Evolving Ideas

Nature's Algorithm

2011-10-18T00:00:00.000Z

Today's post is about a thought experiment that's been capturing my fancy a lot recently. In this experiment, we conceive of the entire Universe around us as nothing more (or less) than a massive simulation. We suppose that "somewhere" there's a computer whose memory banks model the precise state of every sub-atomic particle in the Cosmos. To make things simple let's assume that time and space are quantized, and more generally that the rules of physics are amenable to such a simulation.

Now imagine that we're outside observers, sitting in "somewhere" and watching this simulation run. First of all, it's important to remember that what we're watching is just a bunch of patterns of bits flitting through the simulation's memory. As an illustration, suppose that each particle is tracked by a data structure containing its position, velocity, and other state. Looking at a snapshot of this data at a particular instant in time it would be very difficult to discern objects such as a table or a tree or a person. Such concepts are largely irrelevant, if not totally nonsensical, when viewed from the sub-atomic vantage point.

Which gets to the real value of the thought experiment. Our brains are evolved to identify and interact with "objects" at the scale that's relevant to our survival, so we tend to over-value distinctions at that scale. For example in trying to understand the biological world it's quite natural to think about individual animals as units of Darwinian evolution. However when we get around to studying how ideas move through our society (i.e. memetics), our processing apparatus struggles because there are no readily available "objects" to form the basis of our model.

In light of this thought experiment, the line between biological and memetic evolution has blurred considerably in my mind. From the simulation's perspective, both are just different mechanisms by which patterns of data seem to be propagating themselves through time. Both rely on chaotic processes to explore enormous potential spaces of patterns, and utilize natural selection to gradually drive increasing sophistication. The details of how the patterns are persisted and copied are quite different when viewed from the human brain's default paradigm, but on a larger (or smaller?) scale the distinctions boil down to implementation details.

Instead of considering these to be distinct processes I now think of them as merely two manifestations of what I call Nature's Algorithm. It seems that, whether it's simulated or not, our Universe is built upon rules that irresistibly move towards increasingly complex self-replicating patterns. I strongly suspect that the particular implementations of evolution we happen to see are themselves accidents, part of a meta-evolutionary process by which nature discovers its own tools. If this were indeed how Reality works, the implications would be profound; but even if it's utterly wrong, the thought experiment is a useful way to remind yourself of your brain's scale-based blind spots.

Science: A Masterpiece of Evolution

2011-10-04T00:00:00.000Z

Many people have claimed, in my opinion justifiably, that evolution is one of the greatest results ever to come out of human science. Its ability to explain the complexity we see around us in terms of an accumulation of simple steps is breathtakingly elegant. But the subject of this post isn't how science discovered evolution; it's how evolution discovered science.

Hard as it is for us to imagine in modern times, for most of human history there really wasn't anything resembling the scientific method of understanding the world. Instead most people interpreted their environment via pre-scientific lenses, based on a mix of myths, legends, guesses, and rumors. We should resist the temptation to attribute this to some modern superiority, as genetically speaking there's hardly any difference between us and our ancestors of 2000 years ago. Rather, the difference between us and them is in the progress that memetic evolution has made in the interim.

Like most everything bouncing around in our brains, the fundamental approach we take to building a model of the world is largely learned from our parents and peers. Memeplexes compete for this space, and over time those that do a better job at getting themselves copied will tend to dominate. One way that a memeplex can be successful is to be demonstrably better than its competitors at helping its host achieve his or her desired objectives, and memeplexes that yield better models of the world will tend to exploit this mechanism. And when it comes to good strategies for modeling your environment, science is hard to beat.

Whole volumes have been written about the various merits of science, so I won't go into details here. If you're reading this post, you're probably already pretty sold on that point anyway. What you may not have thought as much about is how complex and fiendishly clever the science memeplex really is. The idea that we should model the world by formulating hypotheses and then testing them in a repeatable manner is such a leap forward from "we believe this because a book says so" that it's little surprise science has proven such a formidable opponent for older and less agile worldview memeplexes.

The discovery of science also marks yet another case of evolution doing an excellent job of finding the sweet spots in a design space. There was an open niche for a memeplex that did a good job of modeling reality, and after a mere few thousand years we couldn't help but stumble onto it. Once the random mutations had fitted all the pieces together, the resulting thought process took off like wildfire. Instances like this give me great hope that there are even more powerful and transformative ideas out there, waiting for memetic evolution to stumble onto them - and equally great confidence that, in due time, it will.

