A Side-Note on "Primitive" Life Forms

Here is a quick summary of how "primitive" bacteria replicate their DNA. It's quite obvious that this process didn't pop up "out of the blue". This is not a description of a "chemical reaction".

"Horizontal Gene Transfer" is also extremely important, especially in providing bacteria with a means to evolve by "borrowing" genes from other, unrelated organisms.

At this level of life on Earth, evolution is about gene transfer by any means possible. It is, in effect, a "wild west" scenario where genes struggle for survival with the survival of hosts (bacteria) being a side-effect. This is the scenario where Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" seems most applicable.  At the time he wrote this book (as a young student himself), the seemingly mathematical rules of evolution were very much "in the air". The facts are more complicated. As you would expect, "Selfish Gene" was accidentally right about some things but was justifiably torn to pieces as a contribution to Darwinian theories of evolution. Even so, it established Dawkins as a TV-authority (talking head) and helped sell lots more books*.

Where "vertical" gene transfer dominates (parent to child - especially sexual reproduction), evolution operates on the organism (gene package). This is the domain of "Darwinian" evolution and biological theory.

When biologists analyze a sample - say from the forest floor or a deep ocean core - to see what bacteria are active, they look for what genes are present and active in the mush. It is seldom practical or even relevant to pin down particular "species" of bacteria.

For my purposes, the "wild west" scenario is useful in four ways:

• It illustrates a situation where the "individual" can be characterized by the genes it carries, creating overlapping categories of organisms that share the same gene. This situation will appear again at the "top" - super-organism level.
• It illustrates the need to think about these "levels" differently and not get stuck by thinking of "life" only in terms of our own "level", where organisms and sexual reproduction apply. In the big picture, life of our form is greatly outweighed by the other levels (such as bacteria). Pound for pound, they are more "successful" than we are.
• By recognizing the complexity of even the simplest life form, we are reminded of the huge leap from proto-life to the simplest form of life. The leap from "organism" to "super-organism" is another one, characterized by a complete re-design of the underlying "programming" and many orders of magnitude in the representative power of the "programming language".
• The "individual" organism is important in only one of the three levels of "life" I discuss here. It is important to set aside our idea that "life" is about the "welfare" of individuals, such as the "survival of the fittest" or "reproductive success". Those ideas apply only if the "program" is implemented in gene packages that are passed from parent to child.

It should be noted that we are not descended from bacteria - they simply represent an alternative and very successful architecture to extend (more or less) their form into the future. They are no more "primitive" than we are. In fact, they have fare more of generations per century and more options for variation than we do. In that sense, we could expect bacteria to be more sophisticated than we are, not less. But as Stephen J. Gould pointed out, evolution works in both directions, including simplification. There is no particular evolutionary trend or "pressure" that favors complexity. For this reason, a philosophical argument that depends on "evolution" from single-celled animals to human beings is flawed. What I call "fairy dust". Bacteria are just different, not more "primitive", nor do they provide much of a clue as to how life began in the first place.

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* "Selfish Gene" introduced the idea of a "meme" to illustrate Dawkins' idea that evolution might apply to other entities besides genes. The idea was taken up by himself and others more seriously than it deserved (mainly to support the concept of religion as an infectious disease). It was eventually disowned by Dawkins himself as a kind of "thought experiment". Even so, "meme" has entered the common vocabulary, applying to things like "viral videos". As it happens, the idea of the "gene" has proven to be less rigorous than what was thought when "Selfish Gene" appeared. When put to the hard test of predicting and explaining the world, both ideas turn out to be a bit fuzzy.

This entire blog may be taken to be a rebuttal of the idea that human culture is the result of "meme" evolution. Dawkins was grasping for another example of a "replicator". Dennett, takes the idea to ridiculous lengths, talking about Darwinian "evolution" of words. What is missing in all of this is the insight that humans have evolved (including significant areas of the cortex) to act as components of a culture. That's the foundation of what's going on. Language is a detail. And not all evolution is "Darwinian".

The ideas presented in this blog don't explicitly depend on either memes or genes, but I use these terms to point in the general direction of something being transmitted. Memes, in particular, are almost useless to shed light on deep structure in language.

