Memes and religions.
Among many anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, it has recently become fashionable to dismiss all religions as memes - parasitic mental processes which propagate in the same manner as chain letters [Dawkins 1989, Dennett 1995]. In this view, religious belief is a self-perpetuating delusion.. A meme (rhymes with 'dream') may be defined as any self-referential belief-system which contains within itself the instructions for its own propagation. Memes are often described as the cultural equivalents of computer viruses.
A meme carries exactly the same psychological motivation as a chain letter - "If you propagate me then something nice will happen, if not then something horrible will happen". In order to justify themselves against attack by reason, memes place absolute reliance on faith, which is seen as being superior to reason. They also contain self-referential or circular claims to the truth such as "This meme says it is the divine truth. Since it is the divine truth whatever its says must be true. Therefore it must be divine truth because it says so and all competing memes must be the work of the devil".

These two types of self-referential statement "propagate me" and "I am the only truth" provide the driving force for memes to invade the minds of their hosts. In addition, many memes contain the instructions "Help people who believe in this meme, attack people who do not". These commands being the ultimate cause of all religious wars throughout the centuries.

The general defining features of all memes can thus be seen to be self-referential 'closed-loop' type of circular statements, and a strong tendency towards intolerance. The science of the study of memes, their internal structures and modes of propagation is known as memetics (by analogy to genetics - how biological entities propagate themselves).

More detailed analysis will usually show the following features:
Like a virus or parasitic worm, a successful meme must perform two actions:

- Ensure it takes up long-term residence in its host.
- Bring about the conditions for its spread.

To establish itself in the mind of its host it will use some or all of the following mechanisms:

[1] Promise heaven for belief.
[2] Threaten eternal punishment in hell for disbelief.
[3] Boost the believers' egos by telling them they are 'chosen' or superior to believers in false memes.
[4] Disable the faculties of disbelief ('immune response') by claiming that faith is superior to reason.

[5] Establish itself as the One True Meme, usually by some sort of holy book containing a circular self-referential argument such as:

X is the one true meme. We know X is the one true meme because The Source of Universal Truth has approved X. We know The Source of Universal Truth has approved X, because X contains statements which say so. We know what X says is true because X is the one true meme.

Once it has parasitised the mind of its host, a meme needs to propagate itself. A successful meme will contain instructions for some or all of the following:

[6] Holy war - convert or kill all unbelievers .
[7] Intimidation and terrorism - threaten and discriminate against unbelievers.
[8] Enforced social isolation or even death to apostates. (An apostate is a host which has cured itself of a meme-infection. Apostasy is especially dangerous to the meme because it might pass on meme-resistance to others).

[9] Fecundism - encourage true believers to breed faster than believers in false memes.
[10] Censorship - prevent rival memes from reaching potential hosts (a theological doctrine known as 'Error has no rights').
[11] Misinformation - spread lies about rival memes. Demonise them - the bigger the lies the more likely they are to be believed.

From: www.geocities.com/scimah/memes.htm

Susan Blackmore says that "The vast majority [of memes] make up the very stuff of our lives, including languages, political systems, financial institutions, education, science and technology. All these are memes (or conglomerations of memes), because they are copied from person to person and vie for survival in the limited space of human memories and culture."
More examples from Susan- "Memes are stories, songs, habits, skills, inventions and ways of doing things that we copy from person to person by imitation. "
If we "dismiss all religions as memes" then should we also dismiss all other memes, including: secular humanism, ethics, Darwin's theory of evolution, or even the " meme meme"?

In 1976 Richard Dawkins introduced the word meme in his best-selling book, The Selfish Gene. The book is all about Darwinian evolution and describes the process as information getting copied over and over, variations appearing among copies, and selection of some variants over others. Dawkins' term for the information that gets copied is "replicator" and he said that evolution doesnt just happen with genes, but works with any replicator. As an example, the meme. Memes getting copied from one person to another, just like genes from parent to child, dont always get copied exactly. In repeating a story, we sometimes forget details, change a name or embelish a little, just like in a game of telephone. Some variations keep getting copied again and again, some die out, and there you have it, evolution.

Since the introduction of the meme in 1976, its been copied over and over from one brain to the next, so that today, lots and lots of people know about memes. It got copied into my brain, now im putting another copy (with variations) here, and anyone reading this is now infected. Clearly, "meme" is a meme. (How's that for self-referential?)
But now we can see that the definition of meme given in the article above- "...any self-referential belief-system which contains within itself the instructions for its own propagation " -is not an exact or even complete copy of the original definition given by Dawkins. We are dealing with something much bigger. Again, i have to quote Blackmore:



"Thinking memetically gives rise to a new vision of the world, one that, when you "get" it, transforms everything. From the meme’s-eye view, every human is a machine for making more memes—a vehicle for propagation, an opportunity for replication and a resource to compete for. We are neither the slaves of our genes nor rational free agents creating culture, art, science and technology for our own happiness. Instead we are part of a vast evolutionary process in which memes are the evolving replicators and we are the meme machines.
This new vision is stunning and scary: stunning because now one simple theory encompasses all of human culture and creativity as well as biological evolution; scary because it seems to reduce great swathes of our humanity, of our activities and our intellectual lives, to a mindless phenomenon."
"In other words you and I and all our friends are the products of two blind replicators, the genes and the memes. "


Blackmore's conclusion : the "self" is really just a co-adapted meme-complex.