Religions: The Dinosaurs of the Memetic World

2011-09-23T00:00:00.000Z

Caveat: Today's topic can be a controversial one, so let me invite readers to come to it with an open mind. My intent isn't to pass judgment or challenge anyone's beliefs, but instead to explore the thought space in a new and hopefully insightful light. Feel free to take this perspective and incorporate it into your belief(s) however you see fit.

Why is it that a discussion of religion needs such a guarded introduction? Because these massive memeplexes are extremely fierce competitors for brain space, evolved over (in many cases) thousands of years. Consequently most of them seem to have developed strong defense mechanisms such as a deep emotional attachment to their core tenets, and a corresponding hostility to any outside challenges of the same. And these mechanisms do their job well: the best way to make sure we keep and spread our beliefs is to make sure we never seriously question them or consider alternatives.

But this defensive behavior isn't why I've taken to calling religions the "dinosaurs of the memetic world." The metaphor is rooted in their strategies of evolutionary competition: size and power. In both cases, natural selection seems to have reached a phase wherein the internal barriers to growth suddenly fell away, and a race to be the largest and meanest guy in town ensued. For religions, this may have happened when our language skills became developed enough to convey abstract concepts, and to persist ideas over significant time and distance (via written form). Whatever the cause, the result was clear: complex, highly integrated worldviews that were propagated as single atomic ideas. And thus the "isms" were born.

I don't have anywhere near enough background in comparative religions to attempt an analysis of what drives their memetic success. But a few things do jump out as common traits that, intuitively, should be selected for. Dogma is a good example: memeplexes that encourage you to unshakably trust a given authority (be it another human being or a book) effectively curtail a major source of lost converts. Encouraging the propagation of the belief system from parent to child is another obvious mechanism. The advantages of incorporating rewards for believers and punishments for non-believers require little explanation. And of course we can't forget evangelism, perhaps the most directly memetically beneficial trait possible. (It's intriguing to me that non-evangelistic religions exist at all, and this is surely a testament to evolution's creativity in finding niches to survive in.)

However, like dinosaurs, religions eventually reached a cap. Sooner or later the strategy of pure brute strength hits a wall, and nature starts looking for other ways to improve. In this way it might not be unreasonable to collectively call the Abrahamic religions the T-Rex's of the memetic world: refined machines for turning a human brain into a machine for copying the memeplex. But they do so without any great degree of subtlety, and their size and complexity leaves them slow and vulnerable. One could make the case that the last 400 years have seen the beginning of the next stage, in which the dinosaurs fall to a new generation of sleeker, more elegant competitors.

Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that these religions are necessarily "wrong" (although it would be pointless to deny that I personally am an atheist). However I hope most would agree that the ancient religions have accumulated a lot of baggage in their rise to dominance. The downside of a dogma is that once an idea gets itself incorporated it will tend to stick around for a while, even if it's not a very good idea to start with. At their core, religions are fighting to supply human beings with an answer to that most central question: Why? Why are we here? What's the point of all this madness we call our lives, our reality, our Universe? Religions which carry around prescriptions for daily life, once an asset in their propagation, suddenly find it an encumbrance when pitted against more concentrated modes of answering "why?"

Predicting the future is a good way to look foolish so I hesitate to venture into such speculation. But I can say what I'm hoping for, which is that evolution will work its magic: religions supply us with answers to the big questions, so the further they evolve, the better and more satisfying those answers should ultimately become. It seems like wishful thinking to suppose we'd ever find one religion compelling enough to close the debate, but if we can even reach a point where they're all close enough to co-exist then it would reshape our civilization. The dinosaurs may die, but something smarter and better will hopefully follow in their footsteps... let's just hope it doesn't take 65 million years this time around.

Bandwidth Between Brains

2011-09-13T00:00:00.000Z

If we accept the metaphor (or literal fact?) that brains are computers, then it's fairly natural to see the movement of ideas between brains as just data flows in a network. To illustrate this, let's take a simple example. Suppose that as I'm talking to you over lunch in a crowded cafe, I notice that the person behind you has accidentally lit your hair on fire with their cigarette. This idea forms in my brain, and some decision-making processes kick in and determine that I should try to alert you of the situation. A message is constructed, then sent to the vocalization subsystem for transmission, resulting in me shouting "Oh my god, your hair is on fire!" The sound waves comprising this message pass through the air between us and into your ears, which do some slick calculus to weed out my voice from the surrounding din. Language processing turns the sounds into words, and thence into an idea: "Oh [your] god, [my] hair is on fire!" The salient meme, namely that "[your hair] is [on fire]," has been copied from my brain to yours in a rather impressively efficient manner.