Whatever Happened to the Meme?

The idea of the meme was invented by Richard Dawkins and hammered into its most robust form by Daniel Dennett. It is an extended analogy that claims that human ideas are somehow like genes and have their own process of evolution independent of the evolution going on in their "hosts", the human race.

It's an attractive idea and it works well as a rhetorical device, especially the way that Dawkins and Dennett use it to attack religion as an infection of the brain. True believers in "memetics" claim that all of human thought is "infection" by memes - a strong claim that memetics is a fundamental explanation of mind. Memeticists claim that the brain is a "meme machine".

The problem comes when you try to apply memes outside of the examples trotted out by the "founders". Personally, I can't figure out what a "meme" is. The old words of ideas, doctrines, theories and especially paradigm seem perfectly serviceable and don't easily translate themselves into "meme talk".

It is worth noting that respected investigators of "mind", such as Hofstadter, bypass the idea of "meme" entirely in spite of being on cordial terms with the founders of the idea. For them, it's not just a wrong idea but one not worth mentioning. "It's not even wrong".

It looks like the basic "atom" of thought, especially linguistic thought (the inner voice), is the analogy, as worked out in "Surfaces and Essences". If we start with this idea, memes must be some kind of "extended analogy" or complex of analogies. However, our mental "analogy computers" process the tangle of analogies in language at lightening speed and mostly below our level of awareness. This doesn't line up well with the "meme" idea, where it seems to be assumed that people can be "talked out" of memes (disinfected) by conscious, logical argument.

In fact, analogy processing is buried in language itself and not the "memes" that have somehow "infected" our minds. If the infection is to be found at all, it is to be found in the language, not the brain. But the analogy of infection breaks down when we study language in general, not the cherry-picked poster children of memetics. For the most part, the analogies that underlie language are benign and somewhat inevitable, given the need to "boot strap" our language from almost zero. The example of "under-stand" comes to mind. How is standing under related to "understand". If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Maybe it's a "meme" but do we need the "meme" idea to make sense of it? Does it make sense to think of this analogy as "surviving" on its own according to some pseudo-Darwinian principles, rather than its roots in human experience? What does "memetics" add to our understanding?

Hofstadter's concept is that some analogies are better than others. They are the "essential" analogies, the ones that come closest to isomorphic mappings between one situation and another. This would seem to claim that is the truth or at least "usefulness", not "survival of the fittest" that makes some ideas prevail over others in the long term. I'd go further and claim that it is our hard-wired preference for symmetry that makes one idea seem better than another. This comes pretty close to common sense about the matter. Is memetics providing a meaningful challenge to common sense?

There is a human tendency to regard people who disagree with us as being "infected", insane and impervious to logic. We are the logical ones. They are ignoring the evidence. Especially when seen in its early forms (attack against religious thinking), memetics is simply a put-down of of stupid people who fail to appreciate the majestic logic and superior mind of Richard Dawkins. Dennett smoothed over the rough edges and gave us some real insight about where "memes" come from, such as the idea that no person needs to "have" an idea, such as the great idea of evolution. But in defending the meme, Dennett has basically moved beyond it. Dennett's memetics doesn't need memetics.

Is there anything we can understand using memetics that can't be understood without it? As it has been said of Freud: "What  is true isn't new and what is new isn't true".

Wrong theories provide special insight by providing us with a new perspective on the problem, like footholds as we climb the mountain, to be used for a moment then discarded.

The Domains of I, M and R

Quick and dirty definitions, to be clarified as we go along:

• R Refers to the "real world". Accepted wisdom is that we have no direct access to R.  It turns out that we actually do have quite a good access to the R domain - the M/R interface, also known as "Science". For the individual, the I domain is tiny compared to the vastness of both M and R. However, with effort and training, it is possible for the individual to open a tiny peephole into R - at least so far as to put to rest the notion that R does not exist at all - that it's all an illusion.
• M Refers to "meme space" or the entire set of ideas, actual and possible. For example, all of Science exists in M, existing uncomfortably with all religions, past present and future. It is everything we know or could know or think we know, possibly including all those things that may be conceivable by some alien intelligence or even "God". M happily accommodates all the wrong ideas and the opposite of every idea.
• I Refers to memes that can be called to working memory. These may be thought of as a subset of M but it's more fruitful to regard the I/M interface as closely analogous to the M/R interface. "Calling up" memes to working memory involves a meme translation. We say we "get" the idea if our translation from a meme m from M to I leaves m unchanged in some way. Or we could say that m will translate to an isomorphic version of m no matter who calls it to working memory. This is a kind of symmetry, which the theory is all about. 

