From science: (paraphrased) "If they are parasitical, show us the organisms. If they are viral, show us the viruses! The nature of science demands material presences that we can test before we can accredit this hypothesis." True enough, but aren't scientists those folks who design experiments according to the expected nature of whatever is about to get tested, and not those presumptuous folks who make loud their opinions whether or not any facts support or resist them?

The religious: they simply felt threatened and accused, plunged under cover, and came up to counter the threat with such with lame concepts as, "Atheists have memes, too, so why are they picking on us?"

Well, duh!

Well, at least the people with much vaunted tendencies to believe in the unobservable and imperceptible by taking other people's word for things did not demand detectable material presences before they could accept the idea.

And, in this case at least, they are right to do so. Why?

Well, look, if you had read Reality 101, you would have some ideas about reality and our perceptions of it that delved beyond the simplistic norm to ferret out reasons for why we get all the different descriptions we hear or read about that subject. The simplistic notions that "…either something is real or it is not;" "…what is real depends on our preferred illusions about it;" "…the reason you cannot experience it is because of your lack of faith;" or, "…nothing is real until it has been presented as a testable theory," only scan the surface of the bubble that surrounds reality without ever allowing a peek inside. Because the sleek surface is not regular or even, we won't all get the same view, but its surface is so shiny we never realize that what we are seeing is not what we are looking toward, but a distorted view of what has already been put behind us.

Our past is what we see; our experiences and adopted knowledge and creeds, and the stuff we were handed in our formative years. We never see what we are looking toward, unless somehow we discover it is there, and the illusions are what is behind us.

]Drum roll!

Here comes! Here Come the Memes! TaDa!  So, when we come upon a new concept, a hypothesis, a bit of imaginative speculation, our first step upon exposure to it is to assess it according to what we see reflecting at us from our reality bubble. Trained skeptics, such as scientists, want to put it under a microscope, but they can't find it in their carefully constructed, materially correct, doctrine-purged picture. Trained believers, the most of us, looked, failed to see anything unreal, and worried about it and wondered if it should be prayed about. Very few worried about bursting their bubbles. Very few looked past the smoke and mirrors that inform them about life, to see what memes might really be like.

Reality mainly consists of what we value and our perceptions regarding that. Much of what we value does access our physical presence only according to how we understand the way things should be: A dollar should be able to buy so much, but a dollar is only a piece of paper whose value we have accredited as a society and agreed upon. A certain amount of time should pass while we work, exercise, or drive between two measured locations on a highway without making ourselves liable to get a ticket; but time is only a concept whose entire nature works according to the way we value it and agreed to tick off the increments of its worth. We value our friends according to their worth to us, even though we may argue against such a notion, and we love some human beings more than others, so much so that we may marry a few of them one at a time. Love has no presence, no increments to describe it, but we recognize it from its effects upon ourselves and upon others we can observe. We recognize it when we are in its presence, and we come to common agreement that, yes, that is love we are looking at in action.

Where is the physical presence of a dollar? Ah, yes, maybe the piece of paper, but tell us this: Why does the value change over time while the increments remain the same? Why can't I buy four loaves of bread for my dollar (or five of the cheap kind) like my dad did when I was a child? The value is what changes, and the value is all that makes that dollar important and, in spite of our money-mongering reputations, it appears that Americans value that dollar less now than they once did; and, that other Americans look at that dollar and recognize, "Yes, that is all a dollar is worth."

Well, then, where is the physical presence of time? I would like to buy some. I am growing old and one day too soon mine will run out. If time has a physical nature, why don't scientists show us that so we can know what we're dealing with and can test it? Time is such a rare commodity that we have increased its value, and demand more and more dollars for allotting large portions of our lives to servicing the demands of employers and clients, and find that others agree with that or else refuse to pay us.

Failing to demonstrate a physical presence for time, perhaps we can find one for love. We are too well aware that others want to test it, and few of them are scientists. Love is often described as an emotion, but we cannot arrive at a consensus about that because emotions also lack a physical presence and must, like love, be recognized according to their effects, and so can only be indirectly examined. Emotions are quite a lot like memes.

Memes have been described as a special kind of idea. Like money, time and love, ideas are also valued and recognized by their effects. A "bad" idea is one that fails to work or gets somebody into trouble. A "good" idea is one people like; it works, it improves something when it works, and it may be applied sometimes to the prevention or correction of trouble. Those are the effects, none of which originated from anything with a distinctive physical presence. It is only the effects that we value or devalue, and only by their effects do we recognize many aspects of reality.

We can recognize memes as different from common ideas by the fact that they get copied, and so we grant a special classification to copyable ideas, and name that classification 'memes'. The act of copying spreads memes, and is all that is required to differentiate memes from other kinds of ideas. Ideas that get copied with no particular effort by their originators are called 'viral'. Ideas that get copied in spite of their harmful effects are called 'parasitical'. Groups of ideas that work together for a common purpose, and get spread in that way are called 'memeplexes'. People who adopt memes are called their 'hosts' and they are described as 'resident' in their hosts. All of those are aspects of memes that can be observed, agreed upon, and rendered to data so that people can learn to predict their effects.

Because they can be considered "good" or "bad", memes are as amenable to valuation as any other kind of idea, and an important point of knowing about them is to warn ourselves that just because something is a bad idea doesn't mean it won't get copied and adopted by other human beings. (Consider how many people get involved as users of harmful drugs, mainly from copying the actions of other people). Rather than looking at memetics (the theory and study of memes) as a simple duplication of other schools of thought, we ought better to understand them as a handy tool that serves to educate and enlighten about the beneficial and harmful aspects of a wide variety of memeplexes and their effects not only on individual human beings, but upon the societies in which they are resident. Such tools that can bridge the gap between science and the common person's awareness of things are needed in our era of high technology, and ought to be heralded rather than disparaged or condemned, by the act of which scientists and their popularizers render both science and society a great disservice.

So, do we need to "believe in" memes in order to consider them a useful concept? No, we only need to observe and learn to recognize the different categories of them. Do memes really duplicate other ways of assessing societal issues? Not really, except for those whose vested interests conflict with adoption of this simpler aid to understanding, and who want to perpetuate science's mystique within the general population. For common folks like you and me, memetics offers a kind of shorthand that can play a great part in advancing our awareness of what is going on around us, and of those things happening in the halls of power that might play both for and against our own best interests.

[Memes and Gods]    [the Memes War]   [Memes BOOK]  [Memes Language]

Copyright ©2005 by Lloyd Harrison Whitling. All rights reserved.