Our blossoming understanding of the Universe has taught us that if something in nature is impressively efficient then it's almost certainly not an accident. We've learned that in such cases, we should look for reasons why a shift in the observed direction might have been favored by evolution. Certainly this is a complex inquiry, but it seems to me that developing better communication methods (e.g. language) would very likely have been memetically favored, for the following reasons:

Any idea that can be had in one brain but not communicated to others is a lost opportunity. Mechanisms which open up the door for replication (such as the emergence of a new word to describe a previously unnamed concept or phenomenon) are likely to be successful.
The more structured and well-defined a language is, the more precisely it can communicate ideas. A series of grunts and gestures might serve to convey "Your hair is on fire" pretty accurately, but "Joe was glad that Mary and Alex talked to Steve" would be pretty tricky to copy with high fidelity across non-language-capable brains. And fidelity is essential to on-going replication: ideas which are copied erratically are unlikely to re-copy.
Higher communications bandwidth also favors more replication. Language increases bandwidth by allowing single utterances to stand in for increasingly complex patterns of ideas. For example, "freedom" is a very simple word but it conveys an extremely rich set of ideas whenever we use it. This efficiency means it takes less time to copy each meme, resulting in more memes being copied per given unit of time.

It's interesting to note that while language is a powerful evolved platform for memetic replication, it's not the only one. Any medium that copies patterns of thought from one brain to another is a part of the memetic environment. In particular, we should not overlook the role of art in all its forms (visual art as well as music, performance, and experience). Modern languages are indeed marvelously expressive, but the persistence of these other mediums is strong evidence that there are still many niches in which it's being memetically out-competed as the ideal communications channel. It's no coincidence that "a picture is worth a thousand words" has been such a successful meme.

Another important thing to remember is that the relationship between communications media and memetic evolution runs both ways. I've been discussing how memetics would favor increasingly expressive languages, but I believe we should also expect the reverse effect: if we can develop communications platforms/models with higher bandwidth and higher fidelity, it should increase the rate of memetic evolution of the ideas within those platforms. This feedback is part of what makes the evolutionary algorithm so stunning: the better it gets, the better it gets at getting better.

A Case Study in Cultural Evolution

2011-08-30T00:00:00.000Z

This week I'm participating in the Burning Man festival out in Nevada's spectacular Black Rock Desert. Perhaps it's not super on-topic for this blog, but it's very much on my mind, so I figured I'd give a quick view of Burning Man from a memetic perspective.

When we talk about a "culture" what we usually mean, in broad terms, is a large memeplex that guides the behavior and interactions of a group of people. Like all memeplexes, cultures compete with each other and evolve over time. Various elements of a cultural memeplex will gradually mutate, as new ideas are either generated internally or copied over from rival cultures. Occasionally whole cultures will die off, unable to spread themselves in the face of the changing memescape (globalization has arguably caused several such extinctions). Once in a while a more or less totally new culture arises, cobbled together from random bits and pieces of its antecedant environment. The Burning Man culture may well represent such a phenomenon.

There are quite a few places around the web that can tell you about the history and nature of the event. Rather than duplicating that content, here's an e-mail I recently wrote to my Burning Man camp (which includes a number of first-timers), entitled "What It Means to Be a Burner":

To me, being a Burner is fundamentally about working with those around you to make the best community possible. But not in a hippie, "let's all hold hands until everyone's happy" kind of way. Burners are some of the most hard-nosed, practical, and sophisticated people I've ever been around. Because holding hands doesn't make the world go around. Hard-working people do, and the better they work together, the better the community.

Just about everything in the culture can be traced, one way or another, to that purpose. A truly worthwhile (and very concise) read is the 10 Principles, if you haven't seen them yet. I pretty much agree with all of them, but there are a few in particular that stand out to me as major parts of the Burner ethos.

Perhaps the biggest is gifting. When I talk to "non-burners" about the event, they often say things like "Oh, that's the one with no buying and selling, just a barter economy, right?" No, Burning Man is not a barter economy. When someone gives you a gift at Burning Man, there is no expectation of anything in return. People give because they like giving. If you want to enjoy your playa experience, I highly recommend finding ways that you can give to the community. Whether it's an awesome costume for people to look at, a cool performing skill, or even just really good cooking, giving to each other is a central part of life on the playa.

