Category Archives: Memetics

Study of self-replicating units of culture

Memetics is a study of information and culture. While memetics originated as an analogy with Darwinian evolution, digital communication, media, and sociology scholars have also adopted the term "memetics" to describe an established empirical study and theory described as Internet Memetics.[1] Proponents of memetics, as evolutionary culture, describe it as an approach of cultural information transfer. Those arguing for the Darwinian theoretical account tend to begin from theoretical arguments of existing evolutionary models. Those arguing for Internet Memetics, by contrast, tend to avoid reduction to Darwinian evolutionary accounts. Instead some of these suggest distinct evolutionary approaches.[2][3][4][5] Memetics describes how ideas or cultural information can propagate, but doesn't necessarily imply a meme's concept is factual.[6]

Critics contend the theory is "untested, unsupported or incorrect".[7] It has failed to become a mainstream approach to cultural evolution as the research community has favored models that exclude the concept of a cultural replicator (called "meme"), opting mostly for gene-culture co-evolution[8] or dual inheritance theory[9] instead. Lesser critical arguments suggest memetics is still valid, but analytically holds a smaller academic space in cultural evolutionary theory.[10] Alternatively, Internet Memetics has yet to provide a tested theory of evolution, having sparse empirical studies.[11] As such, it also struggles to be tested or adopted as an agreeable theory of evolution in a digital context.

The term meme was coined in Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, but Dawkins later distanced himself from the resulting field of study.[12] Analogous to a gene, the meme was conceived as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behavior, etc.) which is "hosted" in the minds of one or more individuals, and which can reproduce itself in the sense of jumping from the mind of one person to the mind of another. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host. As with genetics, particularly under a Dawkinsian interpretation, a meme's success may be due to its contribution to the effectiveness of its host. However, contemporary to Dawkins, reduction of a meme to an immaterial idea was contested during memetics' early theoretical developments.[13] Daniel Dennett went as far as to say "a meme's existence depends on a physical embodiment," [14] rather than the other way around. Nevertheless, contemporary memetics tends to refer to these early memetic arguments as reducible to "mentalism".[15]

In his book The Selfish Gene (1976), the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used the term meme to describe a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture, albeit in a different sense. While cultural evolution itself is a much older topic, with a history that dates back at least as far as Darwin's era, Dawkins (1976) proposed that the meme is a unit of culture residing in the brain and is the mutating replicator in human cultural evolution. After Dawkins, many discussed this unit of culture as evolutionary "information" which replicates with metaphysically analogous rules to Darwinian selection.[16] A replicator is a pattern that can influence its surroundings that is, it has causal agency and can propagate. This proposal resulted in debate among anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, and scientists of other disciplines. Dawkins himself did not provide a sufficient explanation of how the replication of units of information in the brain controls human behaviour and ultimately culture, and the principal topic of the book was genetics. Dawkins apparently did not intend to present a comprehensive theory of memetics in The Selfish Gene, but rather coined the term meme in a speculative spirit. Accordingly, different researchers came to define the term "unit of information" in different ways.

The evolutionary model of cultural information transfer is based on the concept that units of information, or "memes", have an independent existence, are self-replicating, and are subject to selective evolution through environmental forces.[7] Starting from a proposition put forward in the writings of Richard Dawkins, this model has formed the basis of a new area of study, one that looks at the self-replicating units of culture. It has been proposed that just as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics.

The modern memetics movement dates from the mid-1980s. A January 1983 "Metamagical Themas" column[17] by Douglas Hofstadter, in Scientific American, was influential as was his 1985 book of the same name. "Memeticist" was coined as analogous to "geneticist" originally in The Selfish Gene. Later Arel Lucas suggested that the discipline that studies memes and their connections to human and other carriers of them be known as "memetics" by analogy with "genetics".[18] Dawkins' The Selfish Gene has been a factor in attracting the attention of people of disparate intellectual backgrounds. Another stimulus was the publication in 1991 of Consciousness Explained by Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett, which incorporated the meme concept into a theory of the mind. In his 1991 essay "Viruses of the Mind", Richard Dawkins used memetics to explain the phenomenon of religious belief and the various characteristics of organised religions. By then, memetics had also become a theme appearing in fiction (e.g. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash).

The idea of language as a virus had already been introduced by William S. Burroughs as early as 1962 in his fictional book The Ticket That Exploded, and continued in The Electronic Revolution, published in 1970 in The Job.

The foundation of memetics in its full modern incarnation was launched by Douglas Rushkoff's Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture in 1995,[19] and was accelerated with the publication in 1996 of two more books by authors outside the academic mainstream: Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by former Microsoft executive turned motivational speaker and professional poker-player Richard Brodie, and Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society by Aaron Lynch, a mathematician and philosopher who worked for many years as an engineer at Fermilab. Lynch claimed to have conceived his theory totally independently of any contact with academics in the cultural evolutionary sphere, and apparently was not aware of The Selfish Gene until his book was very close to publication.[citation needed]

Around the same time as the publication of the books by Lynch and Brodie the e-journal Journal of Memetics Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission[20] (published electronically from 1997 to 2005[21]) first appeared. It was first hosted by the Centre for Policy Modelling at Manchester Metropolitan University. The e-journal soon became the central point for publication and debate within the nascent memeticist community. (There had been a short-lived paper-based memetics publication starting in 1990, the Journal of Ideas edited by Elan Moritz.[22]) In 1999, Susan Blackmore, a psychologist at the University of the West of England, published The Meme Machine, which more fully worked out the ideas of Dennett, Lynch, and Brodie and attempted to compare and contrast them with various approaches from the cultural evolutionary mainstream, as well as providing novel, and controversial, memetics-based theories for the evolution of language and the human sense of individual selfhood.

The term meme derives from the Ancient Greek (mimts), meaning "imitator, pretender". The similar term mneme was used in 1904, by the German evolutionary biologist Richard Semon, best known for his development of the engram theory of memory, in his work Die mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen, translated into English in 1921 as The Mneme.[23] Until Daniel Schacter published Forgotten Ideas, Neglected Pioneers: Richard Semon and the Story of Memory in 2000, Semon's work had little influence, though it was quoted extensively in Erwin Schrdingers 1956 Tarner Lecture Mind and Matter. Richard Dawkins (1976) apparently coined the word meme independently of Semon, writing this:

"'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word mme."[24]

David Hull (2001) pointed out Dawkins's oversight of Semon's work. Hull suggests this early work as an alternative origin to memetics by which Dawkins's memetic theory and classicist connection to the concept can be negotiated.

"Why not date the beginnings of memetics (or mnemetics) as 1904 or at the very least 1914? If [Semon's] two publications are taken as the beginnings of memetics, then the development of memetics [...] has been around for almost a hundred years without much in the way of conceptual or empirical advance!"[13]

Despite this, Semon's work remains mostly understood as distinct to memetic origins even with the overt similarities accounted for by Hull.