I call the theory that links all this together IMR Symmetry or IMR for short. At bottom, IMR is an extended analogy, asking us to visualize three worlds and ask questions about the interfaces between them. Much of the work consists of cleaning up or ideas about what these three worlds consist of and how we imagine that they communicate.  Advanced warning: many of these ideas will seem counter intuitive unless you "do your homework" and check the references liberally referenced in the text.

• The idea of "self" and "consciousness" are disassembled and put back together into something very different from the common understanding of these ideas.
• The "modern" concept of the "mind" as being an epiphenomenon of something going on in the neurons of our brains is also tossed aside.
• Many of the big philosophical questions, such as "Idealism vs. Realism" are implicitly solved by a new picture of what the mind is and what reality is. This will annoy professional philosophers. Physicists have more to say about this issue, resulting from actually examining the world rather than just thinking about it.
• IMR brings aesthetics, art and science under the same umbrella. This rows against the current fashion of considering such things as fundamentally incompatible ways of experiencing the world. For example, we can find "truth" and "beauty" in all three worlds using very similar criteria.
• My view of the self and consciousness is deeply informed by Zen. By this I don't mean that Zen is "right" but only that Zen is free from many of the misconceptions and fuzzy language that underpins the way most of us talk about the issues under discussion here. Readers not familiar with Zen (or its cousin "mindfulness") may find it worthwhile to take a detour to "wake up" to what they are actually experiencing day to day (the I world).

In line with Frank Wylczek, I take symmetry to be the key to usefully describing the "machinery" in all three domains -- an important criterion for what "works" and what doesn't "work":

• In the I domain, symmetry saves a lot of work by allowing us to work with "chunks" of ideas that don't change when we make "irrelevant" transformations. For example, we have an idea of our house which is the same house from any angle and over a long period of time.
• In the M domain, symmetric ideas have special appeal. For example, we like ideas that apply everywhere and at all times, like Newton's laws of motion. This illustrates the fact that an idea (meme) may be a "good" one (persistent) if it is symmetric but not strictly "right" in that it doesn't always map perfectly to the corresponding phenomena in the R world. "Good" ideas tend to spawn fruitful analogies - that is, they retain many of their essential features when they undergo the "like" transformation.
• Wylczek goes to great lengths to point out that there is enormous real symmetry in the R domain ("real world). In fact, he proceeds by assuming this symmetry then going out to find out if experiments agree with what such symmetry concepts (M world) will predict. A Scientific theory is valid if and only if predictions of the theory is isomorphic with results conducted in the "Real" world.

Dennett helps to free ourselves from thinking that someone must "have" ideas (M domain). As Plato suspected, the world of ideals has a life and existence of its own. We can thank Wylczek for drawing a clear line from Pythagoras to the Standard Model of Physics, illustrating the persistent idea that the world of memes (especially mathematics) is somehow real. For example, the number 321,534,332 has definite real properties even if nobody has ever thought of that particular number.  

Many authors have concentrated on the concept of "working memory" or "attention" as a surrogate for what we call "consciousness". However, when we read about this idea, the impression is created that the contents of "working memory" are somehow conjured up from what is sitting around in the brain (or possibly on the "live" channel to the outside world - the sensations). Here, we take a somewhat more dynamic and open-ended view. For example, 321,534,332 can be conjured up in the brain of the reader as a "chunk" to be divided by two, squared or verified as non-prime. This illustrates that the "chunks" of working memory (consciousness) are constructed on the fly. The brain helps with this process by providing all kinds of tools (What Dennett would call installed subroutines) but it is not correct to say that the mind is entirely an "epiphenomenon" arising in a few billion neurons. If it is an epiphenomenon at all, it arises from M and R through to a process in the brain.

