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.

Roger Penrose is a guy who has a way of asking good questions and providing controversial answers. On page 20 of his monumental survey of applied mathematics, "The Road To Reality" he explains an interesting theory about three "worlds":

• R*:The "real", physical world of "stuff" and phenomena, which he (quite reasonably) takes to exist apart from the other two worlds;
• M:The world of ideas - what I call the "meme space". In principle, this is all the theories, observations, direct or indirect perceptions that could ever be made by the human mind;
• F:The world of forms, mathematics and logic.

While he contends is that each world "maps" completely to the others. In principle at least, each world can be explained in terms of the other.  But he allows us to imagine that the mapping is incomplete. It is the incompleteness that interests me:

• There may be aspects of reality that are "illogical" or cannot be described by mathematics. Such a possibility goes against the grain for Penrose, who is, after all, a mathematician.
• There may be ideas that correctly describe the world, but are beyond the ability of the human mind to grasp, even "in principle"
• There facts of math and logic that are beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. Questions that we cannot even think to ask, postulates - even "important ones" that we will never discover

"In principle" raises a red flag. It quite often means "This is obviously false, but lets pretend its true". It is a good habit to challenge every use of this term and ask precisely what is meant by it.

Penrose's claim amounts to believing that the world can be completely understood by the mind and the way to do it is through mathematics. Thinking like a mathematician, he feels that mathematics "maps" completely to the real world and therefore the two worlds are the same "for all intents an purposes" (another red flag expression). 

Mathematics is claimed to govern the workings of the universe, both seen and unseen. Denial of Penrose's optimism amounts to claiming that, although mathematics rules the universe, many of its "laws" are beyond the reach of human intellect. Even worse, things might happen that are fundamentally illogical. This debate sounds vaguely theological.

Mathematics does not share the personal attributes of the Old Testament God but this new god is all-knowing and, in a sense, separate from the universe governed by the laws of mathematics. This is because the world of mathematics is larger than the universe we inhabit. Other universes can easily be described by mathematical constructs such as the Shrodinger Equation (just fiddle with the constants in the equation). String Theory, a perfectly consistent model of something that looks like a universe, suffers from the problem that it describes too many universes. Ours is a special case.

True believers in a God are familiar with the idea that the "ways" of God's are ultimately unknowable to the human mind. The same is true of the "math god".  Godel's Completeness Theorem guarantees that there are some things that are "true" in mathematics that cannot be proven. In fact, there are an infinite number of such things and you never know if your favourite "obvious" postulate is one of them. Mathematics moves in mysterious ways.

Penrose's belief that the universe can, in principle, describe all phenomena we experience can be seen as faith: pure and simple. Penrose, whose scientific background is in subatomic physics, shares the faith of his peers. He regards subatomic physics as "fundamental" and believes (against all evidence) that all of the more complex phenomena of the world can be "explained" in terms of "fundamental" principles. This is the "reductionist" faith, modern fundamentalism. It is logically identical to the claim that everything you need to know about life can (in principle!) be learned from the Bible. Like religious fundamentalism, reductionism can only be supported if you spend most of your time among other true believers. In the early 21st century, this is not hard to do, since reductionism seems "obvious" to  almost everyone, just as the existence of God was obvious to Descartes.

Richard Dawkins has made his fame by attacking religion, challenging centuries-old "obvious" ideas that have long since lost their relevance to human experience. Religion is reductionist since it claims that everything comes down to God, even though we are not quite sure about the details. So religion is a special case of reductionism. Challenging reductionism is like a vaccine against a huge category of nonsense.

Laughin in "A Different Universe" destroys reductionism with an "emperor has no clothes" argument. He provides one example after another where reductionism fails. He provides an alternative theory as to why this failure is a fundamental aspect of reality.  

As things stand now, it is rare to find anyone who draws a parallel between the universe of mathematics and the heavenly realm. Most of us think we are immune from the kind of nonsense that people took for granted 200 years ago. But the mere fact that we take it as obvious that the mathematical world as real and, in some sense, superior to the world we live in marks us as "true believers" in the old tradition. At least we can certainly claim that mathematics is far more useful than theology when it comes to "explaining" the phenomena of the world, but we cannot defend our assumption that the universe "obeys" mathematical laws or that mathematics is somehow "fundamental".