The memetics movement split almost immediately into two. The first group were those who wanted to stick to Dawkins' definition of a meme as "a unit of cultural transmission". Gibron Burchett, another memeticist responsible for helping to research and co-coin the term memetic engineering, along with Leveious Rolando and Larry Lottman, has stated that a meme can be defined, more precisely, as "a unit of cultural information that can be copied, located in the brain". This thinking is more in line with Dawkins' second definition of the meme in his book The Extended Phenotype. The second group wants to redefine memes as observable cultural artifacts and behaviors. However, in contrast to those two positions, Blackmore does not reject either concept of external or internal memes.[25]

These two schools became known as the "internalists" and the "externalists." Prominent internalists included both Lynch and Brodie; the most vocal externalists included Derek Gatherer, a geneticist from Liverpool John Moores University, and William Benzon, a writer on cultural evolution and music. The main rationale for externalism was that internal brain entities are not observable, and memetics cannot advance as a science, especially a quantitative science, unless it moves its emphasis onto the directly quantifiable aspects of culture. Internalists countered with various arguments: that brain states will eventually be directly observable with advanced technology, that most cultural anthropologists agree that culture is about beliefs and not artifacts, or that artifacts cannot be replicators in the same sense as mental entities (or DNA) are replicators. The debate became so heated that a 1998 Symposium on Memetics, organised as part of the 15th International Conference on Cybernetics, passed a motion calling for an end to definitional debates. McNamara demonstrated in 2011 that functional connectivity profiling using neuroimaging tools enables the observation of the processing of internal memes, "i-memes", in response to external "e-memes".[26]This was developed further in a paper "Memetics and Neural Models of Conspiracy Theories" by Duch, where a model of memes as a quasi-stable neural associative memory attractor network is proposed, and a formation of Memeplex leading to conspiracy theories illustrated with simulation of self-organizing network.[27]

An advanced statement of the internalist school came in 2002 with the publication of The Electric Meme, by Robert Aunger, an anthropologist from the University of Cambridge. Aunger also organised a conference in Cambridge in 1999, at which prominent sociologists and anthropologists were able to give their assessment of the progress made in memetics to that date. This resulted in the publication of Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, edited by Aunger and with a foreword by Dennett, in 2001.[28]

In 2005, the Journal of Memetics ceased publication and published a set of articles on the future of memetics. The website states that although "there was to be a relaunch... after several years nothing has happened".[29] Susan Blackmore has left the University of the West of England to become a freelance science-writer and now concentrates more on the field of consciousness and cognitive science. Derek Gatherer moved to work as a computer programmer in the pharmaceutical industry, although he still occasionally publishes on memetics-related matters. Richard Brodie is now climbing the world professional poker rankings. Aaron Lynch disowned the memetics community and the words "meme" and "memetics" (without disowning the ideas in his book), adopting the self-description "thought contagionist". He died in 2005.

Susan Blackmore (2002) re-stated the definition of meme as: whatever is copied from one person to another person, whether habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information. Further she said that memes, like genes, are replicators in the sense as defined by Dawkins.[30]That is, they are information that is copied. Memes are copied by imitation, teaching and other methods. The copies are not perfect: memes are copied with variation; moreover, they compete for space in our memories and for the chance to be copied again. Only some of the variants can survive. The combination of these three elements (copies; variation; competition for survival) forms precisely the condition for Darwinian evolution, and so memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. Large groups of memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes. In Blackmore's definition, the way that a meme replicates is through imitation. This requires brain capacity to generally imitate a model or selectively imitate the model. Since the process of social learning varies from one person to another, the imitation process cannot be said to be completely imitated. The sameness of an idea may be expressed with different memes supporting it. This is to say that the mutation rate in memetic evolution is extremely high, and mutations are even possible within each and every iteration of the imitation process. It becomes very interesting when we see that a social system composed of a complex network of microinteractions exists, but at the macro level an order emerges to create culture.[citation needed]

Many researchers of cultural evolution regard memetic theory of this time a failed paradigm superseded by dual inheritance theory.[31] Others instead suggest it is not superseded but rather holds a small but distinct intellectual space in cultural evolutionary theory.[10]

A new framework of Internet Memetics initially borrowed Blackmore's conceptual developments but is effectively a data-driven approach, focusing on digital artifacts. This was lead primarily by conceptual developments Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (2006) [32] and Limor Shifman and Mike Thelwall (2009).[33] Shiman, in particular, followed Susan Blackmore in rejecting the internalist and externalist debate, however did not offer a clear connection to prior evolutionary frameworks. Later in 2014, she rejected the historical relevance of "information" to memetics. Instead of memes being a unit of cultural information, she argued information is exclusively delegated to be "the ways in which addressers position themselves in relation to [a meme instance's] text, its linguistic codes, the addressees, and other potential speakers."[15] This is what she called stance, which is analytically distinguished from the content and form of her meme. As such, Shifman's developments can both can be seen as critical to Dawkins's meme, but also a somewhat distinct conceptualization of meme as a communicative system dependent on the internet and social media platforms. By introducing memetics as an internet study there has been the rise in empirical research owed to Internet research methods and extensive digital data. That is, memetics in this conceptualization has been notably testable with the application of social science methodologies. It has been popular enough that following Lankshear and Knobel's (2019) review of empirical trends, they warn those interested in memetics that theoretical development should not be ignored, concluding that,

"[R]ight now would be a good time for anyone seriously interested in memes to revisit Dawkins work in light of how internet memes have evolved over the past three decades and reflect on what most merits careful and conscientious research attention."[34]

As Lankshear and Knobel show, the Internet Memetic reconceptualization is limited in addressing long-standing memetic theory concerns. It is not clear that existing Internet Memetic theory's departure from conceptual dichotomies between internalist and externalist debate are compatible with most earlier concerns of memetics. Internet Memetics might be understood as a study without an agreed upon theory, as present research tends to focus on empirical developments answering theories of other areas of cultural research. It exists more as a set of distributed studies than a methodology, theory, field, or discipline, with a few exceptions such as Shifman and those closely following her motivating framework.

Critics contend that some proponents' assertions are "untested, unsupported or incorrect."[7] Most of the history of memetic criticism has been directed at Dawkins' earlier theory of memetics framed in The Selfish Gene. There have been some serious criticisms of memetics. Namely, there are a few key points on which most criticisms focus: mentalism, cultural determinism, Darwinian reduction, without academic novelty, and a lack of empirical evidence of memetic mechanisms.

Luis Benitez-Bribiesca points to the lack of memetic mechanisms. He refers to the lack of a code script for memes which would suggest a genuine analogy to DNA in genes. He also suggests he meme mutation mechanism is too unstable which would render the evolutionary process chaotic. That is to say that the "unit of information" which traverses across minds is perhaps too flexible in meaning to be a realistic unit.[35] As such, he calls memetics "a pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution" among other things.

Another criticism points to memetic triviality. That is, some have argued memetics is derivative of more rich areas of study. One of these cases comes from Peircian semiotics, (e.g., Deacon,[36] Kull[37]) stating that the concept of meme is a lesser developed Sign. Meme is thus described in memetics as a sign without its triadic nature. Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory involves a triadic structure: a sign (a reference to an object), an object (the thing being referred to), and an interpretant (the interpreting actor of a sign). For Deacon and Kull, the meme is a degenerate sign, which includes only its ability of being copied. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs.

Others have pointed to the fact that memetics reduces genuine social and communicative activity to genetic arguments, and this cannot adequately describe cultural participation of people. For example, Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, and Sam Ford, in their book Spreadable Media (2013), criticize Dawkins' idea of the meme, writing that "while the idea of the meme is a compelling one, it may not adequately account for how content circulates through participatory culture." The three authors also criticize other interpretations of memetics, especially those which describe memes as "self-replicating", because they ignore the fact that "culture is a human product and replicates through human agency."[38] In doing so, they align more closely with Shifman's notion of Internet Memetics and her addition of the human agency of stance to describe participatory structure.

Mary Midgley criticizes memetics for at least two reasons:[39]

Like other critics, Maria Kronfeldner has criticized memetics for being based on an allegedly inaccurate analogy with the gene; alternately, she claims it is "heuristically trivial", being a mere redescription of what is already known without offering any useful novelty.[41]

Research methodologies that apply memetics go by many names: Viral marketing, cultural evolution, the history of ideas, social analytics, and more. Many of these applications do not make reference to the literature on memes directly but are built upon the evolutionary lens of idea propagation that treats semantic units of culture as self-replicating and mutating patterns of information that are assumed to be relevant for scientific study. For example, the field of public relations is filled with attempts to introduce new ideas and alter social discourse. One means of doing this is to design a meme and deploy it through various media channels. One historic example of applied memetics is the PR campaign conducted in 1991 as part of the build-up to the first Gulf War in the United States.[48]

The application of memetics to a difficult complex social system problem, environmental sustainability, has recently been attempted at thwink.org[49] Using meme types and memetic infection in several stock and flow simulation models, Jack Harich has demonstrated several interesting phenomena that are best, and perhaps only, explained by memes. One model, The Dueling Loops of the Political Powerplace,[50] argues that the fundamental reason corruption is the norm in politics is due to an inherent structural advantage of one feedback loop pitted against another. Another model, The Memetic Evolution of Solutions to Difficult Problems,[51] uses memes, the evolutionary algorithm, and the scientific method to show how complex solutions evolve over time and how that process can be improved. The insights gained from these models are being used to engineer memetic solution elements to the sustainability problem.