Having said all that, now i'd like to discuss memes and religion in this context.
i'd like to point out that the original versions of Islam and Christianity do not fit the article's version
of the meme, and that the description of "religion" given in the article seems to be the religion of some crazy person- "Help people who believe in this meme, attack people who do not" - that has nothing to do with Islam or Christianity.
We already saw that the article's version of the meme doesnt agree with Dawkin's original version, and it's pretty clear that the examples of "religion" are very distorted crazy versions of the originals.

I used kindofa lot of space on defining memes and giving examples, that last one being the weirdest that i'd like to say again a little more clearly: the conscious you that is not your spirit nor your body is a conglomeration of memes.

As for religion and spirituality I'm not going to get into a big definition except to say that prayer, meditation, dance, ect. as a spiritual practice, is all about transcendence. Both Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns have the same transcendent experience when they meditate / pray. Scans of their brains show the same quieting-down of activity in the same parts of the brain- called the orientation area. During "normal" consciousness, this part of the brain is constantly checking and updating on where your "self" ends and the rest of the universe begins, your own "personal borders", as it were. Maybe Shawn can give us more info on this, i'm just quoting from memory.
During a transcendent (spiritual) moment, as activity quiets down in these brain areas, the "self" is said to fall away, and consciousness remains, expanding in all directions throughout the universe.
This is an utterly real experience, say neurologists, not imagined. It is at this point that all memes have fallen away, or ceased to replicate in your brain, because "spiritual awakening" or "enlightenment", whatever you want to call it, is not memetic. This is not something you can learn from someone else, not something you can do by imitation or emulation.
If you consider "self" as a conglomeration of memes seperate from consciousness, then in the transcendent moment as the "self" falls away, it is a cessation of meme replication in your brain, leaving only consciousness that is not memetic and cannot be reduced to, or expressed in memes.
If this is true, it would explain why religion and spirituality seems so crazy to the rational mind, because trying to force something that is not a meme into being a meme just wont work.
For example, concepts like "filled with the Holy Spirit" are meaningless to those who have not been filled, because there can be no replication of a meme in their brain. Invariably what is heard is a lot of empty meaningless nonsense, because the real meaning cannot be expressed through memes.

Damn this is some krazy @#%$ i cant go on.

Let me finish by saying this:
1 this essay is totally scientific.
2 totally superior intelligent people believe this is true.
3 because this is true, you should tell all your friends about it so that they dont remain ignorant morons.
4 anyone who does not believe this is an ignorant moron.
5 Evad loves you.

a very interesting series of posts, Evad.  Lot's I'd like to say, mainly constructive and positive (I've enjoyed Dawkin's works, for example), but can't at the moment, .... but please permit me at least to be a bit critical and present the  following questions:  to what extent do we really identify our 'I' with our beliefs or memes?  

Also, you said, "from the meme's-eye view, every human is a machine for making more memes, a vehicle for propagation", and the same can be said for genes, of course, but is it really valid to reference a meme's-eye view?  Isn't this just as valid as referencing, say, an atom's-eye view or a galaxy's-eye view?  Do these points of view even exist or have any meaning?

Argh! I'll have to try to take this up some more later.  Thank you again, Evad, for the thought-provoking posts, and I hope others will join in our discussion.

take care,
Shawn

Trippy, eh?

i gotta point out that most of the ideas presented aren't my own, the thought that came from me was that if this meme theory is true, then it is the ineffable religious experience that is beyond memes, and that's why it's ineffable. Transcendance really means transcending memes!

QUOTE

to what extent do we really identify our 'I' with our beliefs or memes?

See man, this is the cleverest part of the theory! We don't think of ourselves as being our beliefs, we think of ourselves as having beliefs. But what is it that "has" any beliefs? When we say "this is my body," what is it that "has" the body? Who is asking? Or the zen-est yet, "who?"
The idea that there is any "I" that "has" any beliefs or "has" a body is actually a meme! "Self" is a meme we got just like our genes. Far-out, man!
That's Susan Blackmore's idea anyway, and maybe it's true, or not true or both, but i can't find any flaws in it, and i cant think of any way to test this idea, unless we might get a baby and raise it to maturity while doing our best to not convey any memes to it, like in a specially controlled meme-limiting skinner box environment or something, and by observing the subject try to see if it develops meme-like behaviour. But that would be straight-out child abuse and wouldn't prove anything and i dont even like thinking about those kind of 'experiments.'

QUOTE

...meme's-eye view...

yeah, it was Susan that said that too. I donno man, it's metaphorical like saying "selfish gene" or "the black hole's hunger" and it's not meant to be taken literally, i know you know that. So then i don't know what you mean.

Pretty crazy stuff. There at the end of my answer to the original scimah article, i just couldn't keep serious anymore. Well, #5 was serious.
1 this essay is totally scientific.
2 totally superior intelligent people believe this is true.
3 because this is true, you should tell all your friends about it so that they dont remain ignorant morons.
4 anyone who does not believe this is an ignorant moron.
5 Evad loves you.

thats funny, just last week, I was directed to her site:

http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk

and now I see it being discussed here...
I agree totally... Who 'I' am is basically what 'I' believe about myself.  It is not really me, but a mental construct that 'I' have bought into and thus identify with.  By investigating this 'I', MrMonkey has found nothing to bee there, only a bunch of 'shoulds' that have been imposed on him by his past experiences/society.