Where should I begin? Oh–I know. I believe the phrase that you are looking for is “I don’t understand memetics”. You can follow that up with a bit of introspection. Here, I’ll help you through it. First of all, I don’t expect you to believe in memetics…yet. I also don’t expect you to believe in memetics after you’re done reading this letter either. What would I know about thinking? I’m just a neuroscientist, and you know how we are.
I’ll begin again with a question. What does it take for something to exist? Let me take a stab at this one. Is seeing believing? Is measuring believing? I love my family. I would have a hard time pointing to that love though. I would have an even harder time measuring the love. I would probably resort to an argument loaded with logical and rhetorical fallacies. I would list things that I had done and say nonsensical things like “but you know how much I love you”. In the end I would have accomplished nothing. Well, almost nothing. After all of that, if I took a futuristic measuring tool and looked in my wife’s synapses or my son’s synapses, I would measure a change in the representational state in a specific network of neurons. It’s likely some dopamine and serotonin firing is going on but it’s such a tangled mess of stuff in there that I’d have a hard time pin-pointing the exact location. The point is that there are a collection of behaviors and artifacts that I can put out in the universe that when each of those people looks at them, they will create a representation of love in each respective mind.
I’ll begin again but from a different angle. The fact that that one can argue about the existence of a meme is, in a weird recursive way, proof of its existence. A meme is a representational state in a mind. When you think of the meme concept and you evaluate the plausibility of the said entity, you are manipulating a meme in your mind to see if it fits with the other existing memes and meta-memes in there. How does it feel plugged in with there with the other pieces of your world view? Does it shift your other schema, does it coincide with existing construals? Are you able to understand it? How much of life as you know it would you have to redefine based on this new-found understanding? Are there things in your life that would fall apart that are emotionally keeping you from expanding your umwelt to include that meme? That whole process is meme manipulation. Whatever you’re shifting around, the Google searches that you are doing, the changes trends in your browser history and whatever other actions you take in the process were all triggered by some representational state in your mind.
I’ll begin again but from another experience. Here I am a person surfing the internet and I come across your article; let’s say I’m coming from a position of unconscious ignorance. I’ve never heard of a meme and my life has not beef affected in the slightest by its absence. I lack that representational state in my mind. But now I’ve seen the word “meme”. For now, it doesn’t have a valence in my mind. I couldn’t care less about it. For that matter, let me pretend that I haven’t had over a two decades of genetics and neuroscience training just for shiggles. I read an article written by an apparent authority (after all, he is writing for a big Psychology blog) and he gives me a great explanation of genetics and seems to be an expert on the topic(or else he wouldn’t be speaking so authoritatively on it- at least not on a blog read by thousands of people). Now keep in mind that I don’t have two decades of genetics training so I haven’t learned about epigenetics, the environmental effects on gene transcription or fundamental replicator theory. I have no idea that prions replicate by inducing a conformational change in another nearby prion through proximity and that there are multiple other generally accepted models of replication. Again, I don’t have any of those representations in my mind, so I’m going to accept the authority’s article that he authored as a knowledgeable expert. Even if I walk away NOT believing in memetics I have still created a representation, built a model albeit faulty, that I am now carrying around in there. Several changes have taken place in my mind.
I won’t begin again. I’ll pick up from where I left off in the last paragraph. I have forgotten that I read that article on Psych Central and that several of my friends have shared it and discussed it and built representations based on different life experiences. Some of them have gone on and done some more Googling, which is tickling Google’s algorithms and making the likelihood that a meme-related entity will pop up in each of their search results. Ignore the fact that there are other derived meaning of memes that are going viral and demonstrating variation and selection all over the place. Eventually, a lot of those people will come across the use of the word in varied contexts and will continue to trigger their association processes to retrieve that representation, or maybe create another representation not realizing that they are the same thing.
In the end there is an outside of mind entity that we are each representing in mind. Each of us has a different set of filters with which we approach that entity. I won’t go into the details of the semiotics and interactors and artifacts as tools used by memes and of actions as symbols. I will however point out the irony in a person loudly proclaiming that mental representations don’t exist as he is in the process of making the very same mental representations in thousands of minds. I’ll point out that in many of those minds it’s entertaining and that we will patiently wait for your understanding of memetics to reach aperceptive mass.
You see, that’s the thing about memetics. Until you understand it, it does not exist to you. Once you understand it you will see it everywhere. Information is everything and memes are information.