If the reader is unaware of what a meme is, they certainly have much company but ignorance makes a poor defense. The well known evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins first established the term in his monumental book The Selfish Gene originally published in 1976. The meme model has turned out to be very flexible and powerful in describing and predicting human behavior among other things. So it has grown 'evolved' as it were into an official word and a scientific concept. Hence the book I'm now referring to is the 1999 work The Meme Machine written by Susan Blackmore.

The problems of sociobiology in explaining very complex human behaviours such as the intricacies of altruism within the Darwinian model are notable. And the Meme concept appears certainly to me anyway as the best way to resolve these problems. Meme's as self-perpetuating self-replicating entities independently evolving of human DNA. Memes here are ideas, and ideas become quite powerful when the get inside those big human brains with all that computing capability as well as the social propagation power of speech, writing and the Internet. But I'm not going to rewrite the very well done book.

"Memes can gain an advantage by becoming associated with a persons self concept." Page 232. Explains why when attacking a persons ideas it so often is interpreted as an attack on the person themselves, people feel offended and if you don't agree with their opinion you're are just wrong and against them and everything they hold dear.

"Humans, like many of their primate relatives, have evolved to defer to high status males and to be afraid of them." Page 178, God is a symbolic version of the dominant ape, with all the accoutrements of modern knowledge and culture thrown in to generate fear and genuflection. This also provides a cogent explanation of our phallocentric perceptions of God.

"The greatest altruism should be shown to those who are capable of being convinced." Page 173.

The author's conclusions concerning consciousness is especially imaginative if not simply nihilistic, Buddhist Nietzschian nihilist anyway. Negation of free will and the illusion of self-direction, that the best means to deal with the avalanche of information and ideas is to just focus on the now and act rather than decide. Well that has a modicum of legitimacy that unconscious decisions are simpler and often more accurate but to then try and pawn this whole thing off as a way of life is disingenuous and unlikely to say the least. Ironically I think it's just a demonstration of a doomed meme because it doesn't provide an answer, it doesn't provide a way out or a solution or an alternative. Just a revisitation of fate used so often to explain away events void of historical forces. A parallel is clear between fate and memetic force, those ideas that get into the mind and compel actions or similarly the subconscious not-free-will idea that we automatically follow those memetic influences - very fatalistic.

Susan Blackmore demonstrates the power of memes both in themselves and as a model to explain social phenomena but then acquiesces to that as if we have no power, as if genetic influence is negated and humans are just hopeless pawns to these forces, or even worse nothing BUT a summation of these forces. And I think the meme model may have certain self-fulfilling aspects that could negate it's validity.

Meme's aren't the ultimate reason for human behaviour because biology and genetics still plays a significant role another vector to add into the equation of direction. We can see this in how different peoples, cultures and races interact to the same virulent messages from agit-prop to advertising within polyglot countries like America or Brazil. And this is likely the authors most glaring error that being the treatment of every mind, of every person as basically interchangeable as equally capable of being corrupted by memetic influences. It's as if she wants to write genetic influences out of the picture either out of convenience for the hypothesis or more likely because of the erroneous assumption that memetic evolution is more powerful and more influential. Consciousness or what is ME has always been a difficult answer even for metaphysics let alone for science so it's understandable the authors hypothetical answer has a few rough edges.

Yet I don't fully see why one can't use the memes, pick ones 'you' want? Who cares what the 'you' really is it's a myth of convenience anyway. I think 'you' is not that singular nor that transient anyway its a summation of experiences memories, fears, emotions, ideas and memes and all that. The alternative, the answer is that one has to with prudence and care select and avoid the memetic influences. And so what if the memes are just crafting themselves - is that any worse than lack of free will being a bag of protein floating around in a sea of influences and memetic slave-drivers? Isn't that pretty much what most people already do anyway - slaves to circumstance? On the contrary one should think ahead, one should plan and study the past and chart a course. But if anyone doesn't want to they certainly have that option indeed that's the default anyhow! Genetics matters because even as she explained creativity comes from having a brain with the right design to be able to mix and interpret memes to deliver a unique and valuable product.

In conclusion memes are a powerful force and one worth understanding as well as the attempt to control - sort of a new spin on propaganda theory. If nothing else it's a new view on environment versus genetic influences, a good start towards a holological solution. 22.04.01