It is worthwhile to come up with a temporary vision of what the M domain looks like. It's vast. it includes:

• Every book ever written or could be written in any language past present or possible.
• Every word in every language, along with their definitions
• All of Science, including all possible Science and all incorrect theory
• All of Religion
• Every possible sensation
• Every possible inference from sensation or theory (the result of any possible experiment)

As the name suggests, I'm temporarily trusting M to be the world of "memes", but I will have a lot to say about memes. They are not created equal. In a way, they fight for survival. In the language of IMR Symmetry, what they "fight for" is the ability to survive through time and through translation (installation) in many different brains (I-worlds). This is a form of symmetry - a form underlies "evolution" in the M-domain, just as Dawkins suspected in 1979 when he coined the term. Hopefully, our discussion of the M-domain will prove to be a contribution to the field of memetics - an attempt to nail down the "meme" concept with some semblance of rigour. 

In Surfaces and Essences, Hofstadter and Sander make a heroic attempt to show the key role of analogy in structuring human thought - in other words, a key role in the structure of M. They show how analogy plays a fundamental role in human language but also more complex structures of ideas, such as Scientific Theory. Our commentary on M will always keep this insight in mind: "Surfaces" provides powerful insight into the kinds of transformation that memes (ideas) can undergo through the process of analogy. Sometimes when we say A is like B, we are saying that A and B are isomorphic - for all intents and purposes, the same thing. This is another way of saying that the analogy transformation from A to B is symmetric. Other analogies are not so "powerful", extracting only a few properties common to A and B. In fact, we can put A and B in the same "category bag" arbitrarily without them sharing any properties at all. "Surfaces" is well worth reading as a brave attempt to map M. Is there more to say about M? I would say, yes. "Surfaces" is about one kind of transformation we can make on a meme. We are left asking about where memes come from in the first place and whether there are other kinds of transformation - especially transformations that claim to be strong mapping to R or "ideas" that can pop up in working memory (I).

As a career systems analyst, I have been particularly interested in the problems we face when mapping "real world" problems into the M-domain of the computer. We need to build a "model" of the real world situation in order to "computerize" decisions that ultimately have effect in R. One key insight in the last 50 years of the discipline is that our models should be, as far as possible, isomorphic with the entities we think exist in R. Strictly speaking, we have a conceptual model m in M that is usually thought of as "being" real. We need a machine version m*of m that is as isomorphic as possible (symmetric) to m. To do this, our model has entities corresponding to "real" things like "persons", properties of persons and transactions between persons. In the early days of computing, our models consisted of thinly disguised pictures of machine operations like "decisions", "calculations" and free-floating "data" such as integers and text. Today, all this is summarized by the Universal Modeling Language (UML). UML itself is a giant meme, which, when installed in the brains of human analysts, allows them to construct conceptual models in M that can be isomorphically mapped to real models in physical machines operating in R. Such models can turn out to have real impact on real people and other objects in R, such as the ability to drive cars in the real world or land real robots on the real planet Mars.

As a computer geek, I think of I-domain as a "virtual machine" simulating in M in the R-world "hardware" of the brain. "Chunks" of M (memes) are called into working memory either directly out of the brain (buffer to M) or "calculated" by programs installed in the brain from M. We can think of the dynamic aspect of I (he flow of consciousness) as a continual calculation - producing on set of "chunks"after another at a rate of a few cycles per second  For those of us who inhabit the "google sphere", we are familiar with the fact that we can "think" about "chunks" that can be instantly called up from the entire universe of human knowledge. In a profound sense, we swim in a world of information that is not somehow encoded in our heads. What I "know" and what "we" know is becoming more and more difficult to sort out. In fact, my model has no place for what "I" know - only what "I" am able to bring to mind at any particular moment. "I" am a virtual machine running in R, simulating M. I don't think of M as static either. Millions of people are churning away in M to bring new ideas to the surface. As Dennett has shown, ideas can float to the surface and acquire a life of their own even if nobody "has" the idea. Ultimately, the "affordances" of R (what is possible) strongly effect what "bubbles up" in M, so ultimately R has a strong influence on what happens in M. In particular, the process of evolution is a result of R "thinking" or conducting a program of R&D without anyone "having" the ideas behind life itself - ideas we find in "M". I and M also have their "affordances". Wittgenstein said that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence (commenting on what can arise in the language domain - part of M). We know that the brain cannot deal with more than a limited number (less than 10) of "chunks" at any one time.

