Transcript Memes

Memes: Effects on
Consciousness
Presented by:
Aaron Cortez
Danielle Claus
Sonya Morales
Memes: What Art They?
“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas,
catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of
making pots or of building arches. Just
as genes propagate themselves in the
gene pool by leaping from body to body
via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate
themselves in the meme pool by leaping
from brain to brain via a process which,
in the broad sense, can be called
imitation.” – R. Dawkins, The Selfish
Gene
Memes: What Are They?
“If a scientist hears, or reads about, a
good idea, he passes it on to his
colleagues and students. He mentions
it in his articles and his lectures. If the
idea catches on, it can be said to
propagate itself, spreading from brain
to brain.” –R. Dawkins, The Selfish
Gene
Memes
“When you plant a fertile meme in
my mind you literally parasitize my
brain, turning it into a vehicle for
the meme's propagation in just the
way that a virus may parasitize the
genetic mechanism of a host cell.”
– R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Memes: Can They Alter
Consciousness?
• When an individual or group of individuals pass on
memes (cultural practices, social/political practices,
scientific theories) does this effect and possibly alter the
consciousness of those receiving the new input?
• If new beliefs, or ideas change an individual’s
perception of the world thus changing behavior and
actions, can this be correlated with altering
consciousness?
• We believe memes do effect consciousness, though the
effects may be more subtle and on a longer time scale
than the explicit examples we have studied in this
course.
Historical Examples of
Meme Propagation
• 1) Clinging to Old Memes (Danielle)
• 2) Karl Marx and Memes that construct social
superorganisms (Aaron)
• 3) Animals and Memes (Sonya)
• 4) Sir Isaac Newton: Effects on Perception of
the World (Danielle)
• 5) Meditation and Memes (Aaron)
• 6) Religion memes (Video Clip)
Memes in South America
• According to Howard Bloom when an
animal is vulnerable it tends to
gravitate to familiar things.
• When an animal is flourishing is when it
can afford to try new things, be more
frivolous with its energy
• This explains in an evolutionary way
why animals and people tend to revert
to old “memes” .
The Meme Advantage
• To illustrate this example is The Wari expansion in
the late middle horizon in South America
• The second half of 5th century ? Was marked with
a drought which caused suffering amongst the local
people
• The inconsistency of the water and agriculture lead
people to reinforce their deification of ancient
memes
• They believed in huacas which are “any person,
place or thing possessing a sacred or supernatural
quality” basically different memes that had
possessed different supernatural properties
(Golwaki and Malpass)
The Meme Advantage
• When the Wari invaded the land, there was no evidence
of warfare, they just built on pre-existing religious
centers or huacas (old and pre-existing memes)
therefore, a correlation was made between the ancient
ancestral memes and the dominant memes of the Wari.
Discretely associating the Wari with the Gods.
• One example was the site of Cerro Baul of Moquena
valley
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Cerro Bual was a site built to venerate the nearby Apus or snow
peaked mountains which were thought of as ancestral guardians
and had to be appeased by the local people
The Wari came in and facilitated worship of these mountains by
building ceremonial centers to honor the locally embraced memes
and also incorporated worship of their own memes.
• The peak “Arundane may have been
viewed as the ancestral origin of the
local groups, as well as the apu most
closely related to the altiplano and the
Tiwanaku realm. Picchu Picchu, on the
road to Wari itself, was the apu
associated with Wari regional identity
and, through its links to mountains
closer to Wari, with the imperial
Identity” (446).
The Meme Advantage
• Although the dominant tribe most likely
controlled access to the site, they did
facilitate veneration of local gods and
huacas which allowed the local people
to continue to cling to their original
memes
This is an explicit example of how memes
can be maintained and manipulated, by hosts of
different memes, to subliminally control a vulnerable
mass of people.
Memes: The Constructor
of Social Superorganisms
“Memes stretch their tendrils
through the fabric of each human
brain, driving us to coagulate in
the cooperative masses of family,
tribe, and nation.” –Howard Bloom,
The Lucifer Principle
Karl Marx
• From 1852 to 1864 Karl Marx sat
solitary in the library sifting
through books and compiling his
ideas.
• Little did he realize that he was
simply the tool for fragmented
memes.
Karl Marx
• Marx blended a collection of memes
successfully into a single
comprehensive work, thus creating a
new meme, which suggests that memes
can evolve.
• Remarkably his work, Das Capital
(1867), went virtually unnoticed for 50
years. The meme could not find the
proper hosts.
Karl Marx
• Marx’s meme needed minds capable of
organizing the masses.
• These minds were those of Lenin, Stalin and
their friends.
• Lenin became a firm believer in Marxism and
passionately wanted revolution in his
motherland Russia.