Another application of memetics in the sustainability space is the crowdfunded Climate Meme Project[52] conducted by Joe Brewer and Balazs Laszlo Karafiath in the spring of 2013. This study was based on a collection of 1000 unique text-based expressions gathered from Twitter, Facebook, and structured interviews with climate activists. The major finding was that the global warming meme is not effective at spreading because it causes emotional duress in the minds of people who learn about it. Five central tensions were revealed in the discourse about [climate change], each of which represents a resonance point through which dialogue can be engaged. The tensions were Harmony/Disharmony (whether or not humans are part of the natural world), Survival/Extinction (envisioning the future as either apocalyptic collapse of civilization or total extinction of the human race), Cooperation/Conflict (regarding whether or not humanity can come together to solve global problems), Momentum/Hesitation (about whether or not we are making progress at the collective scale to address climate change), and Elitism/Heretic (a general sentiment that each side of the debate considers the experts of its opposition to be untrustworthy).[53]

Ben Cullen, in his book Contagious Ideas,[54] brought the idea of the meme into the discipline of archaeology. He coined the term "Cultural Virus Theory", and used it to try to anchor archaeological theory in a neo-Darwinian paradigm. Archaeological memetics could assist the application of the meme concept to material culture in particular.

Francis Heylighen of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies has postulated what he calls "memetic selection criteria". These criteria opened the way to a specialized field of applied memetics to find out if these selection criteria could stand the test of quantitative analyses. In 2003 Klaas Chielens carried out these tests in a Masters thesis project on the testability of the selection criteria.

In Selfish Sounds and Linguistic Evolution,[55] Austrian linguist Nikolaus Ritt has attempted to operationalise memetic concepts and use them for the explanation of long term sound changes and change conspiracies in early English. It is argued that a generalised Darwinian framework for handling cultural change can provide explanations where established, speaker centred approaches fail to do so. The book makes comparatively concrete suggestions about the possible material structure of memes, and provides two empirically rich case studies.

Australian academic S.J. Whitty has argued that project management is a memeplex with the language and stories of its practitioners at its core.[56] This radical approach sees a project and its management as an illusion; a human construct about a collection of feelings, expectations, and sensations, which are created, fashioned, and labeled by the human brain. Whitty's approach requires project managers to consider that the reasons for using project management are not consciously driven to maximize profit, and are encouraged to consider project management as naturally occurring, self-serving, evolving process which shapes organizations for its own purpose.

Swedish political scientist Mikael Sandberg argues against "Lamarckian" interpretations of institutional and technological evolution and studies creative innovation of information technologies in governmental and private organizations in Sweden in the 1990s from a memetic perspective.[57] Comparing the effects of active ("Lamarckian") IT strategy versus userproducer interactivity (Darwinian co-evolution), evidence from Swedish organizations shows that co-evolutionary interactivity is almost four times as strong a factor behind IT creativity as the "Lamarckian" IT strategy.

Originally posted here:

Memetics - Wikipedia

Faculties responsible for mental phenomena

The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves.[2][3][4] These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various mental phenomena, like perception, pain experience, belief, desire, intention, and emotion. Various overlapping classifications of mental phenomena have been proposed. Important distinctions group them according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious, or occurrent. Minds were traditionally understood as substances but it is more common in the contemporary perspective to conceive them as properties or capacities possessed by humans and higher animals. Various competing definitions of the exact nature of the mind or mentality have been proposed. Epistemic definitions focus on the privileged epistemic access the subject has to these states. Consciousness-based approaches give primacy to the conscious mind and allow unconscious mental phenomena as part of the mind only to the extent that they stand in the right relation to the conscious mind. According to intentionality-based approaches, the power to refer to objects and to represent the world is the mark of the mental. For behaviorism, whether an entity has a mind only depends on how it behaves in response to external stimuli while functionalism defines mental states in terms of the causal roles they play. Central questions for the study of mind, like whether other entities besides humans have minds or how the relation between body and mind is to be conceived, are strongly influenced by the choice of one's definition.

Mind or mentality is usually contrasted with body, matter or physicality. The issue of the nature of this contrast and specifically the relation between mind and brain is called the mind-body problem.[5] Traditional viewpoints included dualism and idealism, which consider the mind to be non-physical.[5] Modern views often center around physicalism and functionalism, which hold that the mind is roughly identical with the brain or reducible to physical phenomena such as neuronal activity[6][need quotation to verify] though dualism and idealism continue to have many supporters. Another question concerns which types of beings are capable of having minds.[citation needed][7] For example, whether mind is exclusive to humans, possessed also by some or all animals, by all living things, whether it is a strictly definable characteristic at all, or whether mind can also be a property of some types of human-made machines.[citation needed] Different cultural and religious traditions often use different concepts of mind, resulting in different answers to these questions. Some see mind as a property exclusive to humans whereas others ascribe properties of mind to non-living entities (e.g. panpsychism and animism), to animals and to deities. Some of the earliest recorded speculations linked mind (sometimes described as identical with soul or spirit) to theories concerning both life after death, and cosmological and natural order, for example in the doctrines of Zoroaster, the Buddha, Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient Greek, Indian and, later, Islamic and medieval European philosophers.

Psychologists such as Freud and James, and computer scientists such as Turing developed influential theories about the nature of the mind. The possibility of nonbiological minds is explored in the field of artificial intelligence, which works closely in relation with cybernetics and information theory to understand the ways in which information processing by nonbiological machines is comparable or different to mental phenomena in the human mind.[8] The mind is also sometimes portrayed as the stream of consciousness where sense impressions and mental phenomena are constantly changing.[9][10]

The original meaning of Old English gemynd was the faculty of memory, not of thought in general.[11] Hence call to mind, come to mind, keep in mind, to have mind of, etc. The word retains this sense in Scotland.[12] Old English had other words to express "mind", such as hyge "mind, spirit".[13]

The meaning of "memory" is shared with Old Norse, which has munr. The word is originally from a PIE verbal root *men-, meaning "to think, remember", whence also Latin mens "mind", Sanskrit manas "mind" and Greek "mind, courage, anger".

The generalization of mind to include all mental faculties, thought, volition, feeling and memory, gradually develops over the 14th and 15th centuries.[14]

The mind is often understood as a faculty that manifests itself in mental phenomena like sensation, perception, thinking, reasoning, memory, belief, desire, emotion and motivation.[2][15] Mind or mentality is usually contrasted with body, matter or physicality. Central to this contrast is the intuition that minds exhibit various features not found in and maybe even incompatible with the material universe as described by the natural sciences.[16][15] On the traditionally dominant substantialist view associated with Ren Descartes, minds are defined as independent thinking substances. But it is more common in contemporary philosophy to conceive minds not as substances but as properties or capacities possessed by humans and higher animals.[15][17]

Despite this agreement, there is still a lot of difference of opinion concerning what the exact nature of mind is and various competing definitions have been proposed.[2] Philosophical definitions of mind usually proceed not just by listing various types of phenomena belonging to the mind but by searching the "mark of the mental": a feature that is shared by all mental states and only by mental states.[16][15] Epistemic approaches define mental states in terms of the privileged epistemic access the subject has to these states. This is often combined with a consciousness-based approach, which emphasizes the primacy of consciousness in relation to mind. Intentionality-based approaches, on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as being a certain way as the mark of the mental. According to behaviorism, whether an entity has a mind only depends on how it behaves in response to external stimuli while functionalism defines mental states in terms of the causal roles they play. The differences between these diverse approaches are substantial since they result in very different answers to questions like whether animals or computers have minds.[2][16][15]

