| > These are as old as mankind itself. All major religions are essentially meme-conglomerates. I find the whole idea that thought equals memes to be excessively reductionist. It neglects the notion of coherence in thought, and the way larger coherent beliefs and narratives are built out of smaller parts. The thing about "dinosaur" formats like novels and books and such is that they can express large coherent bodies of thought. The way memes have taken over online discourse tends toward a kind of anti-intellectualism where ideas are considered entirely in isolation and there is no effort made to relate them to one another. It leads to insane self-contradictory positions like "libertarian fascism" to give one random example. A lot of modern online discourse is what I might call meme salad, which like word salad lacks coherence. It's sort of like describing a program as a bunch of functions or instructions. Yes, it is that, but there is a design, a coherence, a larger idea being expressed. There are also design patterns and motifs, layers of abstraction, etc. None of that is captured by the meme idea, and as popularly understood the meme idea tends to neglect and devalue that. I also always found the selfish gene idea excessively reductionistic in genetics. Yes you can model evolution as survival of the fittest genes, but this neglects the way genes work together to form higher order systems that are themselves subjected to selection. Selection can operate at the genetic level but also at higher levels. In evolution look into group selection, the evolution of evolvability, epigenetics, gene regulatory networks, etc. |