Lets look at another aspect of Penrose's claim: that mathematics, in principle, completely describes the real world and, indirectly, the brain and the human mind. So, things like consciousness, compassion and creativity could be (in principle!) reduced to a branch of neuroscience. This idea applies reductionism to the link between the brain and the mind, even if the workings of the brain cannot be explained in mathematical terms.

The poster boy for this idea (that consciousness can be, in principle, be explained by workings of the brain) is Daniel Dennett. Typically, Dennett is his own best critic. He  identifies the weakness of his own approach as "Greedy Reductionism".

Like the theist view of the world, reductionism needs to be abandoned as one of those "obvious" ideas that simply doesn't fit experience. Mathematics and logic create a wonderful, fascinating world but we will probably never know if mathematics somehow underlies all of reality itself. It seems likely that there is a lot of things we'd like to know about the universe that we will never know. The worlds that Penrose talks about communicate in interesting ways, but they are not the same in any meaningful sense. 

*R, M and L are terms for "core memes", borrowed from my blog on the mind

Mathematics: The Modern God

Roger Penrose is a guy who has a way of asking good questions and providing controversial answers. On page 20 of his monumental survey of applied mathematics, "The Road To Reality" he explains an interesting theory about three "worlds":

• R*:The "real", physical world of "stuff" and phenomena, which he (quite reasonably) takes to exist apart from the other two worlds;
• M:The world of ideas - what I call the "meme space". In principle, this is all the theories, observations, direct or indirect perceptions that could ever be made by the human mind;
• F:The world of forms, mathematics and logic.

While he contends is that each world "maps" completely to the others. In principle at least, each world can be explained in terms of the other.  But he allows us to imagine that the mapping is incomplete. It is the incompleteness that interests me:

• There may be aspects of reality that are "illogical" or cannot be described by mathematics. Such a possibility goes against the grain for Penrose, who is, after all, a mathematician.
• There may be ideas that correctly describe the world, but are beyond the ability of the human mind to grasp, even "in principle"
• There facts of math and logic that are beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. Questions that we cannot even think to ask, postulates - even "important ones" that we will never discover

"In principle" raises a red flag. It quite often means "This is obviously false, but lets pretend its true". It is a good habit to challenge every use of this term and ask precisely what is meant by it.

Penrose's claim amounts to believing that the world can be completely understood by the mind and the way to do it is through mathematics. Thinking like a mathematician, he feels that mathematics "maps" completely to the real world and therefore the two worlds are the same "for all intents an purposes" (another red flag expression). 

Mathematics is claimed to govern the workings of the universe, both seen and unseen. Denial of Penrose's optimism amounts to claiming that, although mathematics rules the universe, many of its "laws" are beyond the reach of human intellect. Even worse, things might happen that are fundamentally illogical. This debate sounds vaguely theological.

Mathematics does not share the personal attributes of the Old Testament God but this new god is all-knowing and, in a sense, separate from the universe governed by the laws of mathematics. This is because the world of mathematics is larger than the universe we inhabit. Other universes can easily be described by mathematical constructs such as the Shrodinger Equation (just fiddle with the constants in the equation). String Theory, a perfectly consistent model of something that looks like a universe, suffers from the problem that it describes too many universes. Ours is a special case.

True believers in a God are familiar with the idea that the "ways" of God's are ultimately unknowable to the human mind. The same is true of the "math god".  Godel's Completeness Theorem guarantees that there are some things that are "true" in mathematics that cannot be proven. In fact, there are an infinite number of such things and you never know if your favourite "obvious" postulate is one of them. Mathematics moves in mysterious ways.

Penrose's belief that the universe can, in principle, describe all phenomena we experience can be seen as faith: pure and simple. Penrose, whose scientific background is in subatomic physics, shares the faith of his peers. He regards subatomic physics as "fundamental" and believes (against all evidence) that all of the more complex phenomena of the world can be "explained" in terms of "fundamental" principles. This is the "reductionist" faith, modern fundamentalism. It is logically identical to the claim that everything you need to know about life can (in principle!) be learned from the Bible. Like religious fundamentalism, reductionism can only be supported if you spend most of your time among other true believers. In the early 21st century, this is not hard to do, since reductionism seems "obvious" to  almost everyone, just as the existence of God was obvious to Descartes.