There is a great variety of mental states. They fall into categories like sensory and non-sensory or conscious and unconscious.[18][15] Various of the definitions listed above excel for states from one category but struggle to account for why states from another category are also part of the mind. This has led some theorists to doubt that there is a mark of the mental. So maybe the term "mind" just refers to a cluster of loosely related ideas that do not share one unifying feature.[15][16][17] Some theorists have responded to this by narrowing their definitions of mind to "higher" intellectual faculties, like thinking, reasoning and memory. Others try to be as inclusive as possible regarding "lower" intellectual faculties, like sensing and emotion.[19]

In popular usage, mind is frequently synonymous with thought: the private conversation with ourselves that we carry on "inside our heads".[20] Thus we "make up our minds", "change our minds" or are "of two minds" about something. One of the key attributes of the mind in this sense is that it is a private sphere to which no one but the owner has access. No one else can "know our mind". They can only interpret what we consciously or unconsciously communicate.[21]

Epistemic approaches emphasize that the subject has privileged access to all or at least some of their mental states.[15][18][22] It is sometimes claimed that this access is direct, private and infallible. Direct access refers to non-inferential knowledge. When someone is in pain, for example, they know directly that they are in pain, they do not need to infer it from other indicators like a body part being swollen or their tendency to scream when it is touched.[15] But we arguably also have non-inferential knowledge of external objects, like trees or cats, through perception, which is why this criterion by itself is not sufficient. Another epistemic privilege often mentioned is that mental states are private in contrast to public external facts.[15][22] For example, the fallen tree lying on a person's leg is directly open to perception by the bystanders while the victim's pain is private: only they know it directly while the bystanders have to infer it from their screams. It was traditionally often claimed that we have infallible knowledge of our own mental states, i.e. that we cannot be wrong about them when we have them.[15] So when someone has an itching sensation, for example, they cannot be wrong about having this sensation. They can only be wrong about the non-mental causes, e.g. whether it is the consequence of bug bites or of a fungal infection. But various counterexamples have been presented to claims of infallibility, which is why this criterion is usually not accepted in contemporary philosophy. One problem for all epistemic approaches to the mark of the mental is that they focus mainly on conscious states but exclude unconscious states. A repressed desire, for example, is a mental state to which the subject lacks the forms of privileged epistemic access mentioned.[15][17]

One way to respond to this worry is to ascribe a privileged status to conscious mental states. On such a consciousness-based approach, conscious mental states are non-derivative constituents of the mind while unconscious states somehow depend on their conscious counterparts for their existence.[16][22][23] An influential example of this position is due to John Searle, who holds that unconscious mental states have to be accessible to consciousness to count as "mental" at all.[24] They can be understood as dispositions to bring about conscious states.[25] This position denies that the so-called "deep unconscious", i.e. mental contents inaccessible to consciousness, exists.[26] Another problem for consciousness-based approaches, besides the issue of accounting for the unconscious mind, is to elucidate the nature of consciousness itself. Consciousness-based approaches are usually interested in phenomenal consciousness, i.e. in qualitative experience, rather than access consciousness, which refers to information being available for reasoning and guiding behavior.[16][27][28] Conscious mental states are normally characterized as qualitative and subjective, i.e. that there is something it is like for a subject to be in these states. Opponents of consciousness-based approaches often point out that despite these attempts, it is still very unclear what the term "phenomenal consciousness" is supposed to mean.[16] This is important because not much would be gained theoretically by defining one ill-understood term in terms of another. Another objection to this type of approach is to deny that the conscious mind has a privileged status in relation to the unconscious mind, for example, by insisting that the deep unconscious exists.[23][26]

Intentionality-based approaches see intentionality as the mark of the mental.[15][16][18] The originator of this approach is Franz Brentano, who defined intentionality as the characteristic of mental states to refer to or be about objects.[29][30] One central idea for this approach is that minds represent the world around them, which is not the case for regular physical objects.[18][31] So a person who believes that there is ice cream in the fridge represents the world as being a certain way. The ice cream can be represented but it does not itself represent the world. This is why a mind is ascribed to the person but not to the ice cream, according to the intentional approach.[15] One advantage of it in comparison to the epistemic approach is that it has no problems to account for unconscious mental states: they can be intentional just like conscious mental states and thereby qualify as constituents of the mind.[32] But a problem for this approach is that there are also some non-mental entities that have intentionality, like maps or linguistic expressions.[15][33] One response to this problem is to hold that the intentionality of non-mental entities is somehow derivative in relation to the intentionality of mental entities. For example, a map of Addis Ababa may be said to represent Addis Ababa not intrinsically but only extrinsically because people interpret it as a representation.[32][34] Another difficulty is that not all mental states seem to be intentional. So while beliefs and desires are forms of representation, this seems not to be the case for pains and itches, which may indicate a problem without representing it.[30][33] But some theorists have argued that even these apparent counterexamples should be considered intentional when properly understood.[35][36]

Behaviorist definitions characterize mental states as dispositions to engage in certain publicly observable behavior as a reaction to particular external stimuli.[37][38] On this view, to ascribe a belief to someone is to describe the tendency of this person to behave in certain ways. Such an ascription does not involve any claims about the internal states of this person, it only talks about behavioral tendencies.[38] A strong motivation for such a position comes from empiricist considerations stressing the importance of observation and the lack thereof in the case of private internal mental states. This is sometimes combined with the thesis that we could not even learn how to use mental terms without reference to the behavior associated with them.[38] One problem for behaviorism is that the same entity often behaves differently despite being in the same situation as before. This suggests that explanation needs to make reference to the internal states of the entity that mediate the link between stimulus and response.[39][40] This problem is avoided by functionalist approaches, which define mental states through their causal roles but allow both external and internal events in their causal network.[41][42][17] On this view, the definition of pain-state may include aspects such as being in a state that "tends to be caused by bodily injury, to produce the belief that something is wrong with the body and ... to cause wincing or moaning".[43][18]

One important aspect of both behaviorist and functionalist approaches is that, according to them, the mind is multiply realizable.[44] This means that it does not depend on the exact constitution of an entity for whether it has a mind or not. Instead, only its behavioral dispositions or its role in the causal network matter.[41][43] The entity in question may be a human, an animal, a silicon-based alien or a robot. Functionalists sometimes draw an analogy to the software-hardware distinction where the mind is likened to a certain type of software that can be installed on different forms of hardware. Closely linked to this analogy is the thesis of computationalism, which defines the mind as an information processing system that is physically implemented by the neural activity of the brain.[16][45]

One problem for all of these views is that they seem to be unable to account for the phenomenal consciousness of the mind emphasized by consciousness-based approaches.[18] It may be true that pains are caused by bodily injuries and themselves produce certain beliefs and moaning behavior. But the causal profile of pain remains silent on the intrinsic unpleasantness of the painful experience itself. Some states that are not painful to the subject at all may even fit these characterizations.[18][43]

Broadly speaking, mental faculties are the various functions of the mind, or things the mind can "do".

Thought is a mental act that allows humans to make sense of things in the world, and to represent and interpret them in ways that are significant, or which accord with their needs, attachments, goals, commitments, plans, ends, desires, etc. Thinking involves the symbolic or semiotic mediation of ideas or data, as when we form concepts, engage in problem solving, reasoning, and making decisions. Words that refer to similar concepts and processes include deliberation, cognition, ideation, discourse and imagination.

Thinking is sometimes described as a "higher" cognitive function and the analysis of thinking processes is a part of cognitive psychology. It is also deeply connected with our capacity to make and use tools; to understand cause and effect; to recognize patterns of significance; to comprehend and disclose unique contexts of experience or activity; and to respond to the world in a meaningful way.

