The Meme Machine

Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: A very good introduction to memetics. Quite speculative in the last chapters, but the author acknowledges it (at least she must be praised for her honesty !). Her tendency to apply memetics to almost any subject can be disturbing, and I haven't been quite convinced by some of her points, but her ideas are always challenging and makes you wondering. She doesn't have all the answers, but she asks an awful lot of good questions !

Rating:
Summary: progress along a personal path...
Review: Don't let the polemics below scare you. Susan Blackmore is simply a person who's trying to understand the world. She just happens to be brilliant, as well. Much of the criticism expressed is by camouflaged Creationists who are having hissy-fits over a well-argued and deeply-meaningful work

This is a reader-friendly book that introduces concepts gradually and simply. Blackmore presents an amiable personality that acts reassuringly to calm the fears this subject usually provokes. This amiability is a welcome attribute in contrast to the detached orientation Dawkins presents himself. And Blackmore's friendliness does much to neutralize the defensive posture assumed (necessarily) by writers in the field.

Amazingly, Blackmore opens the possibility of a morality based upon the state of the art of present molecular biological and neurocognitive research. This marks the emergence of "something new under the sun" and is exciting to contemplate.

Rating:
Summary: Popular Intro to the Memetic Theory
Review: This is a very ambitious book that sets out to grant the theory of memes, invented by Richard Dawkins and expounded upon by Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, a scientific and logical audience.

Ultimately, this book falls far short as a scientific and logical justification for the memetic theory, but that does not totally disqualify this book from being a good one. Susan Blackmore provides the general public with a very good introduction to the idea of the meme and its philosophical and personal implications. I highly recommend this book to anyone unfamiliar with the concept of memes, but be warned that Dawkins or Dennett can provide a better introduction to the non-general-public or philosophically literate layman.

The theory of the meme needs to be tested philosophically and scientifically with other competing theories in order for it to be fully justified and accepted. The meme itself is a very fascinating and tempting concept.

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Summary: Understanding human behavior...
Review: I've always thought information had a life of its own; now I understand it does. If you study the content of this book carefully, you will suddenly understand how you think, and why people behave (sometimes irrationally) as they do. It provides a good predictive framework for predicting human behavior, and if this interests you, this book is for you. Caution: It will challenge every belief you hold dear, including what it means to say, "I". Ms. Blackmore has distilled memetics down to make a work as important as Darwin's, and of more interest to the common person.

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Summary: THE LOGOS MACHINE
Review: Richard Dawkins, in spite of is tallent, is a man lost between matter and mind. According to his metaphysical naturalism (typical of XIX century), all thought, all feelings and all emotions are ultimately the product of matter, mutations and selection. There is no self. Those who believe there is, are the modern equivalent of thosdes that used to believe in fairy tales. There is no "ghost in the machine". But if one takes Dawkins' materialist reductionism to its ultimate logical consequences, there is nothing beyond matter that would warrant the truth of our perceptions. Reason and intelligence have no place inside Dawkins' autopoietic naturalist system. What we designate as mind is just a bunch of particles and genes in a random movement. No one knows exactly where they came from, where they are going, and what they are up to. Where, when and how did nothing "mutate" to become something? What mechanism "selected" beeing from non-beeing? Here Richard Dawkins is still in Ground Zero. Matter by itself gets darwinian theories nowhere, because ultimately it undermines our ability to believe there is such thing as a mind or a reason able to formulate and sustain plausible theories. But what if post-modern idealism is right? What if Dawkins is nothing but a prisoner of his own thought, epistem, paradigm, "set of memes", unable to connect with "reality".