After that, my next-favorite is radical self-reliance. This is one that has played a huge role in my personal life. Going and spending a week doing everything to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments reminds you of something very important: you are the product of millions of years of highly selective evolution, and you are insanely badass (paraphrasing Neal Stephenson). Sometimes modern comforts make us forget that, and we settle into listlessness, apathy, and cynicism (which never saved the world). So I encourage you to take radical self-reliance seriously: on the playa, you should strive to never need help from anyone. Just don't worry too much, because everyone needs help sometimes, and when you do the Burning Man community will be there for you (a phenomenon often encapsulated by the popular idiom, "the playa provides").

To these I might also add my own observation: Burners are ruthlessly self-improving. Realizing your own abilities shows you your potential, and having seen that, it's pretty hard to justify stagnation. You can always do more things, and you can always do them better. You want to know why Burning Man is still so amazing and "fresh" after all these years? It's because every year Burners work their asses off to do even sicker, more ridiculous, more awesome projects than the year before.

Finally, Burners are some of the kindest, most respectful, and most understanding people you will ever deal with. Even the most bitter ideological adversaries will happily agree to disagree (unless it's the "hot and grumpy" part of the playa afternoon), because at the end of the day we're all in this together, and who really knows anyway. Burners will not judge you, although they may give you friendly advice ;)

As you can probably tell from the above, I'm a huge fan of the event and would recommend it to anyone as just a fun time and a great experience. But I would especiallyrecommend it to those with an interest in the evolution of culture, because it's so fundamentally different from the "mainstream" cultures that I've encountered. It's hard to say right now whether this new memetic species will flourish, or have a few choice elements picked out and incorporated into the mainstream, or just die off entirely. Whatever happens we should pay close attention, because it's one of today's best opportunities to see memetics in action.

Applied Memetics

2011-08-23T00:00:00.000Z

I'm going to level with you: I'm an engineer, not a scientist. It's just a fundamental fact of how my brain works. Why am I bringing this up now? Because so far this blog has been about memetics as a science, but that's not really my true passion. What attracts me to the field is the virtually limitless possibilities of applying memetic understanding to the real world. For today, I want to talk about the three main ways in which I envision memetics improving our lives: personal understanding, infrastructure optimization, and cultural engineering.

The first one is the least ambitious, but most immediately beneficial. When I say personal understanding, I mean the ability to conceptualize oneself as a brain whose beliefs are the product of a rich and ever-changing memetic environment. Naturally, this goes hand in hand with at least a rudimentary knowledge of neuroscience in general (e.g. I highly recommend Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained). For me, one of the main takeaways of these fields is that it's statistically almost certain that at least a few of my core beliefs are wrong. Recognizing that my brain is (extremely) fallible helps me treat my opinions as just data points, to be correlated with those of other brains in search of a good model of our shared world. It's also helpful to remember that other brains are similarly products of their own memetic environment, and therefore it's un- or counter-productive to blame their actions on their being "selfish," "evil," etc. The more people who can learn to treat each others’ brains as shared computing resources, the better off we'll all be.

The prospects for memetically-inspired improvements to our communications infrastructure are extremely promising over the next decade or two. Just about all of human productivity these days boils down to the efficient discovery and propagation of good ideas, both big and small. Rarely, if ever, is this process done entirely within a single human brain; virtually all modern ideas are the product of a whole bunch of previously discovered memes colliding in just the right brain state, with a little luck, to generate a new mutation. Can we devise mechanisms that increase the likelihood/rate of finding these happy accidents, and recognizing and spreading them once they've been found? These aren't easy problems but it's important to remember the scale we're talking about: a 1% improvement in the net productivity of human civilization is worth a lot of money. This is also an area ripe for a cooperative effort between human beings and our rapidly maturing artificially intelligent friends. The brain is still the best tool out there for creating and evaluating ideas, but computers far outstrip us in their ability to process massive amounts of data simultaneously. Using AI to track the movement of ideas amongst a community, and to choose which ideas are most likely to usefully stimulate which brains, we may be able to give "natural" memetic evolution a boost.