Memory is the ability to preserve, retain and subsequently recall knowledge, information, or experience. Although memory has traditionally been a persistent theme in philosophy, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw the study of memory emerge as a subject of inquiry within the paradigms of cognitive psychology. In recent decades, it has become one of the pillars of a new branch of science called cognitive neuroscience, a marriage between cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Imagination is the activity of generating or evoking novel situations, images, ideas or other qualia in the mind. It is a characteristically subjective activity, rather than a direct or passive experience. The term is technically used in psychology for the process of reviving in the mind percepts of objects formerly given in sense perception. Since this use of the term conflicts with that of ordinary language, some psychologists have preferred to describe this process as "imaging" or "imagery" or to speak of it as "reproductive" as opposed to "productive" or "constructive" imagination. Things imagined are said to be seen in the "mind's eye". Among the many practical functions of imagination are the ability to project possible futures (or histories), to "see" things from another's perspective, and to change the way something is perceived, including to make decisions to respond to, or enact, what is imagined.

Consciousness in mammals (this includes humans) is an aspect of the mind generally thought to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, sentience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. It is a subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Some philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness, which is subjective experience itself, and access consciousness, which refers to the global availability of information to processing systems in the brain.[46] Phenomenal consciousness has many different experienced qualities, often referred to as qualia. Phenomenal consciousness is usually consciousness of something or about something, a property known as intentionality in philosophy of mind.

The mental phenomena brought about by the faculties of the mind have been categorized according to various distinctions. Important distinctions group mental phenomena together according to whether they are sensory, qualitative, propositional, intentional, conscious, occurrent or rational. These different distinctions result in overlapping categorizations. Some mental phenomena, like perception or bodily awareness, are sensory, i.e. based on the senses.[47] These phenomena are of special interest to empiricists, who hold that they are our only source of knowledge about the external world.[48] They are contrasted with non-sensory phenomena like thoughts or beliefs, which do not involve sense impressions.[49] Sensory states are closely related to qualitative states, which have qualia and are therefore associated with a subjective feeling of what it is like to be in this state.[18] Sensory and qualitative states are often contrasted with propositional states, which are sometimes said to be non-sensory and non-qualitative.[18][22] Propositional states involve attitudes, like belief or desire, which a subject has towards a proposition. One problem with this contrast is that some propositional attitudes may have a subjective feeling to them, which would make them qualitative phenomena.[50][51] This is the case, for example, when actively desiring something. Another problem with this contrast is that some mental phenomena, like perceptions, are both sensory and propositional.[52][53] Propositional attitudes are intentional states, which have as their characteristic that they refer to or are about objects or states of affairs.[29][30] Some philosophers see intentionality as the mark of the mental, i.e. as what is shared by all and only by mental phenomena. Opponents of this position have argued that there are various mental phenomena, like pains and itches, that lack the representational aspect associated with intentionality and therefore count as non-intentional.[54][55] This claim is sometimes even extended to all sensory phenomena. It sometimes held that all intentional states are propositional. While this is true for the paradigmatic cases, it has been argued that there is a form of object-directed intentionality, like the fear of snakes, that does not involve propositional attitudes, like the fear that one will be bitten by snakes.[56][57]

Another important distinction among mental states is whether they are conscious or not. Often two types of consciousness are distinguished: phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness.[27][58] Phenomenal consciousness refers to actual experience. A common view is that some states, like sensations or pains, are necessarily associated with phenomenal consciousness while other states, like beliefs and desires, can be present both with and without phenomenal consciousness.[59][60] According to some views, conscious mental states are more basic while unconscious states only count as mental if they can arise in phenomenal consciousness.[16][22][23] Access consciousness, on the other hand, refers to mental states that are accessible: they carry information that is available for reasoning and guiding behavior.[27][58][16] This notion is closely related to occurrent mental states, which are not just accessible but also currently active or causally efficacious within the owner's mind. All phenomenally conscious mental states are occurrent but there may also be unconscious occurrent states, like repressed desires, that influence our behavior.[61][62][63][64][65] Occurrent mental states contrast with standing or dispositional mental states, which are part of the subject's mind even though they currently play no role in it.[63][65] Mental phenomena are rational if they are well justified or obey the norms of rationality. Irrational mental phenomena, on the other hand, violate these norms. But not all mental phenomena are rationally evaluable: some are arational and exist outside the domain of rationality. They include urges, dizziness or hunger while beliefs and intentions are the paradigmatic examples of rationally evaluable states.[66][67] Some hold that rationality depends only on structural principles that govern how different mental states should relate to each other while others define rationality in terms of responding correctly to reasons.[68][69][70][71]

Mental contents are those items that are thought of as being "in" the mind, and capable of being formed and manipulated by mental processes and faculties. Examples include thoughts, concepts, memories, emotions, percepts and intentions. Philosophical theories of mental content include internalism, externalism, representationalism and intentionality.[72]

Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, which was originated by Richard Dawkins and Douglas Hofstadter in the 1980s. It is an evolutionary model of cultural information transfer. A meme, analogous to a gene, is an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour (etc.) "hosted" in one or more individual minds, and can reproduce itself from mind to mind. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief, is seen memetically as a meme reproducing itself.

In animals, the brain, or encephalon (Greek for "in the head"), is the control center of the central nervous system, responsible for thought. In most animals, the brain is located in the head, protected by the skull and close to the primary sensory apparatus of vision, hearing, equilibrioception, taste and olfaction. While all vertebrates have a brain, most invertebrates have either a centralized brain or collections of individual ganglia. Primitive animals such as sponges do not have a brain at all. Brains can be extremely complex. For example, the human brain contains around 86 billion neurons, each linked to as many as 10,000 others.[73][74]

Understanding the relationship between the brain and the mindthe mindbody problem is one of the central issues in the history of philosophy, a challenging problem both philosophically and scientifically.[75] There are three major philosophical schools of thought concerning the answer: dualism, materialism, and idealism. Dualism holds that the mind exists independently of the brain;[76] materialism holds that mental phenomena are identical to neuronal phenomena;[77] and idealism holds that only mental phenomena exist.[77]

Through most of history many philosophers found it inconceivable that cognition could be implemented by a physical substance such as brain tissue (that is neurons and synapses).[78] Descartes, who thought extensively about mind-brain relationships, found it possible to explain reflexes and other simple behaviors in mechanistic terms, although he did not believe that complex thought, especially language, could be explained by reference to the physical brain alone.[79]

The most straightforward scientific evidence of a strong relationship between the physical brain matter and the mind is the impact physical alterations to the brain have on the mind, such as with traumatic brain injury and psychoactive drug use.[80] Philosopher Patricia Churchland notes that drug-mind interaction indicates an intimate connection between the brain and the mind.[81]

In addition to the philosophical questions, the relationship between mind and brain involves a number of scientific questions, including understanding the relationship between mental activity and brain activity, the exact mechanisms by which drugs influence cognition, and the neural correlates of consciousness.

Theoretical approaches to explain how mind emerges from the brain include connectionism, computationalism and Bayesian brain.

The evolution of human intelligence refers to several theories that aim to describe how human intelligence has evolved in relation to the evolution of the human brain and the origin of language.[82]

The timeline of human evolution spans some 7 million years, from the separation of the genus Pan until the emergence of behavioral modernity by 50,000 years ago. Of this timeline, the first 3 million years concern Sahelanthropus, the following 2 million concern Australopithecus, while the final 2 million span the history of actual Homo species (the Paleolithic).

Many traits of human intelligence, such as empathy, theory of mind, mourning, ritual, and the use of symbols and tools, are already apparent in great apes although in lesser sophistication than in humans.

There is a debate between supporters of the idea of a sudden emergence of intelligence, or "Great leap forward" and those of a gradual or continuum hypothesis.

