How do you pronounce "meme"? "Meem" (rhymes with "dream")
What is a meme? Memes are the basic building blocks of our minds and culture, in the same way that genes are the basic building blocks of biological life.
Isn't memetics just a fancy name for _________ (fill in the blank with "cultural evolution", "behavioral psychology", "sociobiology", or anything else)? Why is this anything new?
The breakthrough in memetics is in extending Darwinian evolution to culture. There are several exciting conclusions from doing that, one of which is the ability to predict that ideas will spread not because they are "good ideas", but because they contain "good memes" such as danger, food and sex that push our evolutionary buttons and force us to pay attention to them.
Who invented memes? Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins is credited with first publication of the concept of meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.
If memes control our thoughts and therefore our actions, what about free will?
We continually understand more and more about how our bodies and minds work. We now know that trillions of organic nanomachines in the cells of our bodies work together to give us life. Neither that understanding nor the new understanding of our minds that memetics will give us should affect the philosophical question of free will.
In Virus of the Mind, you seem to neglect truth as a main reason that memes replicate, focusing instead on psychological button-pushing, evangelism, and other non-obvious means. Why?
First, the theoretical reason. Our minds evolved to support survival and reproduction in the ancestral environment (Stone Age). The kind of truth that would have aided that would have pertained to knowledge of terrain, seasons, and so on. These things are concrete and simple. Our society today is so complex that concrete and simple things that "make sense" are likely to out-compete "true" memes that are less appealing. Second, empirical evidence shows that students are getting worse and worse at knowledge tests.
You talk a lot about living life in "Level 3." What does that mean?
It means not just living consciously, but consciously choosing the memes I allow to program me. Read this.