Richard Dawkins has made his fame by attacking religion, challenging centuries-old "obvious" ideas that have long since lost their relevance to human experience. Religion is reductionist since it claims that everything comes down to God, even though we are not quite sure about the details. So religion is a special case of reductionism. Challenging reductionism is like a vaccine against a huge category of nonsense.

Laughin in "A Different Universe" destroys reductionism with an "emperor has no clothes" argument. He provides one example after another where reductionism fails. He provides an alternative theory as to why this failure is a fundamental aspect of reality.  

As things stand now, it is rare to find anyone who draws a parallel between the universe of mathematics and the heavenly realm. Most of us think we are immune from the kind of nonsense that people took for granted 200 years ago. But the mere fact that we take it as obvious that the mathematical world as real and, in some sense, superior to the world we live in marks us as "true believers" in the old tradition. At least we can certainly claim that mathematics is far more useful than theology when it comes to "explaining" the phenomena of the world, but we cannot defend our assumption that the universe "obeys" mathematical laws or that mathematics is somehow "fundamental".

Lets look at another aspect of Penrose's claim: that mathematics, in principle, completely describes the real world and, indirectly, the brain and the human mind. So, things like consciousness, compassion and creativity could be (in principle!) reduced to a branch of neuroscience. This idea applies reductionism to the link between the brain and the mind, even if the workings of the brain cannot be explained in mathematical terms.

The poster boy for this idea (that consciousness can be, in principle, be explained by workings of the brain) is Daniel Dennett. Typically, Dennett is his own best critic. He  identifies the weakness of his own approach as "Greedy Reductionism".

Like the theist view of the world, reductionism needs to be abandoned as one of those "obvious" ideas that simply doesn't fit experience. Mathematics and logic create a wonderful, fascinating world but we will probably never know if mathematics somehow underlies all of reality itself. It seems likely that there is a lot of things we'd like to know about the universe that we will never know. The worlds that Penrose talks about communicate in interesting ways, but they are not the same in any meaningful sense. 

* R,M and F signify core memes outlined in my blog on the workings of the mind.

M1: A Theory of Everything

I'm beginning to feel the need to organize my ideas into some kind of structure. Let's call that structure "M1". The name comes from "M for Mind and 1 for the primacy of the first person experience".

This should probably be document in a Web Site, rather than a blog, but such a site needs a few initial ideas and some sketch of what it's about. In any case, documentation of M1 needs to be on an interactive platform (not a paper book) to allow dynamic growth and interaction with interested individuals.

Mind Maps

One key tool on the site should be the "Mind Map", which allows us to draw informal diagrams of the relationship between ideas. This is considerably less formal than UML (Universal Modelling Language) that I was first tempted to use. It takes considerable training to understand a UML diagram and there are subtle objections to the ultimate trap of equating an "idea" with a UML "class". The Mind Map allows us to informally model the "space" of ideas and say intelligible things about what ideas are "close to each other" in that space. This includes the ability to visualize the analogy, which, according to Hofstadter, is the underlying organizing principle of the mind.

Core Ideas

1. M1 builds on the first person experience. Everything we know comes from "unpacking" our experience, forming new associations into categories. This is articulated in Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop". The first person experience is also primary in Zen, although Zen and Hofstadter arrive at quite different conclusions about what's "really going on".

