[FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate

[┣glen┫]

I absolutely loathe the meme metaphor.  I don't usually agree with Nick's distinction between metaphor and analogy.  8^)  But here, I claim the meme isn't *anything* like a gene... or more clearly, there is no idea/thought construct that is anything like a gene.

To explain why I hate it so much, we can try to think deeply about the nazi that killed the antifa yesterday in Charlottesville and Trump's response to it (blaming all sides).  To be clear, anyone who continues defending their vote for Trump at this point should be held accountable for their idiotic choice.  But the Trump defender will say something like "Trump's not a racist or a nazi, even if some of his followers are."  And, "yes I support Trump.  But I'm not a nazi."  Pffft.  It flat out does not matter.  There is no analog for mutation or crossover that we can use to map Trump to his nazis.  The gooey milieu that flows from someone like Trump, whose life of privilege has severely decoupled him from reality, to the nazis, whose fear and hatred has severely decoupled them from reality, ... that gooey ball of ill-formed ideology can't be coupled to reality.  That's the problem with metaphor, ideology, and fantasy.  To make reductive attempts to model such fantasy with analogies to real things (like genes) is to conflate fantasy with reality.

To be as clear as I can, ideas can only track back to mechanisms when they sync up with reality.  That's why (observational) science is so successful.  There are (basically) 2 ways ideas can interact with reality: 1) methodologically and 2) neural correlates.  If a ball of ideas includes (in its not biological evolution) a method for regularly testing itself against reality, then it's possible to analogize between that ball of ideas and reality.  Neither Trump, nor his nazis include that.  So, the only remaining map we can draw from the ideas to reality is any neural correlates we can find.  And until we have those, mapping the ideas to genes dooms us to faulty (at best) or delusional (at worst) inferences.

Now, everyone I know who uses the words "meme" and "memetics" is relatively scientifically literate.  So, memetics *seems* plausible because it's only used by relatively clear thinkers about relatively reality-touching balls of ideas.  But I would bet money that memetics will fail miserably if we try to use it to explain or model fantasy-dominated people like Trump and his supporters.



On 08/12/2017 12:10 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> In the socio/political/religious/economic realm it seems that multiple simultaneous mutations are more obvious to observe.   I think we see humans mis-copy their memetic code (misinterpret their holy scriptures, or their parents or masters teachings, etc.) very often and sometimes in several dimensions at once. Perhaps the "robustness" of the underlying unit (a human being) allows for such wild mutations (highly antisocial behaviour by most measures) in a single copy, is what allows for what seems like some fairly fast memetic evolution at the social level?
> 
> i'm probably reaching here, but in this petri dish that is the USA with Trump or the first world with Trump, et al, or even the globally connected (bits, atoms, virus particles, memes, oh my!) first, second and third world there is likely to be some relatively unprecedented mutations recognized and even selected for.  Some could say that Donald Trump represents a half-dozen (or more) mutations in the socio/economic/political code and yet HE WAS SELECTED FOR and is almost surely malignant and seems to be metastasizing (other populist whitelash fascist movements around the first world).  The question in this metaphor might be whether the body (humankind) has the ability to fight back against this? It fits my Candide/Pollyanna idea that times such as these are good times to focus significant resources on simply "tending your own garden".    The world will have a better chance of fighting off this malignancy if it maintains it's overall health (social, economic, spiritual)
> otherwise.   We can't let this malignancy weaken our immune system any more than it already has.

-- 
␦glen?