In subsequent postings, I will flesh out the ideas of the I, M and R domains along with the idea that we best understand the relationship between these worlds in terms of symmetry. The analogy is with the success that such projects have had in reconciling the part of M called "Science" with experiments that confirm that our "Scientific" ideas map very well to the real world. The flagship example of this mapping is the Standard Theory of Quantum Mechanics, which so far maps to the real world to a precision of 12 decimal places or more. The success of this model has come in large part from the concept that the most useful ideas ("laws" in M) are the ones that are symmetric in some sense because it turns out that reality itself (R) is governed by symmetric principles. I claim that the most useful "chunks" to hold in memory are those that are in some sense "symmetric" and that the most useful ideas in "M" also have this property.

Daniel Dennett: "From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds"

This talk introduces a recent book by Dennett, rehashing and updating his theories on the mind. I have the hard copy of the book on order. These comments refer to his summary of it delivered as part of the Google Talks series.

It is much to Dennett's credit that, as he goes along, his ideas become more precise and articulate. His examples are more apt, his analogies closer to the "essence". He never seems to say, "I was totally wrong about this", but he does make progress - partly by not taking himself too seriously. It is much to Dennett's credit that he is rarely caught in an "argument" -- he sees an element of truth in almost everything, always putting his own ideas on the table without allowing opposition to get personal. This is good because he gets a lot of opposition.

"Consciousness Explained" (1991) was a serious over-reach. Rather a mess that didn't come close to delivering on the promise in its title.

Yet, in the intervening 25 years or so, Dennett has wrestled with the ideas in "Consciousness" and made them almost work. There are many signs of progress ...

COMPUTERS

His facile understanding (1971) of the way computers work has been replaced by a deeper insight -- especially contrasting the machine with the living cell. Yet he manages to navigate the tricky issue of what is and is not alive ("Animus"). It's about "internationality" - behavour that makes little sense if you don't take into account a future "purpose". He's very good at showing that this behavour does not necessarily involve consciousness. I note that this particular talk was delivered to the folks at Google, who arguably know more about computers than anyone else on the planet. There were not patronizing giggles from the audience. Questions from the audience were respectful - it was a dialogue between peers.

COMPETENCE

He makes it clear that some entities are more "competent" than others even if they don't actually know what they are doing. Increasing competence is happening in evolution even though it is a mindless process. It is, in the end, governed by a close partnership between the entity and its environment. Not all things are possible but "R&D" is required to find out what is actually possible. In a sense, "thinking" takes place in partnership with reality! How very Zen!

It's worth noting that he sees his pet 3D vision of the evolution of mind from blind chance to intelligent design as not a picture of what is real but an arbitrary choice of 3 axes for the purpose of explanation. In other words, he's very aware of the role of analogy (as brilliantly explained in "Surfaces and Essences"). There are good analogies and bad ones. Dennett is aware of these things as "memes" - (thinking tools) things that evolve to become more useful or are discarded as misleading. This applies to the meme of the meme itself, which may become much more useful than it was when it was born in the pages of "Selfish Gene".

REDUCTIONISM

In his early years, Dennett was literally the poster child for "reductionism", the idea that behavour of systems was "merely" the result of the behavour of their constituent parts. Dennett has become very good not only at accepting the idea of emergence (the whole is more than the parts) but explaining how this becomes true. A good theory of emergence (the classic being the theory of gases based on basic Newtonean physics) don't just explain emergent behavour but explicity tie it down to what is going on at a simpler level. This is never easy.