What it there is no "reality" as there is no "self"? What if the darwinian worldview, with its concepts like "matter", "mutations", "selection", "facts", "evidence", etc., is just one more human construct, a product of the "meme machine", designed to fight an ideological, political, moral and spiritual battle against the once dominant judeo-christian "memes" and paradigms, whith no true connection with what is out there? Again, this line of thought gets evolutionary theories nowhere, because it denies the possibility of connecting to something "real" beyond mind, thought and words. Both naturalism and idealism lead to a dead end.
In my view, it makes perfect sense to overcome modernist radical naturalism, and post-modernist radical idealism, combining science and religion, without falling in pre-modern superstition. This approach (more XXI century) seems to me more promissing, in a time when some astronomers are beginning to say that only a miracle could have produced the Big Bang, and when all biologists (including Dawkins), keep refering to the DNA code as a literary masterpiece. What's more, the language of intelligence and design is always present in every TV documentary about Nature. This combination could be attained by exploring the possibilities opened by the philosophical and religious concept of The Absolute Logos, (word; reason; "Logos Machine"), that is beyond nature, and combining it with scientific evidence if intelligence, complex-specified information (William Dembski), irreducible-complexity (Michael Behe), that we now can get from design theory, probabilities theory and complexity theory. This would certainly make more sense than to keep insisting, in a desperate "just so" mode, and against all appearance and all probabilities, that the DNA code, with its trillions of complex specified instructions, along with the fine-tuning of the universe for life, could have been the result of blind chance. This type of inference, would be unthinkable anywhere else outside neodarwinism. This openess to the Absolute Logos, would make it possible for us understand and sustain scientific inquiry and progress, and to try to know more about our own reason, our intelligence, our sense of morality, our freedom, our failures, our sense of guilt and our responsibilities, that is, to know more ourselves and our place in this world. It would also invite us to try to know more about The Logos that became flesh and lived among us.

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Summary: An explication of the meme concept.
Review: To make clear the meaning of; explain.
[Latin explicre, explict-, to unfold, explain : ex-, ex- + plicre, to fold; see plek- in Indo-European Roots.]
I am receiving a copy of this book shortly from B&N because my father won't permit his credit card to be used. You may be interested to know that he is a Mormon, and so am I. What you must understand in the realm of memes and thought contagion is that while we may be very well educated, we do not necessarily become educated through a natural process. What must be understood is that many major religions, including the catholic church and the mormon church as well as other religions, engage in the practice of dividing the brain stuff which our minds are made up of. What must be understood is that the only people, as Susan Blackmore says in her online chapter who really make a difference in really clarifying the meaning of all of the mathematics and psychology and other related things are our parents and friends. In order to see things properly their must be intelligent debate about pressing bits of intricacy in our modern world, in the news or whatever resources you have, in the classes you take in college and in their various peculiarities. To succeed well and quickly in college is not necessarily the point. It is preferable in many elemental circumstances where the poor quality of friends and teachers can lead to a poor quality of mind. To be truly successful is to, in a way take advantage of your resources measuredly. It is simply contrary to logic to believe that if you raise more than three children in the modern America, you can expect to be truly improving the lives of the poorer and the people rising through the job and education ladder. All you can really be doing is taking jobs that aren't yours and locking everyone else not in your class and not believing as you do, in prison. Memes must be passed to children so as to protect their basic rights as human beings. Recently I had a lesson in church where the teacher stated from a former "Prophet of God" that our "Power" to do a thing increases with our attempts to do a thing. That is wrong, no matter how you may feel uncomfortable being not being dictator of the world, you must participate in the human drama in such a way as to be more than simply elemental. It is dangerous to play any other sort of game. You must recognize what is harmful for your health and for other's health. Currently Osama bin laden has been having alot of children in a place where there can be no real future for them in terms of advancement. He raises new children like there is no tomorrow, secure in the belief that surely there must have been a logical reason for his parents' raising 55 of them. Life will be cheap in the middle east in the near future. Once again please understand that we must prepare memetically for a sustainable future, we are not so capable of obtaining otherworldly habitats as we may believe, and they may never equal the quality of our current one. Memetically we must restrain ourselves just as the Chinese have so logically done. Memes are elemental, the more children you have especially at small age differences, but nevertheless at large age differences too. The more elemental will be their minds, and the more they are moved into a changing environment and into faith and trust, the more rituals of eating and exercise are practiced ignoring the kind of sustenance and the kind of exercise, and the diversity that is possible, the more religious minds will stagnate. Religious minds do stagnate more than any other mind. But there is a changing wind in the air. ...Religious minds do not HAVE to stagnate and we have more diverse ways of using them and our bodies and muscles than ever we have had before. I have read Thought Contagion by Aaron Lynch and that was a very good book. Please try to diversify and not be locked into your lives and your work to the exclusion of proper rest. Susan Blackmore makes many interesting points in her online text. One of them is that memes are only memes when handed from parent to child, take that to heart. Understand that ancient religions are not the only means to progress in this world, indeed they can be a hinderance. Try to diversify on your own.

