Do you know what a meme is?

[KickAssClown]

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The Game is a social phenomenon and an anti-memory game, the objective of which is to forget its existence. It is spread mostly by word of mouth, leading to a number of variations, but all share the same basic rules:

1. Knowledge of The Game is the only thing required to play it.
2. Thinking of The Game causes a player to lose.
3. A losing player must announce the loss.

I lost by the way.

I would like to know more about meme theory than I currently know, and to start it off I would like to introduce you all to a game that you may or may not have played before. It represents mememetic replication and is by far hugely interesting.

Meme

So what do you know of and what do you know that you don't know of memes? Can they be constructed and/or have they been constructed, simulated, or otherwise used in computers? How do you model such a thing? What are the universal attributes of a meme?

[Buffy]

Its exactly like the Game. If you *try* to construct a meme, you *will* fail.

In my book, memes are sentient beings created by a social *group* not the creation of an individual: an individual might actually be the *author* of the original textual representation of the meme, but the meme *itself* is a creature of how the social group *reacts* to it!

Willed into existence,
Buffy

[KickAssClown]

Well in the course of discussing the game design In another thread, I came to have an intellectual idea for a test of the game itself.

If the AI is capable of using, making, modifying and spreading Memes around then it will be capable of conception. As the two are more or less one. So the Idea is to model an AI that is grown on memes.

Hence what I mean by constructed, simulated, or otherwise used in computer simulation.

Also as a side note, I don't believe in things that can't be codified. Things that exist are patterns, patterns are objective and distict, but not seperate from what is observable. A gene here is a gene there, a meme here is a meme there.

So let's break the code and see how it works.

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by KickAssClown

Well in the course of discussing the game design In another thread, I came to have an intellectual idea for a test of the game itself.

...and I think it will fail the test because...

Originally Posted by KAC

If the AI is capable of using, making, modifying and spreading Memes around then it will be capable of conception.

...which I argue is impossible because a meme is a social phenomenon. You can't just "generate" them.

Now conversely:

Originally Posted by KAC

I don't believe in things that can't be codified. Things that exist are patterns, patterns are objective and distict, but not seperate from what is observable.

Patterns are code and code is patterns.

This is where my thinking gets really radical: we wholly underestimate what can be done with "code" because we think of it as been a single level stream of bits, when at its most magical, it is layer upon layer of abstraction that through recursion and self modification is positively god-like. When I look at what we've done in 50 years of computer science, it gives me the willies to think what could be done in the next 50. "I Robot" will be childsplay, but ONLY if we realize that we have to not only build on what we know and *ignore* what we think the "goals" are, but let it build *itself*. Consciousness? Don't start creating it by defining the word, you'll quickly get lost in the woods. You need to let the code *reach* it on its own!

Doors of Abstraction,
Buffy

[KickAssClown]

I agree rather in totality. I am just saying that how do you setup an information system to deal with data such that the result is what would be called a meme? What atomic emergent algorithms do we put together to get a self propagating, self modifying concept?

What are the phenomena of a meme, what attributes do they have? You assert they can't be modelled or you misunderstand my meaning, or I am miscommuncating my meaning. Anyway it goes, there is confusion.

I am not saying I want to build a meme like christianity, I am just saying what are the common elements of the phenomena which we call memes, and how can we model them conceptually? They exist, and we can prove them emperically, so we can infact model them.


If we can model them, we can code them, if we can code them we can simulate. the chain goes on and on but it just means good things.

[Sly]

Put robots in a room, with the ability to put on hats.
Give them access to 5 different colors of hats.
Randomly place the hats all over the floor of the room.

Assign a formula to the robots to put on the color of the hat in which they see most of.
Hats that robots currently are wearing will count as more color points since they're in a more convenient field of vision.

Over time, they'll all start to wear identical hats!

And it'll be soo cute...