Theories of the evolution of intelligence include:

Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body. The mindbody problem, i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body.[87] Jos Manuel Rodriguez Delgado writes, "In present popular usage, soul and mind are not clearly differentiated and some people, more or less consciously, still feel that the soul, and perhaps the mind, may enter or leave the body as independent entities."[88]

Dualism and monism are the two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mindbody problem. Dualism is the position that mind and body are in some way separate from each other. It can be traced back to Plato,[89] Aristotle[90][91][92] and the Nyaya, Samkhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy,[93] but it was most precisely formulated by Ren Descartes in the 17th century.[94] Substance dualists argue that the mind is an independently existing substance, whereas Property dualists maintain that the mind is a group of independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to the brain, but that it is not a distinct substance.[95]

The 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger suggested that subjective experience and activity (i.e. the "mind") cannot be made sense of in terms of Cartesian "substances" that bear "properties" at all (whether the mind itself is thought of as a distinct, separate kind of substance or not). This is because the nature of subjective, qualitative experience is incoherent in terms of or semantically incommensurable with the concept of substances that bear properties. This is a fundamentally ontological argument.[96]

The philosopher of cognitive science Daniel Dennett, for example, argues there is no such thing as a narrative center called the "mind", but that instead there is simply a collection of sensory inputs and outputs: different kinds of "software" running in parallel.[97] Psychologist B.F. Skinner argued that the mind is an explanatory fiction that diverts attention from environmental causes of behavior;[98] he considered the mind a "black box" and thought that mental processes may be better conceived of as forms of covert verbal behavior.[99][100]

Philosopher David Chalmers has argued that the third person approach to uncovering mind and consciousness is not effective, such as looking into other's brains or observing human conduct, but that a first person approach is necessary. Such a first person perspective indicates that the mind must be conceptualized as something distinct from the brain.

The mind has also been described as manifesting from moment to moment, one thought moment at a time as a fast flowing stream, where sense impressions and mental phenomena are constantly changing.[10][9]

Monism is the position that mind and body are not physiologically and ontologically distinct kinds of entities. This view was first advocated in Western Philosophy by Parmenides in the 5th Century BC and was later espoused by the 17th Century rationalist Baruch Spinoza.[102] According to Spinoza's dual-aspect theory, mind and body are two aspects of an underlying reality which he variously described as "Nature" or "God".

The most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries have all been variations of physicalism; these positions include behaviorism, the type identity theory, anomalous monism and functionalism.[103]

Many modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive or non-reductive physicalist position, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from the body.[103] These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, e.g. in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences.[104][105][106][107] Other philosophers, however, adopt a non-physicalist position which challenges the notion that the mind is a purely physical construct.

Continued progress in neuroscience has helped to clarify many of these issues, and its findings have been taken by many to support physicalists' assertions.[113][114] Nevertheless, our knowledge is incomplete, and modern philosophers of mind continue to discuss how subjective qualia and the intentional mental states can be naturally explained.[115][116] There is also the problem of Quantum Mechanics, whose Copenhagen interpretation can be understood as a form of perspectivism. As the Copenhagen interpretation is not universally accepted, an exact mechanism of the collapse of the wavefunction remains elusive, and the role of mind in fundamental physical theory is unclear.

Neuroscience studies the nervous system, the physical basis of the mind. At the systems level, neuroscientists investigate how biological neural networks form and physiologically interact to produce mental functions and content such as reflexes, multisensory integration, motor coordination, circadian rhythms, emotional responses, learning, and memory. The underlying physical basis of learning and memory is likely dynamic changes in gene expression that occur in brain neurons. Such expression changes are introduced by epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetic regulation of gene expression ordinarily involves chemical modification of DNA or DNA-associated histone proteins. Such chemical modifications can cause long-lasting changes in gene expression. Epigenetic mechanisms employed in learning and memory include the DNMT3A promoted methylation and TET promoted demethylation of neuronal DNA as well as methylation, acetylation and deacetylation of neuronal histone proteins. Also, long term excitation of neural pathways and subsequent endocrinal signaling, can provide a capacity for structural activation of gene expression in the histone code; allowing a potential mechanism of throughput epigenetic interaction with the nervous system.

At a larger scale, efforts in computational neuroscience have developed large-scale models that simulate simple, functioning brains.[117] As of 2012, such models include the thalamus, basal ganglia, prefrontal cortex, motor cortex, and occipital cortex, and consequentially simulated brains can learn, respond to visual stimuli, coordinate motor responses, form short-term memories, and learn to respond to patterns. Currently, researchers aim to program the hippocampus and limbic system, hypothetically imbuing the simulated mind with long-term memory and crude emotions.[118]

By contrast, affective neuroscience studies the neural mechanisms of personality, emotion, and mood primarily through experimental tasks.

Cognitive science examines the mental functions that give rise to information processing, termed cognition. These include perception, attention, working memory, long-term memory, producing and understanding language, learning, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. Cognitive science seeks to understand thinking "in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures".[119]

At the birth of cognitive science in the 1960s and 1970s, the paradigm of the computational theory of mind was widely adopted. This paradigm holds that the mind is essentially a computational system, and its explanation needs to be provided in terms of a computational description. More recently, rival paradigms gained ground within cognitive science, namely the neurophysical description and the intentional description.[120]

Though the interface between neuroscience and an exact model of cognition is not yet made, progress in biological neuron models help to mathematically quantify cognitive neuroscience; and elaborate a theory of mind that can be provable. However a theoretically fundamental synthesis in psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and biophysics must be made; for the problem of mind and its faculties to gain tractable scientific ground.

Over the past years, research in cognitive sciences has highlighted the importance of the body for cognition. Proponents of the embodied cognition theory of mind hold that cognition (and mental phenomena) is the product of active interactions between individuals and their surrounding environment.[121]

Psychology is the scientific study of human behavior, mental functioning, and experience. As both an academic and applied discipline, Psychology involves the scientific study of mental processes such as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, as well as environmental influences, such as social and cultural influences, and interpersonal relationships, in order to devise theories of human behavior. Psychological patterns can be understood as low cost ways of information processing.[122] Psychology also refers to the application of such knowledge to various spheres of human activity, including problems of individuals' daily lives and the treatment of mental health problems.

Psychology differs from the other social sciences (e.g. anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology) due to its focus on experimentation at the scale of the individual, or individuals in small groups as opposed to large groups, institutions or societies. Historically, psychology differed from biology and neuroscience in that it was primarily concerned with mind rather than brain. Modern psychological science incorporates physiological and neurological processes into its conceptions of perception, cognition, behaviour, and mental disorders.

Psychiatry, Neurology and Neurosurgery are the specialties within the field of Medicine that are devoted to the study of the mind and to the treatment of humans with mental disorders and other medical conditions affecting the mind and nervous system. Psychiatrists, Neurologists and Neurosurgeons conduct research in clinical, academic and industry settings.

By analogy with the health of the body, one can speak metaphorically of a state of health of the mind, or mental health. Merriam-Webster defines mental health as "a state of emotional and psychological well-being in which an individual is able to use his or her cognitive and emotional capabilities, function in society, and meet the ordinary demands of everyday life". According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there is no one "official" definition of mental health. Cultural differences, subjective assessments, and competing professional theories all affect how "mental health" is defined. In general, most experts agree that "mental health" and "mental disorder" are not opposites. In other words, the absence of a recognized mental disorder is not necessarily an indicator of mental health.

One way to think about mental health is by looking at how effectively and successfully a person functions. Feeling capable and competent; being able to handle normal levels of stress, maintaining satisfying relationships, and leading an independent life; and being able to "bounce back" or recover from difficult situations, are all signs of mental health.