MEMES

Dennett is still very respectful of the ideas of his friend Richard Dawkins and recommends the book that made Dawkins famous (Selfish Gene). It is interesting to note that Dawkins has since downplayed the idea of memes presented in that book. Dennett, on the other hand, has picked up the idea and run with it. Dennett's "memes" are useful and, in fact, it's possible for Dennett to talk about memes without using the word. An echo of the talking points of "four horsemen" of Atheism is still to be found here, as Dennett speaks of the virus-infected ape - the viruses being memes. This is gratifyingly close to my term: "The Programmable Ape". In both cases, we are referring to the fact that our minds consist largely of culturally determined "memes". To understand this idea, it is not necessary to see the genetic evolution theory of memes as literally true (it is hopelessly imprecise) but it's a great analogy and points precisely to what Zen would claim the "mind" is an illusion - there are only "ideas" running around in our heads. No "observer".

It is culture and especially language that is evolving and getting smarter at an exponential rate over the last 100 years or so.

Dennett's little talk is perhaps the clearest explanation I've seen of what is going on and why. My old "Dragon Theory" (now Programmable Ape) blog explores a special case of this insight - especially the darker implications.

LIFE ITSELF AND "ANIMUS"

Dennett does us a big favor by breaking down the concept of "life" (not merely consciousness). We still don't know how life arose but Dennett has provided a way of talking about the emergence of life without the need for mystical language, a mysterious miraculous event or a whole set of new words to describe what is going on.

The Meme Machine - Susan Blackmore

For those who still like memes, the reviews of this book on Amazon are worth reading. 

The meme are a rhetorical device that can't stand up to the mildest of criticism.

Dennett and Dawkins Grapple With Death

D&D dance around the terrible reality of death.

It's fascinating to watch two of the world's leading atheists grapple with the big issue that religion supposedly deals with. Typically, Dawkins waxes eloquent, firing off an impressive display of wordy fireworks that almost makes you forget what he's talking about.

We see them both grasping for "big ideas" that make life make sense. To my mind, they both avoid what Buddha saw: that suffering is inevitable. Suffering must be faced head-on. The "self" is ephemeral. All things come to an end.

What D&D are doing is making death part of a grand and compelling story, which is exactly what "religion" does.

Death is a terrible tragedy. Is it not possible to face it without fear, without rationalization?

Richard Dawkins Leads the Revolt Against Sunday School

Dawkins is the "pope" of not-something. Unlike the heros of Skepticism, Dawkins spends most of his energy on the attack against what he imagines to be "Theism". For many who have basically parked their spiritual side as part of there general rebellion in their teens and never thought of it since, Dawkins can seem like a revaluation.

Memes and Analogies

The idea of a meme was introduced by Richard Dawkins in a final chapter of his popular 1976 book on genetics: "The Selfish Gene". Dawkins kicks around the meme idea with philosopher Daniel Dennett here.

Even after 40 years, Dawkins still brings up the meme constantly, especially when he's talking about religion as a meme that "infects" the human brain. The word "meme" is now tossed around quite freely, almost a synonym for "idea", but usually confined to a "big idea" or at least one that is effectively communicated from person to person and somehow "survives" competition with competing ideas.

Given "Surfaces and Essences" (S&E), we can immediately see that the meme is an explicit analogy with the gene. We can also ask if it's a very good analogy. Does it lead us to understand anything about ideas that we can't easily see without it? Does it mislead us to think that ideas have properties or behavior that genes have but "memes" actually don't? Does it lead us closer to understanding the essence of what an idea is?

Such questions lead us to suspect that we can do without the "meme" analogy.

How are genes and memes different?

• Genes are discreet entities, encoded in actual physical sequences of DNA. Memes are fuzzy and seem to be defined only in the mind of the speaker. What, exactly, is the "meme" of God?
• Genes survive (according do Dawkins) by means of competition. What accounts for the "survival" of memes? S&E would say that any idea survives because it is an apt, more or less essential "name" for a common situation. We don't know exactly how the brain decides that a particular name is appropriate, but it's fast and automatic. "Survival" doesn't seem to come into it. "Competition" for the appropriate word or phrase takes place in the brain all the time and we tend to come up with the best one available, but this doesn't imply that we forget the alternatives. The "winner" pops up where it fits.
• Genes are communicated from generation to generation. Analogies are communicated because the speaker and listener share a common understanding of the situation -- usually experiences or concepts that are "like" one another. How humans decide that one situation is "like" another is mysterious and astonishing. There is no evident similarity to "communication" in the sense of some "thing" being handed from one person to another.