Finally, in the slightly more distant future, memetics may be the tool that gives us a serious shot at tackling some of human civilization's most fundamental problems. War, intolerance, corruption, and greed have been with us for so long that to most people the very suggestion of trying to eliminate them is hopeless idealism. Nevertheless, these things are ultimately just mechanical results of the aggregate brain states of the population. Seen from this perspective, "utopia" as such is merely an engineering challenge: how can we create cultural memes that discourage these behaviors, and that will be able to spread themselves to (near-)ubiquity? OK, so it's a monstrously difficult challenge, and it certainly is possible that genetics or "human nature" will eventually pose insurmountable obstacles to getting 100% of the way there. But again, any progress we can make down that road can have a very positive impact on the lives of billions of people. Of course, it's entirely possible that natural memetic evolution is already headed in this direction (there is certainly evidence to support such a claim), but speeding things along is still a worthwhile goal.

All of these applications are based on my own extremely minimal understanding of the science of memetics. As an engineer, my job is to take the stuff the scientists give me and figure out how to use it to change the world. So if you're into the science of memetics, I hope you'll take the time to donate your memes to me, and we'll see what we can do.

"Better" vs. "Better Adapted"

2011-08-16T00:00:00.000Z

In contemporary English, the word "evolution" has taken on a number of connotations that fall outside of the scientific usage of the word. For example, dictionary.com lists one definition as:

"a process of gradual, peaceful, progressive change or development, as in social or economic
structure or institutions."

This usage has the potential to confuse scientific discussions about evolution, such as this blog, so I thought I'd spend a post clearing things up a little.

There's a common misunderstanding that because life is evolving, it is therefore getting "better" in some universally meaningful sense. This is an especially tempting trap when looking back on the history of life on our planet: it certainly seems like today's life is just plain betterthan the simple single-celled organisms that dominated it a billion years ago. We are stronger, faster, and smarter - doesn't that show that evolution leads to progress?

The fallacy with the above logic is twofold. First, it relies on an entirely subjective (and fundamentally human-centric) view of what "better" means. Second, and more crucially, it conflates correlation with causation. Evolution does tend to result in changes that look like improvements to us, but that's not "why" they happen. They happen because stronger organisms can out-compete weaker ones; faster predators outrun slower prey; smarter hunters survive longer. In short, evolution finds ways to make organisms better at surviving and propagating, and it just happens that these same qualities are often lauded by human societies. (This apparent coincidence is memetically interesting in its own right, but that's a digression for another day.)

So what does all this mean for memetics? When we use the term "memetic evolution" what we're referring to is a process by which ideas (memes) that are better adapted to their environmenttend to produce more copies of themselves. Thus, understanding the environmental factors that affect memetic selection is essential to a useful exploration of the subject.

To illustrate this concept, consider the case of the meme "The Sun revolves around the Earth." For a long time this meme was quite successful: its environment consisted largely of human brains used to trusting immediate sensory data, with very little understanding of astrophysics. As the science memeplex (subject of an upcoming post!) took hold, however, the environment changed. Now many brains were accustomed to data-based analysis, could share astronomical observations from various times/locations, and began to understand the mechanics that govern our Universe. The meme consequently was out-competed in scientifically-minded brains, and today it's on the verge of extinction. (On a related note, we should all be thanking the Flat Earth Society for their diligent protection of endangered memetic species ;))

The memes that permeate and define our civilization are constantly evolving, but it's naive to think of them as evolving "towards" anything. As with genetic selection we might expect to see a trend towards greater complexity, and indeed this certainly seems to be the case. Most modern memeplexes are extremely complex; indeed it's hard to find a mainstream subject that doesn't have tens of thousands of pages written about it. However it's not hard to find memeplexes that are "bad" by any mainstream standard, and nothing in the structure of memetic evolution prevents them from coming to dominate the meme pool. On the contrary, history (not to speak of current events) is rife with instances of destructive memes gaining widespread traction.

As memeticists, our task is to understand how and why certain ideas spread while others die off. The point of this post is to convince you that how "good" or "bad" an idea is does not, in and of itself, affect its viability. We need to look deeper - and I hope to do so soon.

The Canonical Memeplex

2011-08-09T00:00:00.000Z

As promised last week, it's time to look at a concrete example of applying memetics to a real-world phenomenon. Luckily, I don't think we have to search very hard to find a good candidate: cooking recipes. As I hope to show below, studying these everyday creatures lets us exercise quite a bit of memetic machinery.