Psychotherapy is an interpersonal, relational intervention used by trained psychotherapists to aid clients in problems of living. This usually includes increasing individual sense of well-being and reducing subjective discomforting experience. Psychotherapists employ a range of techniques based on experiential relationship building, dialogue, communication and behavior change and that are designed to improve the mental health of a client or patient, or to improve group relationships (such as in a family). Most forms of psychotherapy use only spoken conversation, though some also use various other forms of communication such as the written word, art, drama, narrative story, or therapeutic touch. Psychotherapy occurs within a structured encounter between a trained therapist and client(s). Purposeful, theoretically based psychotherapy began in the 19th century with psychoanalysis; since then, scores of other approaches have been developed and continue to be created.

Animal cognition, or cognitive ethology, is the title given to a modern approach to the mental capacities of animals. It has developed out of comparative psychology, but has also been strongly influenced by the approach of ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology. Much of what used to be considered under the title of "animal intelligence" is now thought of under this heading. Animal language acquisition, attempting to discern or understand the degree to which animal cognition can be revealed by linguistics-related study, has been controversial among cognitive linguists.

In 1950 Alan M. Turing published "Computing machinery and intelligence" in Mind, in which he proposed that machines could be tested for intelligence using questions and answers. This process is now named the Turing Test. The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was first used by John McCarthy who considered it to mean "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines".[124] It can also refer to intelligence as exhibited by an artificial (man-made, non-natural, manufactured) entity. AI is studied in overlapping fields of computer science, psychology, neuroscience and engineering, dealing with intelligent behavior, learning and adaptation and usually developed using customized machines or computers.

Research in AI is concerned with producing machines to automate tasks requiring intelligent behavior. Examples include control, planning and scheduling, the ability to answer diagnostic and consumer questions, handwriting, natural language, speech and facial recognition. As such, the study of AI has also become an engineering discipline, focused on providing solutions to real life problems, knowledge mining, software applications, strategy games like computer chess and other video games. One of the biggest limitations of AI is in the domain of actual machine comprehension. Consequentially natural-language understanding and connectionism (where behavior of neural networks is investigated) are areas of active research and development.

The debate about the nature of the mind is relevant to the development of artificial intelligence. If the mind is indeed a thing separate from or higher than the functioning of the brain, then hypothetically it would be much more difficult to recreate within a machine, if it were possible at all. If, on the other hand, the mind is no more than the aggregated functions of the brain, then it will be possible to create a machine with a recognisable mind (though possibly only with computers much different from today's), by simple virtue of the fact that such a machine already exists in the form of the human brain.

Many religions associate spiritual qualities to the human mind. These are often tightly connected to their mythology and ideas of afterlife.

The Indian philosopher-sage Sri Aurobindo attempted to unite the Eastern and Western psychological traditions with his integral psychology, as have many philosophers and New religious movements. Judaism teaches that "moach shalit al halev", the mind rules the heart; humans can approach the Divine intellectually, through learning and behaving according to the Divine Will as enclothed in the Torah, and use that deep logical understanding to elicit and guide emotional arousal during prayer. Christianity has tended to see the mind (Greek nous)[125] as distinct from the soul (Greek psuche)[126] and sometimes further distinguished the spirit (Greek pneuma).[127] Western esoteric traditions sometimes refer to a mental body that exists on a plane other than the physical. Hinduism's various philosophical schools have debated whether the human soul (Sanskrit atman) is distinct from, or identical to, Brahman, the divine reality. Taoism sees the human being as contiguous with natural forces, and the mind as not separate from the body. Confucianism sees the mind, like the body, as inherently perfectible.

Buddhist teachings explain the moment-to-moment manifestation of the mind-stream.[9][10] The components that make up the mind are known as the five aggregates (i.e., material form, feelings, perception, volition, and sensory consciousness), which arise and pass away continuously. The arising and passing of these aggregates in the present moment is described as being influenced by five causal laws: biological laws, psychological laws, physical laws, volitional laws, and universal laws.[10][9] The Buddhist practice of mindfulness involves attending to this constantly changing mind-stream.

According to Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti, the mind has two fundamental qualities: "clarity and cognizes". If something is not those two qualities, it cannot validly be called mind. "Clarity" refers to the fact that mind has no color, shape, size, location, weight, or any other physical characteristic, and "cognizes" that it functions to know or perceive objects.[128] "Knowing" refers to the fact that mind is aware of the contents of experience, and that, in order to exist, mind must be cognizing an object. You cannot have a mind whose function is to cognize an object existing without cognizing an object.

Mind, in Buddhism, is also described as being "space-like" and "illusion-like". Mind is space-like in the sense that it is not physically obstructive. It has no qualities which would prevent it from existing. In Mahayana Buddhism, mind is illusion-like in the sense that it is empty of inherent existence. This does not mean it does not exist, it means that it exists in a manner that is counter to our ordinary way of misperceiving how phenomena exist, according to Buddhism. When the mind is itself cognized properly, without misperceiving its mode of existence, it appears to exist like an illusion. There is a big difference however between being "space and illusion" and being "space-like" and "illusion-like". Mind is not composed of space, it just shares some descriptive similarities to space. Mind is not an illusion, it just shares some descriptive qualities with illusions.

Buddhism posits that there is no inherent, unchanging identity (Inherent I, Inherent Me) or phenomena (Ultimate self, inherent self, Atman, Soul, Self-essence, Jiva, Ishvara, humanness essence, etc.) which is the experiencer of our experiences and the agent of our actions. In other words, human beings consist of merely a body and a mind, and nothing extra. Within the body there is no part or set of parts which is by itself or themselves the person. Similarly, within the mind there is no part or set of parts which are themselves "the person". A human being merely consists of five aggregates, or skandhas and nothing else.

In the same way, "mind" is what can be validly conceptually labelled onto our mere experience of clarity and knowing. There is something separate and apart from clarity and knowing which is "Awareness", in Buddhism. "Mind" is that part of experience the sixth sense door, which can be validly referred to as mind by the concept-term "mind". There is also not "objects out there, mind in here, and experience somewhere in-between". There is a third thing called "awareness" which exists being aware of the contents of mind and what mind cognizes. There are five senses (arising of mere experience: shapes, colors, the components of smell, components of taste, components of sound, components of touch) and mind as the sixth institution; this means, expressly, that there can be a third thing called "awareness" and a third thing called "experiencer who is aware of the experience". This awareness is deeply related to "no-self" because it does not judge the experience with craving or aversion.

Clearly, the experience arises and is known by mind, but there is a third thing calls Sati what is the "real experiencer of the experience" that sits apart from the experience and which can be aware of the experience in 4 levels. (Maha Sathipatthana Sutta.)

To be aware of these four levels one needs to cultivate equanimity toward Craving and Aversion. This is Called Vipassana which is different from the way of reacting with Craving and Aversion. This is the state of being aware and equanimous to the complete experience of here and now. This is the way of Buddhism, with regards to mind and the ultimate nature of minds (and persons).

Due to the mindbody problem, a lot of interest and debate surrounds the question of what happens to one's conscious mind as one's body dies. During brain death all brain function permanently ceases. According to some neuroscientific views which see these processes as the physical basis of mental phenomena, the mind fails to survive brain death and ceases to exist. This permanent loss of consciousness after death is sometimes called "eternal oblivion". The belief that some spiritual or incorporeal component (soul) exists and that it is preserved after death is described by the term "afterlife".

Parapsychology is the study of certain types of paranormal phenomena, or of phenomena which appear to be paranormal or not have any scientific basis,[129] such as precognition, telekinesis and telepathy.