• But Lenin had to wait for the right time to
inject Marx’s meme into the mind of the
masses for a successful revolution.
Marx’s Meme Spreads
• In 1905, Czar Nicolas went to war with Japan
who annihilated the Russian Baltic fleet
• The people were becoming enraged at the
incompetence of their leader
• Russia’s battles on the eastern front during
WWI left the country in shambles.
• This was the tipping point, Russians resented
their leader more than ever
• Finally it was time for Marx’s meme to infect
the receptive mind of the masses who were
ready for change.
Marx’s Meme Spreads
• Lenin seized the opportunity, taking a
train to the Russian capital. He started
riots and bombarded the crowds with
Marxist slogans
• Marx’s meme finally had the receptive
minds it needed to create a social
superorganism
• By the second half of the 20th century,
the meme had control over the minds of
over 1.8 billion people. (Russia, China,
Korea, Cuba etc.)
Animals and Memes
• Do you think that animals portray
meme transmission or is this
unique only to humans??
Birds and Memes
• It can be argued that the learning and
imitation of birdsong is a meme
• P.F. Jenkins studied the Saddleback bird on
islands off coast of New Zealand
• Jenkins observed that they have 9 distinct
songs and males of a given group had a
distinct song and dialect
• Jenkins studied the song patterns of the father
and son, and concluded that they were not
inherited genetically
• The son as well, was able to adopt the unique
songs of his neighbors via imitation
Birds and Memes
• The learning and acquisition of birdsong is
analogous in many ways to human speech
• Both are learned early in life
• Both require listening to the sounds to imitate
as well as hearing their own production of
sound
• There is evidence of innate predispositions for
the learning and perception of the complex
vocalizations
• Songbirds and humans have a critical period
for learning
Birds and Memes
• Jenkins noticed that there was a song pool, and a
certain number of songs on each island, and
sometimes there was an invention of a new song,
which Jenkins referred to as cultural mutations,
because they were usually variations of the old
• This is an explicit example of how memes can
propagate from one mind to the next in birds
• These songs act as cultural identity to particular
groups of birds, just like language in humans
Isaac Newton:
Scientific Memes
• Proposed theory of gravity and invented
calculus
• His compilation of various physical and
mathematical laws changed the way he viewed
the world
• His memes spread over time to enable new
inventions and discoveries in astrophysics,
math, and engineering which collectively
changed the way we perceive the universe.
• Manifestation of new memes in brain=change
in perception=change consciousness
Meditators focus on Meme to
Achieve Meditative State
• In the Lutz et al. article, trained Meditators showed
robust gamma oscillations while focusing on
“unconditional loving kindness and compassion.”
• The focus was “non-referential compassion” which
means the meditators were not focusing on any
particular living beings, objects, memories or images
• This basically means the meditators were focusing on
the idea of compassion to achieve a meditative state
and not directing it to or deriving it from anything
physical!
• Ideas are memes. These results suggest that training the mind
to focus solely on a particular meme can produce an altered
state of consciousness which as Lutz et al. claim, is a unique
state compared to guided, mantra or object focused meditation.
• What do you think????
Review/Discussion ?’s
1) Do you believe that the propagation of
memes from one host to the next can alter
the consciousness of the recipients?
Review/Discussion ?’s
2) What is it about an individual or group
that makes them either vulnerable to
new memes or clingy to old memes?
Is it based off the
individual’s experiences or
the salience of the memes,
both, or something else?
Review/Discussion ?’s
3) It seems to be clear that memes propagate
from one mind to the next via imitation and
language. But where do they originate
from?
Are memes emergent properties
of the brain as suggested by
computational neuroscience?
!?!?Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff
believe truth, ethical, and aesthetic
values exist in the quantum geometry
of the universe!?!? Are memes stored
here?!?!????
References
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1.) Bloom, Howard (1995). The Lucifer Principle. New York: The
Atlantic Monthly Press.
2.) Dawkins, Richard (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University
Press.
3.) Bloom, Howard (2000). Global Brain. John Wiley and Sons
4.) Glowacki and Malpass. 2003 Water, Huacas, and Ancestor
Worship. Latin American Antiquity Vol 14 Dec 2003.
5.) Williams and Nash. Sighting the apu: a GIS analysis of Wari
Imperialism and the worship of mountain peaks World
archaeology vol 38 2006
6.) Schreiber, Katharina. 2005. Sacred Landscapes and Imperial
Ideologies: The Wari Empire in Sondondo, Peru. Archeaological
Papers od the American Anthropological Association Vol 14
7.) Kuhl, Patricia et al "Birdsong and Human Speech: Common
Themes and Mechanisms" Annual Review of Neuroscience Vol 22
March 1999