Rating:
Summary: Thought-provoking, but shaky science and annoying author
Review: The premise of memetics is resoundingly fascinating. This is true whether you believe in it as a science or not. If nothing else, memetics can provide a very different way of thinking about the evolution of language and as a way to describe the construction of thought. However, Blackmore overextends herself in her apparent attempts to establish memetics as genuine science. For example, her differentiation of memetics from social learning is tenuous at best. The writing style is a bit self-ingratiating as well. It's an interesting read, but you can get the main gist from the first third of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Hoodwink'd with faery fancy
Review: 'The Meme Machine' clearly demonstrates Susan Blackmore's fascination with the examination of key questions viv a vis human existence. However, I find the whole notion of memes a little hard to accept: meme theory is based upon somewhat shaky philosophical foundations. In placing such emphasis on imitation how does Blackmore explain the origin of ideas? Process is conflated with genesis: where did the first meme come from? Did it float down from the ether and penetrate the tabula rasa of an individual's mind? Examined in basic terms of cause and effect, meme theory cannot account for the origin of human ideas and action. This teleology leads to a crude reification: meme theory illegitimately attributes agentic potential to memes, which in reality only exist as ideas or thoughts generated by purposive individuals. Susan Blackmore wants the reader to recognise how human beings are shaped by external cultural milieux, but she does this to the exclusion of acknowledging how these are, in turn, shaped by individuals. Meme theory fails to capture the dialectical interplay between individual agency and broader societal context.

Ms Blackmore is also eager to pre-empt criticism that 'The Meme Machine' cannot explain consciousness or free will. These issues are addressed in small, separate sections in Chapter 18. Because the long reach of the meme struggles to explain these 'problematic' philosophical issues they are conveniently underplayed. The attempt to understand the human mind by displacing the self and filling it with memes hardly seems a credible attempt to illuminate the amorphous, inexplicable quality of mind. Some scientists seem higly indignant that consciousness cannot be explained by reference to a neural correlate; therefore, its significance has to be peripheralised. Arguing that pouring cornflakes requires a person to be conscious but does not require consciousness portrays pointless semantic quibbling. It does prove, however, that language made for immanent knowledge is incapable of grasping questions that remain stubbornly transcendental.

Whilst 'The Meme Machine' legitimately warns against the notion of some majestic, unified, self-constructed ' I ', the idea that the mind can be reduced to memes is ridiculous. Whilst individuals may imitate others, they also have the ability to subvert, reformulate and resist memetic influences. Daniel Dennett's quote on p22 referring to the human mind as "an artefact created when memes restructure a brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes" would be better suited to the realm of science fiction.

'The Meme Machine' presents another scietific endeavour to provide a totalising, ahistorical elucidation of the complex accumulation of interacting individuals spanning whole societies. Unfortunately, reducing life to imitation and deploying a catchy scientific term which sounds like 'gene' is pitifully inadequate. An explanation of the human condition based upon a weird notion of mythical mind parasites is as equally nonsensical as the paranormal mumbo-jumbo that Ms Blackmore labasts. It seems absurd that thinkers such as Dawkins, who pride themselves on rigorous scientific analysis, promote such an absurd, misguided theory. It appears that Blackmore and Dawkins are as 'hoodwink'd with faery fancy' as the rest of us!

Rating:
Summary: Pop science, a little overdone
Review: I was initially very interested in Memes, but I'm troubled by the way in which Memes are presented in this book an in other recent works (Darwin's Dangerous Idea). The idea of an analogy between inherited cultural information and genetic inforrmation is one thing. But the analogy has been taken too far and made ridiculus. This is pop science gone crazy. Instead of grand BS, get to the facts. Instead of loose references, demonstrate this phenomena. A good place to begin would be in psychological laboratory work.

Rating:
Summary: Spreading the word
Review: This is a very good book. Problems first: Blackmore jumps between science and speculation throughout the book and that was frustrating at times. I was not absolutely certain about the books identity as I read it. What was in it for me? I personally liked three specific parts of this book. 1) I really enjoyed the sections on evolutionary psychology and those related to sexual selection. Blackmore excels here and I felt like we were really moving! 2) Her arguments about altruism are compelling. 3) Her toying with the new agers was very fun. Now, should you own this book? You bet. Memetics is in it's infancy. From D.D. to R.B. we learn useful ideas that ultimately give us a better picture of the world we live in...and create everyday.