1. M1 is ultimately about mind, mainly but not only human minds.
2. M1 builds on first person experience to describe (if not "explain") the emergence of personal memes such as "you" and "them".
3. M1 builds on personal memes to describe social memes and the emergence of "group minds" with "thoughts", "concepts" and "perceptions" that cannot be productively described in terms of some kind of function of individuals in the group (Dragon Theory)
4. M1 is about all possible ideas. Every idea that has ever appeared in all possible mind plus any idea that could appear in the mind, including "right" and "wrong" ideas. M1 is therefore a "Theory of Everything". Annoyingly to some, it includes all other possible "Theories of Everything". This "universe" of memes is sometimes called the "noosphere" but that word is also used in an mystical way to refer to the "mind of the universe". 
5. M1 includes the idea that M1 cannot embrace all of reality. This amounts to acceptance that there is a real world "out there" and our ideas map to that world only incompletely and approximately. Of course, since it includes all ideas, M1 also includes the opposite idea, which is that there is no actual real world out there: it's all in our heads (Strong Idealism). However, M1 concerns mainly with actual, productive and powerful human ideas. Acceptance of the existence of the external world allows M1 to embrace all of "Science".
6. M1 is not "epistemology" which is the philosophical discipline attempting to describe what "we" know and how we know it. How we "know" things is of specific interest in M1, including how and why we "know" things that are manifestly false or inconsistent with the other things we "know".
7. M1 collects imagination pumps (Dennett)
8. The focus of M1 is on "core" memes. These include the "Self", "Mind", "Reality", "Person", "Category" and of course "M1" itself and the meme of a "core meme". 
9. M1 is not reductionist. It makes no attempt to "explain" the universe in terms of a privileged "fundamental" collection of memes (such as those from neurology or quantum mechanics). If anything, the "self" is fundamental, yet, when examined, turns out to depend on other things going on that could be regarded as "more fundamental". 
10. M1 attempts to "unpack" the "self" meme to show the connection between the way cells specialize in brain tissues to produce a "brain" that is, at least in principle, capable of supporting a mind.
11. M1 is shamelessly self-referential and recursive. This is to be expected, since M1 is a product of the mind which has the remarkable ability to know itself and to know it is knowing or even doubt that it is knowing ...
12. M1 is to the universe of ideas as cartography is to the world. It's about mapping and exploring - specifically about tools we can develop to map the meme world - how we get from one meme to another, how we generalize and form analogies.

The Real World - The "R and Q Memes"

The "R" meme is the most powerful and widely-shared meme: that there is a "real world out there" independent of our minds. This is the intuitive insight that is denied or at least challenged by "Idealism" [1].

Denial of R turns out to be a powerful "intuition pump". We imagining that the "real world" does not exist at all, and it's "all in our minds". This is a rather strong denial of Idealism, since an Idealist would, I think, admit that the real world exists -- just that we can't know anything about it other than what pops up in our minds.

At the risk of spoiling the plot, the view of this blog is that the brain can be thought of as a fantastically complex and specially-constructed knot that intimately ties the mind M to the world R. This connection is so intimate that it is, in practice, impossible to say where mind ends and world begins [2]. In effect, this frames "Idealism" as a discussion about a distinction without a difference -- not unusual for philosophical discussions in general.

One of the pillars of R is he "Standard Model of Physics" (I will call it Q) an idea that claims to be "isomorphic" with the "real world" [2] at almost all contexts of experience. That means that we have a complete explanation of things like atomic and sub-atomic particles and forces operating on us. The contexts where this model doesn't apply include the interior of black holes and the early time of the Universe (between the "big bang" and "inflation". Q includes a specific and elegant description of its own limitations, captured in the idea of an "effective field theory", which may be thought of as a formal definition of what's meant by "for all intents and purposes" when applying Q to specific phenomena.

Q is a powerful meme, underlying a sweeping range of ideas we have about reality, including things like photosynthesis, the lifetime of stars and the behavior of semi-conductors. Particle physicists and cosmologists tend to wax poetic about this idea, calling it "fundamental" and the "theory of everything". This over-states the matter. The mind, not R, is "fundamental". R is an idea, not reality itself, so therefore included in the world of memes (even it it turns out to be false!) In this sense, the theory of memes (especially as envisioned by Hofstadter) is more "fundamental". The idea that Q is "fundamental" is the bedrock of reductionism and fails for all the reasons reductionism fails. Q enthusiasts also tend to rely on the common confusion between a description and an explanation. The fact that all observed phenomena are consistent with Q does not imply that Q "explains" or predicts anything at all. Q fails to predict many "emergent" properties, such as the chemical properties of matter and becomes of marginal importance as the level of complexity increases. For example, Q doesn't help much when explaining how he mind works.

