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From Jaron Lanier< There
are a number of frustrations confronting a skeptic who attempts to make sense
of the claims made by adherents of the "meme" idea. First and foremost among these
is that the notion is so variable as to provide no fixed target. In my conversations
with Richard Dawkins, including one that was transcribed and published (click
here), I have had the distinct impression that his ambitions for the term
are modest. He wonders if some cultural processes could be understood as
being like selfish genes. This caution is also found among certain other theorists,
who focus on unconscious or semi-conscious phenomena like dance steps as candidate
memes. Some meme-adherents (click
here) demand a rather strict application of the metaphor to genes, while others,
including Dennett, are ready to explore alternate biological models, such as viruses.
Then there are meme totalists who believe their one metaphor consumes the whole
of culture. Most perplexing is the fact that individual meme proponents display
a tendency to waver between these preferences according to who is in the audience.
I have more than once had the experience of watching a meme totalist turn into
a guarded meme speculator when confronted by a skeptic, only to expand again once
the skeptic left the room. Are memes a rhetorical
technique, a metaphor, a theory, or some other device? Depending on who you talk
to, they can be so wispy as to be almost nothing. As applied by Dennett in his
lecture, they make no predictions and cannot be falsified. They are no more than
a perspective. Just as a musician might try to listen to the silences, instead
of the notes, to gain a new experience of familiar music, Dennett asks us to consider
culture from the point of view of tropes instead of people.
I adore this exercise for it's esthetic value. As a young composer I used to use
my imagination to take on the identities of musical ideas. Imagine being equal
temperament. You would first come to consciousness in China and feel yourself
pounded out into the air from giant bells. You would feel the dark beating of
your imperfect harmonies like tingles in your toes. Then, with the death of an
Emperor, you would fall into a deep sleep, only to awaken centuries later pulsing
out of the fingertips and into the ears of a frenetic, sober, workaholic named
Bach. You would then feel your body opened up in new ways by a prying cosmic chiropractor-
this is how the successive generations of harmonic innovators would feel to you.
You would eventually flow out of the Beatles' space age chrome guitar pickups
and through the distorting diminutive speakers of pastel plastic Japanese radios.
Since neither Dennett nor anyone else identified with the meme movement is unambiguous
about what they are claiming, I'll answer Dennett's lecture in a similarly schizophrenic
fashion. First, I'll assume memes are poetry, then I'll assume they are theory.
If memes are poetry, then they are the poetry of a flight from Meaning. What is
communicated in Dennett's account of the origin of music is primarily that it
means nothing. Imagine for a moment that instead of music, Dennett had chosen
to provide a "just so" story to explain the origin and development of mathematics.
Dennett could have started in the same way, with an early hominid or some other
ancestor beating a stick for the hell of it, only in this case he or she would
have done so for a certain number of times. The "integers" meme was thus born.
Dennett could have created a scenario in which that beating is copied and elaborated
and gains its own momentum. This could develop in the course of millennia into
an elaborate culture of counting, including strange kinds of numbers, like the
imaginaries. It would also explain the often noted concurrence of musical and
mathematical talent. But something would be missing,
which is that mathematical ideas can actually be true or false. In the same way,
I am not ready to throw out the possibility that musical meaning is not entirely
culturally relative. As Dennett points out, "music" is a universal phenomenon.
It is probably the only human activity that is both universal and apparently elective.
Yet the variety of musical behavior is so extreme as to make one wonder how it
is possible for humans to perceive that universality.
By what stretch of the imagination is Inuit throat singing (which is accomplished
by two people kissing and using each-others' throats as resonators) in the same
category as John Cage sitting quietly in front of a piano, or Stanford students
staying up all night perfecting a new signal processing algorithm?
As much as Dennett wants to get rid of ontology, he is its slave. He relies on
meaning in order to communicate his attack on meaning. How can he even talk about
music? Music is not the only pattern of behavior that has become extremely elaborate.