The most serious problem with the "meme" analogy is that it leads us to think about ideas at the wrong level of culture. "Memes" and the analogies studied in "Surfaces" "infect" the shared language of a culture and only indirectly the thought processes of an individual. A child starts to use the word "God" without any idea of the vast baggage and extensive mythology ("memeplex") that comes along with that single word. The "meaning" of the word is "out there" in the culture, to be discovered and gradually assimilated (or not) as the child learns (or fails to learn) to think for himself.

Bottom line: the "meme" is a special case of an analogy, which is a special case of pattern recognition. It's not a very good analogy and it's been made worse by common use that divorces it from its roots (it's now just a pretentious way to say "idea").

If we are to persist in using the word "meme', we need to drop the original analogy of the meme "infecting" our brains and taking over evolution. A "meme", if it is anything at all, is a powerful and commonly-understood idea shared by a culture or a language. Memes grow and evolve as a shared project of a culture as the language itself evolves and grows. This includes the constant elaboration of important myths that underlie the culture, along with the bottomless enthusiasm we all have for a good story.

One of the things that career atheists miss about religion is the way it "morphs" rapidly in response to our shared talent for improving on a good story. There is no inherent reason why our stories should compete with each other or be somehow logically consistent. When we use the word "meme", we conjure up a rather static picture (like a virus). In fact, "memes" are dynamic creatures, never the same at any one time, any one culture or in any one mind.

Assimilation and Atheism 101

Interesting discussion between leading atheists 
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali

A wide-ranging discussion of subtle issues with atheism, including an unusually subtle treatment of why people accept religion - the process of assimilation and the difficulty in freeing people from assimilation.

• Risks associated with criticizing Islam;
• When to take the gloves off - being polite to people who have been indoctrinated;
• Vetting the authorities;
• How liberal kids get assimilated to radical Islam;
• Sam Harris speaks eloquently about the powerful meme of Islam;
• Dawkins doesn't understand that everyone doesn't think like he does;
• Dennett refers to the "narrative arc" in TV shows and movies, which primes a person for assimilation;
• The appeal of Islam to intelligent, liberal women;
• Ali calls Islam a form of madness;
• Dennett compares crime committed for religious reasons with drunk driving
• Harris points out that religious delusion is excluded in DSM 
• Are religious people just lazy;
• Dennett makes the important point that religious people "just go along", they are not intellectuals;
• Harris makes the point that theologians are not lazy. Making sense of religion is hard work;
• Dawkins is unsympathetic - regards believers has having their ears stopped up;
• Harris points out that crazy Christians understand crazy Muslims better than atheists do. Atheists don't take belief seriously;
• Ali points out realization of individual identity as a core challenge to Islam. "Submission to Allah" is basically surrender of individuality;
• Dawkins makes a similar point about the depth and scope of the "bossiness" of religion, far beyond reason. Why do religions make things so hard for believers?
• Dennett points out the parallel between religious hokum and "viral" memes - "infectious stupidity". 
• Dawkins- quotes Chesterton- when people stop believing in religion, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything;
• Harris makes the point that, for example, there is nothing in Science to fill the "Santa Clause Hole";