I'm taking the liberty of calling a recipe a memeplex, so maybe this is a good time to address some terminology. A reasonable person might ask, "What exactly is the difference between a meme and a memeplex?" It's a bit arbitrary, but I think of it this way: a meme is a single atomic concept, while a memeplex is a set of distinct ideas that are combined into a group. To use a very rough analogy, memes are like single cells while memeplexes are like multi-celled organisms. Recipes are a good example because the individual steps work together to create a whole which is more useful to its host (and therefore, presumably, more likely to propagate) than any individual step by itself.

It shouldn't be hard to convince the reader that recipes exhibit heredity. In fact if you've ever learned (or taught) a recipe, then you've already participated in copying a recipe memeplex. There are many possible methods for this propagation: parents teaching children, friends swapping tips, or (in the very recent memetic past) instructions posted on the Internet. Regardless of the mechanism the result is that a new brain has started hosting the memeplex, and in many cases that brain will go on to spread it to other hosts.

The variety of propagation mechanisms presents a good opportunity to contrast with traditional genetic evolution. In the biological world the DNA ecosystem has risen to more or less absolute dominance as the copying mechanism of choice. And it's no surprise, given how staggeringly effective it's proven. The memetic world is quite a bit less mature, however. Oral tradition, which was the only game in town until a few millennia ago, is weak in fidelity, fecundity, and longevity. Writing systems, and especially the printing press, helped considerably. However it wasn't until digital communication and storage that a mechanism anywhere close to DNA has been available to eager memes. (Memetic propagation channels are a fascinating subject in themselves, and I hope to explore them in an upcoming post.)

Variation in recipes is also satisfyingly consistent with the memetic model. Most people have had the experience of learning a recipe, and then over time experimenting and tweaking to try and improve on it. If you've been perfecting a recipe for five years and then your friend asks you to teach it to her, you certainly won't just teach her the original version. The memeplex has mutated, and this mutation is what your friend will go on to teach to her cousin. The mutation has out-competed its ancestor.

Again it's worth a pause to reflect on the nature of memetic mutation, which can be a little bit mind-bending because the instrument of mutation is the human mind. This is one of the places in memetics where we have to just be patient and wait for the neuroscientists to come to our rescue. What exactly is it that makes you decide to try adding that teaspoon of cinnamon? We don't know yet, but as with genetic mutation, the only really relevant point is that there is a more-or-less random source of variation in the system.

The final element of the evolution equation is selection, and again recipes are illustrative. It seems intuitively obvious that recipes which taste good will out-compete those that don't; recipes which are fast and easy will out-compete those which are slow and difficult. But memetic selection is a complex process, because it's inextricably tied to human psychology. A meme(plex) is well-adapted if and only if it is capable of getting a large number of human brains to adopt it. To say that this is a moving target is perhaps an understatement.

To me, the question of selection criteria is the most fascinating aspect of memetics. It seems hard to deny that the ideas already present in a brain have a definitive impact on its inclination to adopt or reject any new ideas it happens upon. A meme which is trying to make it in modern America faces very different challenges (and opportunities) from what it would in, say, medieval France. We can certainly see this in effect in recipes, by looking at the "traditional cuisines" of the world's cultures. People tend to develop tastes in accordance with what they're exposed to, and recipes which cater to those tastes have a leg-up on those from the outside. Incidentally, the non-linear feedback inherent in this process (memes compete; some are adopted; this creates a new set of criteria for the next round of selection) is part of what makes the idea of memetic modeling so daunting.

So there you have it, a tour of the memetic perspective. Next time you're cooking your favorite meal, remember that you are actually just being used by a pattern of ideas selfishly seeking to propagate itself. Just be thankful that it's chosen a fairly symbiotic means of doing so - it knows it can get you to spread it by being delicious!

Memetics As A Science

2011-08-02T00:00:00.000Z

In my first post I tried to present the case for why memetics is a field worth studying. However, like any infant branch of human inquiry, it faces quite a few challenges. Rather than leaving these as elephants in the room, I'd like to spend a few words clearing the air. If we're going to try and proceed down the path of understanding memetic evolution, we have to be honest with ourselves about what we can and can't expect to achieve.

The good news is that if we define memetics broadly (as I attempted to do), it's really only a small step away from very well-established schools of scientific thought. In fact it's hardly even a new theory; one could easily call it merely a different lens through which to view the fields of anthropology, sociology, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience. All of these fields, in some form or another, study the structure of human brains and how they change and interact. Memetics only suggests that we think of these interactions in terms of the patterns being copied, rather than the organisms hosting them.