[1] "Idealism" The idea that we cannot know anything about the world except through the prism of our minds. This has many modern variants, such as the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Q meme). Its shadow can be seen in Einstein's introduction of the "observer" into physics, banishing the all-knowing "god" view of the universe. Idealism can be contrasted with the idea we see in Eastern philosophies (Zen), which claim that the mind is an illusion.

[2] In Quantum Mechanics, the fact that the theory and the world are not the "same thing" can never be swept under the carpet. "Isomorphic" is an idea borrowed from mathematics, which says that there is a one-to-one mapping between one domain to another.  For. example, "isomorphism" means that all the properties of a "real" electron are exactly mirrored in the electron of Q meme (leaving nothing out). Conceptually, "isomorphism" can be taken to mean that the two domains are, "for all intents and purposes", the same thing, which almost amounts to claiming the universe itself is an idea. The R meme would deny this, claiming that there "must" be aspects of the universe that cannot be "isomorphic" to human ideas. Some things are forever beyond the grasp of the human mind (It is certainly true that Q itself is beyond the grasp of all but a tiny number of actual minds).

The concept of "effective field theory" (part of Q) is an open admission that isomorphism fails at some point, meaning that Q does not "map" to everything in the real universe. Even in its own terms, Q is not a "theory of everything".

The Almighty Meme

You can think of a "meme" as an shared "big idea".  The main thing about a meme is that it is shared between minds (2) - the more minds the better. The idea is that memes compete with each other and survive at the expense of their "hosts", who are "infected" with memes, such as (Dawkins' favorite example), religion. Late in life, Dawkins still pushes this idea and it still gains some traction. There is an attractive analogy between genes and memes, spelled out explicitly when Dawkins introduced the idea [1] and swallowed up by "Surfaces and Essences" as just another example of analogy making -- perhaps one that doesn't get to the "essence" of the phenomenon of "ideas".

In this blog, I will use the word "meme" sparingly to refer to basic powerful ideas such as the "Self", "Reality" and "God". It turns out that we don't get very far by thinking of these ideas as "viruses" as Dawkins still does. In every case, it is more productive to "drill down" to the analogies and categories, surfaces and essences, that underlie these ideas. In each case, we fund that a "meme" can and should be "unpacked" to examine how the associated words are used in real conversation and how these words are based on analogies.

Surfaces and Essences


It turns out that Dawkins' idea of the "meme" is not particularly useful, especially when compared to the concepts introduced by Hofstadter and Salter in "Surfaces and Essences". "Surfaces" presents a far more fundamental and insightful analysis of how ideas arise and what ideas are. After reading "Surfaces" (which doesn't mention Dawkins or memes), I decided to use the word "meme" much more sparingly. In particular, Dawkins' fundamental concept -- that memes fight for survival in the way genes do -- seems to be somewhat superficial if not totally wrong. Attempts to build on the original "meme" idea have not shed more light on how we think or believe.

Notes:

(1) The "Meme" was introduced by Richard Dawkins in 1989 in his book "The Selfish Gene". His original idea was that "Memes", are like "Genes", fighting for their own survival irrespective of the welfare of the "host" believer. The idea struggled to catch on partly due to the vagueness of the idea and the fuzziness of the comparison between "real" genes and "ideas". Since then, the idea of "genes" themselves has been made a lot more complex.

(2) The main task of this blog is to explore what we mean by "mind" -- in effect to construct a meme I call "M". "M" is itself a meme but only if it can be shared. "Surfaces" has required a sweeping revision of what I envision to be "M", since "Surfaces" provides a working definition of what an "idea" is (along with thousands of examples), whereas "meme" theory leaves this fundamental question untouched.

(3) A very important meme introduced and discussed in this blog is the "R" meme - the idea that there is a "real world" that exists independent of "mind". This meme is so common and so widely shared that our task would seem trivial except that R depends on what we mean by M - in fact, some "things" belong to M and others to R. This blog will hopefully get us thinking of this distinction.

(4) An important meme introduced here (hopefully one that can be shared) is that of T, the collection of memes that are definitely not "out there" in R but nonetheless are easily shared between human minds. The whole of pure mathematics belongs in T.