Everyday greetings and small talk are extremely complex, and yet are not experienced
as profound. What is this profundity, this meaning in
music? Well, that's the hard question. Music is particularly odd because it sits
at the intersection of so many aspects of human experience and capability. It
is a little like math, a little like dance, a little like sex, a little like speech,
a little like drama. It is all these things and yet it is somehow instantly recognizable
as something distinct. I can report subjectively that
in extended work with other musical cultures, there is an eerie sense of common
musical understanding that is somehow possible. In learning to play musical instruments
from distant cultures I have had the distinct impression of entering a heretofore
inaccessible world of experience- as if learning to move and breath with these
artifacts conveyed qualities that words and even sounds could not. And yet it
is of course impossible to be certain of how much commonality I have ever truly
achieved, or indeed if there was as much distance as I initially perceived. I
can't know how much of the musical meaning I experience is illusory, except to
say that I believe it to be absurd to think that it is entirely an illusion. To
assert illusion is ultimately to assert both meaning and consciousness; an unconsciously
had, meaningless illusion is an absurd proposition. Such a thing could not be
detected. The question of meaning is one that Dennett
is simply deaf to. It is a subjective pleasure, like consciousness. It is part
of that world of things that cannot be empirically falsified, but undeniably constitute
an individual's subjective reality. A person's rapture at the hearing of Bach's
music can theoretically be characterized neurologically, and could then be emulated
by a computer. That the experience itself exists is known only to each individual
experiencer. I have speculated elsewhere (click
here) that Dennett might represent a class of person who does not have internal
experience. I meant this originally as a joke, and I still strongly suspect that
he and other "cybernetic totalists" are merely enjoying being smart alecs by tweaking
those of us ready to acknowledge that we have subjective awareness. But the logical
possibility exists that there are some people without internal experience, and
that would certainly explain our diverging philosophies.
Instead of trying to make the question of meaning disappear in the mists of a
single metaphor, science can better proceed by gradually helping to illuminate
components of meaning that can be subjected to empirical investigation. A genetic
component for such a universal phenomenon as music would not be surprising, and
indeed it has been proposed. It might at first seem surprising to see Dennett, of all people,
not even mention the work that has been done suggesting genetic components to
musical behavior, but it shouldn't be. The alliance between information centric
theorists and biological determinists is probably a temporary marriage of convenience.
Soon enough, I expect, meme theories will cause simplistic cybernetisists to jump
over to the cultural relativity side of the fence en masse.
There is an irony here. Dennett seems to be arguing that under a Darwinian lens,
culture would look like a "spandrel", which was a metaphor constructed by Stephan
J Gould and rather violently repudiated by Dennett. Now,
what of memes as theory rather than poetry? I have addressed this already elsewhere
in the Edge dialogs. So I will only summarize here.
Objection #1) There are no predictions that can be tested, no potential for falsification.
Memes are, as Dennett points out, open enough in their possibilities to account
for the wild variations imaginable in potential cultures. But there is no basis
for preferring memes over other potential equally open theories. Are memes more
testable than the vague obfuscations of recent "postmodern" philosophers? Or do
they merely adopt a cybernetic style that certain people find more comforting?
Objection #2) Ideas and other cultural elements are Lamarckian. That is one reason
why people didn't understand Darwin at first. God was supposed to have thought
the world into existence. Even people who were ready to question God had trouble
getting over the idea of ideas. Indeed, I have seen students adopt incorrect understandings
of genes because of the publicity for memes. They thought that genes must work
like ideas, and be able to influence each other on contact. Lysenko would have
loved memes. Objection #3) Ideas often have objective
value. Mathematical ideas can be proved. Scientific theories can be falsified.
Technologies can function, or fail. Political ideas have harder to assess but
real moral and ethical implications. A candidate for a virulent meme, such as
the music for a Diet Pepsi commercial, might truly be a lesser achievement than,
say, a late Beethoven string quartet- yet that judgement cannot exist in the framework
of memes alone. Furthermore, in all of the above cases people have created cultural
institutions that have formally, rationally improved human achievement in the
course of history. Culture is a watchmaker with vision, at least some of the time.
Objection #4) Culture doesn't generally suffer from constraints of the sort found
in biological processes. For instance, bad ideas typically don't really die, alas,
while the dominant mechanism of evolutionary selection is pre-reproductive death
(the other primary mechanism being mate selection). Your genetic traits were largely
selected for because your would-be ancestors with alternate traits were killed
by your actual ancestors or other organisms, particularly microorganisms- or starved
to death. In that sense, the ideas that perished in the library at Alexandria
were more like memes than any ideas in currency today. Furthermore, culture doesn't
generally have impassable species boundaries. Although cultures become isolated
on occasion, in a vast number of cases ideas flow into one another and selection
pressure, if it existed, could not be focused on a unit of potential change, as
it is in biological systems. Objection #5) Ideas and
other cultural phenomena do not necessarily have an inheritable substrate that
functions as a specification layer. Biological organisms are reducible to an evolutionary
interpretation to the degree that traits are described by genes. (As in: An undernourished
animal will be smaller than a well nourished genetic twin, so not all observed
traits are genetic.) In order for a meme theory to say anything it would have
to be able to identify some structure that could serve as the basis for reductionism.
It is possible that some human behaviors are not reducible. (In my experience,
for example, you cannot learn to play Indian classical music without becoming
immersed in Hindu culture, including a style of movement, of interpersonal and
intergenerational contact, and a great many other things that do not have names.)
Jaron Lanier
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