[Buffy]

A friend of mine from high school used to say "love is circumstantial." So are memes. What makes a meme you ask? Timing! Location! History! The Gestalt of it all! An idea with pretentions of meme-ness 10 years ago might fail where it takes off like wildfire today. Or conversely. And a fallacy of memes is that once they attain meme-ness that they are immortal. In fact most memes are like shooting stars the blast out in an awe-inspiring burst of color and *meaningfulness*, then a day, a month, a year, a decade, at most a century later, they are gone to be noted by students of popular culture. Do they all *die*? No, many do survive, but once they reach the "end of their memeness," the successful memes become so enmeshed in the societal consciousness that they are no longer memes, they are fully integrated into "reality."

To the extent that you could Monkey-at-a-Typewriter-like simply churn out concepts, yes, you could generate proto-memes. But if society is not prepared to pick them up and run with them--something that by definition cannot be "manufactured" by an algorithm--then they are simply words on paper, unrealized in their potential.

Sound and Fury,
Buffy

[CraigD]

My definition of meme derives from it’s origin in Dawkin’s title phrase “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes”. As a gene is a sequence of information coded into an organism’s genome sufficient for a cell to express a specific protein, a meme is “code” in an individual’s nervous system sufficient for the individual to “express” a specific behavior. A key feature of memes is that, like genes can be shared among bacteria via plasmids, the neurological states that produce behaviors can be shared among people via communication.

In my book, there are many perils in taking the gene-meme analogy too far. Genes are objectively real features of DNA and RNA. They can currently be identified with precision via gene sequencing, and by a process of elimination, identified with the proteins they produce. Though slight variations in a particular gene – alleles – exists among individuals, and proteins may have slight molecular and structural differences, the mapping of genes to proteins is essentially exact. Efforts to create an ”e-cell”, a mechanical simulation of the expression of genes within a cell, are ongoing, and promise to be successful.

Memes, on the other hand, have about the same foundation in objective reality that genes did in Lamarck’s days – we can infer from how behaviors spread in animal (especially human) populations, and are passed from generation to generation (“[wiki]time binding[/wuki]”) that they exists, but know very little about how they work, either in a completely biomechanical way, or more abstractly. This leads to a serious problem – just as many old ideas about genes proved very wrong, so, it’s almost certain, will many of our current ideas about memes. While the link between genes and proteins can be precisely tested, and, ultimately, a complete and accurate model of the cell can be made, how can we know if a particular meme truly exists and is responsible for a particular behavior? How can we know if a particular meme model is right?

With our current, imprecise understanding of memes, it’s hard to know how to use them sensibly. Does it make sense to call religion a meme, and say that the meme of Islam “evolve” from that for Judaism, then mutate into distinct alleles for Sunni, Shi’a, and Sufism? Or should we think of it as being made of smaller memes, like “don’t kill” and “honor thy parents?” This is not just a question of terminology – the choices made for the “granularity” and “cladistics” of memes strongly effect the predictions made by a model of them. There are right and wrong answers to “is this a meme?” that determine how well a memetic model predicts reality.

So, how to go about improving the objectivity of memetics? Try many different models, keeping and improving on ones that best predict reality? Or dig in reductionistically, and try to understand the biochemistry of thought, explaining on a molecular level such things as the rise and fall of disco?

In conclusion, I’m forced to admit that, while I recognize the term, I don’t really know what a meme is.

[hallenrm]

Interesting thread indeed!

While going through some of the posts and the article in Wikipedia I had this recurring question in my mind.

How is a meme different from a thought? Are the two word synonyms?

The questions are especially important to me, because all that I have been calling thoughts in many of my posts in this forum seem to be memes.

Can somebody help me a bit.

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by hallenrm

IHow is a meme different from a thought? Are the two word synonyms?

I think that's the crux of the debate in the thread so far. I argue that what makes a meme different is that it takes on a life of its own spreading throughout a society, *after* its been thought up. A thought is just a thought: it can just sit there or society can reject it outright (possibly only because of timing as I discussed above)....

The marketplace of memes,
Buffy