The discussion is continued without Ayann, adding Christopher Hitchens

• doubt - the idea that doubts are "normal";
• faith - nice discussion of how belief without evidence becomes evidence and a barrier to further evidence;
• Dennett calls it all a "bag of tricks" - cons could be used to sustain anything;
• Harris points out how easy it is for Christians to spot the "bag of tricks" in other religions;
• Theology is like stamp collecting - theologians "take in each other's laundry";
• Dawkins again displays his lack of appreciation of myth;
• Dennett confusing myth with metaphor;
• Harris points out the pride of religious people when they maintain their faith in spite of the "hammer blows" that destroy all its premises;
• Dennett complains that the professionals "know better" but the problem with the flock is that they have ceded authority to the professionals. The buck stops with the professionals. The pastor's job is to know what he's talking about;
• How is scientific authority different from religious authority? Competitiveness, structure of the discipline, predictions, puzzles vs. mysteries, glorification of "mystery";
• giving up the demand for intuitive understanding; 
• religious moves are not allowed in debates. For example, if you say this is just what I believe, you disqualify yourself from the debate;
• Harris: "Is there a single sentence in the Bible or Koran that shows it's not a work of a human author?" If these are not "magic books", Christianity and Islam collapse.

Dennett and Dawkins Circle Around Dragon Theory

Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins share ideas on religion.

The conversation is interesting because Dawkins is generally credited with the invention of the idea of the "meme" and Dennett is best known for making the idea more precise and useful. Interestingly, Dennett's grasp of evolution (and even memes!) seems to be more nuanced than Dawkins', even though Dennett is a philosopher and Dawkins' credentials are in biology.

Dawkins focused originally on the idea that memes survived in a way analogous to evolution (In his preface to "The Meme Machine", Dawkins admits that he's surprised that people took the idea seriously). The conversation struggles to keep this analogy going, trying to make the case that religion is a parasitic meme, surviving at the expense of the believer. It seems that Dawkins uses "meme" mainly as a rhetorical device -- part of his arsenal of weapons to attack what he imagines to be "religion". Dennett, on the other hand, generalizes he idea and takes it into some very interesting territory. In either case, it can be asked if the "meme" analogy tells us anything useful about the way humans think.

Returning to the meme analogy, both of these guys miss the obvious fact the meme doesn't need to "infect" individual brains. More precisely, memes help to assimilate the individual, but this doesn't go all the way to explaining religion. The cluster of memes that give religion its ability to survive and "morph" to meet challenges from the environment include those that assimilate believers but there are others that are strictly necessary for the survival of the religion as a human organizational structure. These memes are not so different from what we find in other "Dragons", such as nations and corporations. For example, every Dragon must "feed" (find resources), protect its form (protect itself from "infection" from outsiders) and simply survive. To survive in the long run, a religion needs to make the transition to some kind of corporate structure. Otherwise, the "religion" will fizzle out as a mere "cult".

The best way to see this is by analogy. An ant doesn't "understand" that it's part of an ant colony, yet the colony as a whole acts in a very purposeful way. It's not correct to say that the colony itself "knows" that purpose.  Dennett is good at pointing out that a meme can emerge without anybody actually "knowing" the meme (Dawkins doesn't seem to get this). His favorite example, mentioned in this discussion, is the way canoes are "designed" by the sea by the simple process of copying the ones that don't sink. Ant hills are "designed" by Nature, simply by randomly stumbling into a working "design". Corporations "evolve" in the same way, converging on the psychopathic "person" described in The Corporation.

Interestingly, Dennett and Dawkins discuss the problems faced by professionals in the Church. Seen from the perspective of Dragon Theory, these people are trying to escape assimilation. But Dennett and Dawkins address this as if it's simply a matter of recovering rationality. This keeps them from drawing parallels with other people escaping assimilation, such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Is it really about "rationality"?

Not surprisingly, Dennett and Dawkins agree that religion is doomed to wither away in the near future. You can make this case, if at all, by a suitable definition religion. You must/ignore the religions of militarism, nationalism, consumerism. and all the varieties of ignorance people refer to when they identify themselves as "spiritual". In a broader sense, they are predicting the end of assimilation, which seems to be a core aspect of being human. You must assume that everyone but you is "irrational" and somehow the laws of nature dictate that, sooner or later, everyone will see the world the way you do.

It's always fun to watch these two guys circle around the issues that religion deals with (or tries to deal with). They are crippled by their lack of deep understanding that would have come with a serious investigation into what religion is and why people are swept up in it. They gave up too soon. Here, they try to glorify death in an echo of the stories religion tells in the West, failing to take account of the stories he Buddha told.