The bad news is that while this lens feels very satisfying and intuitive, it's difficult to apply any sort of scientific method to its investigation. For starters, attempts to design experiments to validate memetics seem quite problematic. There are massive practical challenges in trying to control for all the variables that are inevitably involved in the transmission of memes. You would somehow have to account for the precise mental/emotional state of every participant in the study, an all-but-impossible feat. Beyond that, there are non-trivial ethical problems with trying to manipulate another person's ideas, even if only for scientific inquiry. Given these challenges, it seems optimistic to hope for a 21st century Mendel to come along and demonstrate memetic heredity.

Another method which often comes up is to point at historical or contemporary ideas or beliefs, analyze them from a "memetic perspective," and show how the observed result fits the prediction. While this isn't a completely useless approach, it is one to treat with extreme skepticism. Such hindsight predictions can very easily over-simplify the conditions to result in a neat story, while ignoring equally (or more) plausible arguments which would have predicted an opposite outcome. It's the responsibility of the memetics community to hold this type of argument to a high standard, and call shenanigans where appropriate.

All that said, I do believe that looking at the world through the memetic lens can yield some very interesting observations. After I started thinking memetically, many aspects of human civilization that otherwise appeared inexplicable suddenly seemed fairly obvious. Even applying the high standard I called for above, I believe we can identify some cases where a memetic model really does bring some novel explanatory power to the table. Of course, one of these by itself doesn't prove anything; neither do two or five or ten. But if we continue finding ways in which the model helps us understand reality, then sooner or later we'll have convinced ourselves that it's true.

As always, pioneering new science takes patience and perseverance. It's going to feel like we're groping in the dark for a while, but the rewards of finding the light switch are substantial indeed. So, let's forge ahead!

An Introduction to Memetics

2011-07-26T00:00:00.000Z

Today I'm kicking off a new blog on a topic in which I've developed a keen interest: memetics. Let me state up front that I have no particular credentials or expertise on the subject. I'm just an enthusiast who's read a couple books. But I'm hoping to start some discussions, because I think the field has some real potential.

There's a lot of controversy out there as to what memetics is really about. So in the interest of clarity, let me say what it means to me: memetics is the study of the evolution of ideas. "Evolution" isn't just a biology term; it's a general name for what happens in any system with heredity, variation, and selection. It is a simple but extraordinarily elegant algorithm for producing complexity out of randomness. What we mean by "ideas" is more complicated, so let me digress for a moment.

Human brains are truly remarkable machines. A massive network of billions of neurons combine to provide all of our thoughts, memories, feelings, and beliefs. When we believe something such as "2+2=4" or "red means stop, green means go" that belief is somehow represented within the structures of our brain. When we share our ideas with others, and they decide to agree with us, their brain's structures are altered in turn to store that belief. Thus we can say that something has been "copied" from our brain to theirs. That something is an idea or, to use memetic terms, a meme.

Memetic evolution happens because this copying process is selective: not every idea that you hear or see successfully takes hold as a belief in your brain. Many are not interesting, or obviously false ("2+2=5" is not a very commonly held belief). In fact, your brain has evolved an incredibly sophisticated set of filters for choosing which memes to adopt. This leads to a fierce competition amongst the memes of the world: those which are best adapted to get themselves propagated will tend, over time, to dominate the population.

It's important to be extremely clear up front: memetic processes are unbelievably chaotic. Even understanding what's going on in a single brain at a given moment is still far beyond our current reach. Memetics deals with the interactions of millions of brains over hundreds or thousands of years. As a result, we shouldn't expect a bunch of neat equations that can be plugged into a computer to tell us what next year's most popular book will be about. It just doesn't work that way.

But it does provide a model for beginning to ask some pretty fundamental questions about the nature of human civilization. Ultimately, everything from art and culture to religion and politics is just ideas. And more to the point, human behavior is largely dictated by beliefs, which memetics shows us to be the product of a selection algorithm. If we can understand, even a little, how those selective forces shape our societies, maybe we can leverage that knowledge to make the world better.

In that hope, this blog will be exploring how memetic thinking can be applied to a wide range of subjects. Please come back, read along, and leave comments. With any luck, my memes and yours will manage to evolve into some good ideas!