormal and break these rules?

One possible argument is that, due to natural selection over the course of millennia, creatures of the same species developed a propensity to respond to signals from each other in the way that a peahen, for instance, responds to the display of a peacock without the need for any direct tactile contact to happen between them, but through sight or sound alone. This communication might then be explained as a kind of semiotic messaging similar to that which takes place in the bee dance, and exchanging information through language could be argued to be simply an immensely more sophisticated version of this semiotic signalling. A huge leap, perhaps, but we are told that a few cells which were slightly more sensitive to light eventually evolved into the eye, and that given the millions of years in which natural selection has to work, this is possible. One problem with this idea in the case of human language, though, is that it did not evolve over untold millions of years. In evolutionary terms, it’s a recent phenomenon. And, if I understand him correctly, Dawkins is not a fan of punctuated equilibrium.

A better explanation may lie in the human ability for mimesis. If I watch you do something and then copy what you do, I don’t need any abstract or cultural concepts in my mind: I just need to repeat what I have seen you do, something which children in particular are very good at. Then I have ‘learned’ the new behaviour without any need for an intellectual exchange of ideas. This may certainly help to explain the ‘softer’ version of memetics, where it is essentially a form of mimicry, as in the case of a slogan or a snatch of song going viral. More complex cases of exchange of ideas through mimesis could be aided by simple signals like pointing at an object, although the receiver must understand, of course, that the signal refers to the object in the distance and not the pointing finger: something which I read that chimps in captivity can do but, interestingly, not those in the wild. We also know that mimesis occurs in several other species of mammals and birds. I remain unsure, though, that it satisfactorily explains ‘harder’ versions of memetics, since there is a huge difference between pointing to where a deer is hiding in the trees and using language to explain, for instance, quantum entanglement, and we have to make the assumption that such a leap is possible, again in a relatively short period of evolutionary time.

I mention quantum entanglement for a reason. (I choose the word ‘mention’ quite deliberately here since I don’t want to pretend that I have any real understanding of what it is.) As someone way out of his depth, I merely want to tentatively suggest that this phenomenon might be helpful in explaining the transmission of memes. If particles can communicate across vast expanses of space with no possibility for physical interaction of any kind between them, why couldn’t this happen at a more local level between two minds? However, once this is accepted as a possibility, Dawkins would need to also accept the possibility of lots of other phenomena which he considers impossible, telepathy being an obvious example.

My essential problem is not with the meme as such but with the combination of the concept of the meme with a metaphysics of physicalism. If we accept dualism – matter and mind as two distinct substances which co-exist in some inexplicable way – or a monism which declares that the ultimate reality is mind and matter is a substance somehow created by mind, there is no problem accepting the reality of memes. Physicalism, however, needs to explain the transfer of immaterial ideas from mind to mind. The fact that it clearly happens all the time makes us take it for granted, as if it needs no explanation, and I feel physicalists take advantage of this familiarity to camouflage assumptions that they do not want examined and questioned. But in my opinion that doesn’t make the questions disappear.

This all reminds me of the physicalist response to another phenomenon that calls materialism into question: the placebo effect. Physicalists cannot deny this exists since it clearly does, so they accept that it is real without feeling any necessity to explain how it can take place in a purely material universe, how something that has no material reality – the mind – can influence matter – the brain and body. Tellingly, although physicalists usually avoid the word ‘mind’ whenever possible, preferring to use ‘brain’, when the placebo effect is described, it is almost always theorised as a way that the mind, not the brain, influences the body. It is a belief  that does the trick – my belief that the person in a white coat is a doctor and therefore I will benefit from the medicine given to me – but how can a belief affect the physical organism, since a belief must surely be immaterial and not in any way ‘real’ (and said belief can also be mistaken and therefore not correspond with reality)? Does the placebo effect happen in and through the brain, as generally supposed? But what then is the link between an immaterial mind and the brain with its chemical and electrical activity? But if we remove mind from the equation, where is a belief situated? It seems to me that much is being assumed here rather than explained or explored.

To trained scientists and philosophers, I am probably coming across as very naive, asking a basic question – how can immaterial things exist in a universe which is solely material – which they feel does not need to be asked because it is so obvious and commonsense that they do. But either these things which seem immaterial must be in some way ultimately material, or the physicalist edifice has problems it needs to address. I can’t shake off the feeling that Dawkins and Dennett want to have their cake and eat it when they reduce mind to a substrate of matter and argue for a universe which is strictly material while using words and concepts that their overarching theory rejects as impossible. I accept that an entity of a different quality can emerge from a base belonging to another category – for example, mathematics emerging from the separation of physical objects into discrete entities, or culture more generally emerging from the material reality of human bodies and brains – but why do we accept this so readily, as if it needs no explanation? Common sense and our daily experience are the reasons, perhaps, but elsewhere science has so often proved that common sense and daily experience can lead to misguided assumptions (the sun going round the earth being an obvious one), so why not here?

In short, as a concept utilised to describe the transmission of cultural entities, I think the meme is an extremely useful piece of shorthand, especially in the fields of the social sciences. But once it becomes more than a metaphorical tool, I have doubts about its utility and difficulties understanding how it is even possible once it is combined with a physicalist metaphysics.