The term is based on the Greek para ('beside, beyond'), psyche ('soul, mind'), and logos ('account, explanation') and was coined by psychologist Max Dessoir in or before 1889.[130] J.B. Rhine tried to popularize "parapsychology" using fraudulent techniques as a replacement for the earlier term "psychical research", during a shift in methodologies which brought experimental methods to the study of psychic phenomena.[130] Parapsychology is not accepted among the scientific community as science, as psychic abilities have not been demonstrated to exist.[131][132][133][134][135] The status of parapsychology as a science has also been disputed,[136] with many scientists regarding the discipline as pseudoscience.[137][138][139]

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Mind - Wikipedia

Model of developmental psychology

Spiral Dynamics (SD) is a model of the evolutionary development of individuals, organizations, and societies. It was initially developed by Don Edward Beck and Christopher Cowan based on the emergent cyclical theory of Clare W. Graves, combined with memetics as proposed by Richard Dawkins and further developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. A later collaboration between Beck and Ken Wilber produced Spiral Dynamics Integral (SDi).[1] Several variations of Spiral Dynamics continue to exist, both independently and incorporated into or drawing on Wilber's Integral theory.[2] In addition to influencing both integral theory and metamodernism,[3] Spiral Dynamics is noted for its applications in management theory and business ethics,[4][5][6][7] and as an example of applied memetics.[8]

Spiral Dynamics describes how value systems and worldviews emerge from the interaction of "life conditions" and the mind's capacities.[9] The emphasis on life conditions as essential to the progression through value systems is unusual among similar theories, and leads to the view that no level is inherently positive or negative, but rather is a response to the local environment.[10] Through these value systems, groups and cultures structure their societies and individuals integrate within them. Each distinct set of values is developed as a response to solving the problems of the previous system. Changes between states may occur incrementally (first order change) or in a sudden breakthrough (second order change).[11] The value systems develop in a specific order, and the most important question when considering the value system being expressed in a particular behavior is why the behavior occurs.[12]

University of North Texas (UNT) professor Don Beck sought out Union College psychology professor Clare W. Graves after reading about his work in The Futurist. They met in person in 1975, and Beck, soon joined by UNT faculty member Chris Cowan, worked closely with Graves until his death in 1986. Beck made over 60 trips to South Africa during the 1980s and 1990s, applying Graves's emergent cyclical theory in various projects.[14] This experience, along with others Beck and Cowan had applying the theory in North America, motivated the development of Spiral Dynamics.[15]

Beck and Cowan first published their extension and adaptation of Graves's emergent cyclical theory in Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change (Exploring the New Science of Memetics) (1996). They introduced a simple color-coding for the eight value systems identified by Graves (and a predicted ninth) which is better known than Graves's letter pair identifiers. Additionally, Beck and Cowan integrated ideas from the field of memetics as created by Dawkins and further developed by Csikszentmihalyi, identifying memetic attractors for each of Graves's levels. These attractors, which they called "VMemes", are said to bind memes into cohesive packages which structure the world views of both individuals and societies.[1]

While Spiral Dynamics began as a single formulation and extension of Graves's work, a series of disagreements and shifting collaborations have produced three distinct approaches. By 2010, these had settled as Christopher Cowan and Natasha Todorovic advocating their trademarked "SPIRAL DYNAMICS" as fundamentally the same as Graves's emergent cyclical theory, Don Beck advocating Spiral Dynamics Integral (SDi) with a community of practice around various chapters of his Centers for Human Emergence, and Ken Wilber subordinating SDi to his similarly but-not-identically colored Integral AQAL "altitudes", with a greater focus on spirituality.[2]

This state of affairs has led to practitioners noting the "lineage" of their approach in publications.[16]

The following timeline shows the development of the various Spiral Dynamics factions and the major figures involved in them, as well as the initial work done by Graves. Splits and changes between factions are based on publications or public announcements, or approximated to the nearest year based on well-documented[17] events.

Vertical bars indicate notable publications, which are listed along with a few other significant events after the timeline.

Bolded years indicate publications that appear as vertical bars in the chart above:

Chris Cowan's decision to trademark "Spiral Dynamics" in the US and form a consulting business with Natasha Todorovic contributed to the split between Beck and him in 1999.[26] Cowan and Todorovic subsequently published an article on Spiral Dynamics in the peer-reviewed journal Strategy & Leadership,[30] edited and published Graves's unfinished manuscript, and generally took the position that the distinction between Spiral Dynamics and Graves's ECLET is primarily one of terminology. Holding this view, they opposed interpretations seen as "heterodox."[26]

In particular, Cowan and Todorovic's view of Spiral Dynamics stands in opposition to that of Ken Wilber. Wilber biographer Frank Visser lists Cowan as "strong" critic of Wilber and his Integral theory, particularly the concept of a "Mean Green Meme."[43] Todorovic produced a paper arguing that research refutes the existence of the "Mean Green Meme" as Beck and particularly Wilber described it.[33]

By early 2000, Don Beck was corresponding with integral philosopher Ken Wilber about Spiral Dynamics and using a "4Q/8L" diagram combining Wilber's four quadrants with the eight known levels of Spiral Dynamics.[38][26] Beck officially announced SDi as launching on January 1, 2002, aligning Spiral Dynamics with integral theory and additionally citing the influence of John Petersen of the Arlington Institute and Ichak Adizes.[26] By 2006, Wilber had introduced a slightly different color sequence for his AQAL "altitudes", diverging from Beck's SDi and relegating it to the values line, which is one of many lines within AQAL.[38]

Later influences on SDi include the work of Muzafer Sherif and Carolyn Sherif in the fields of realistic conflict and social judgement, specifically their Assimilation Contrast Effect model[44][45] and Robber's Cave study[46]

Ken Wilber briefly referenced Graves in his 1986 book (with Jack Engler and Daniel P. Brown) Transformations of Consciousness,[47] and again in 1995's Sex, Ecology, Spirituality which also introduced his four quadrants model.[25] However, it was not until the "Integral Psychology" section of 1999's Collected Works: Volume 4 that he integrated Gravesian theory, now in the form of Spiral Dynamics.[29] Beck and Wilber began discussing their ideas with each other around this time.[26]

By 2006, Wilber was using SDi only for the values line, one of many lines in his All Quadrants, All Levels/Lines (AQAL) framework.[48] In the book Integral Spirituality published that year, he introduced the concept of "altitudes" as an overall "content-free" system to correlate developmental stages across all of the theories on all of the lines integrated by AQAL.[49]

The altitudes used a set of colors that were ordered according to the rainbow, which Wilber explained was necessary to align with color energies in the tantric tradition. This left only Red, Orange, Green, and Turquoise in place, changing all of the other colors to greater or lesser degrees. Furthermore, where Spiral Dynamics theorizes that the 2nd tier would have six stages repeating the themes of the six stages of the 1st tier, in the altitude system the 2nd tier contains only two levels (corresponding to the first two SD 2nd tier levels) followed by a 3rd tier of four spiritually-oriented levels inspired by the work of Sri Aurobindo. Beck and Cowan each consider this 3rd tier to be non-Gravesian.[50]

Wilber critic Frank Visser notes that while Wilber gives a correspondence of his altitude colors to chakras, his correspondence does not actually match any traditional system for coloring chakras, despite Wilber's assertion that using the wrong colors would "backfire badly when any actual energies were used."[52] He goes on to note that Wilber's criticism of the SD colors as "inadequate" ignores that they were not intended to correlate with any system such as chakras. In this context, Visser expresses sympathy for Beck and Cowan's dismay over what Visser describes as "vandalism" regarding the color scheme, concluding that the altitude colors are an "awkward hybrid" of the SD and rainbow/chakra color systems, both lacking the expressiveness of the former and failing to accurately correlate with the latter.[53]

As an extension of Graves's theory, most criticisms of that theory apply to Spiral Dynamics as well. Likewise, to the extent that Spiral Dynamics Integral incorporates Ken Wilber's integral theory, criticism of that theory, and the lack of mainstream academic support for it are also relevant.

In addition, there have been criticisms of various aspects of SD and/or SDi that are specific to those extensions. Nicholas Reitter, writing in the Journal of Conscious Evolution, observes:[54]

On the other hand, the SD authors seem also to have magnified some of the weaknesses in Graves' approach. The occasional messianism, unevenness of presentation and constant business-orientation of Graves' (2005) manuscript is transmuted in the SD authors' book (Beck and Cowan 1996) into a sometimes- bewildering array of references to world history, pop culture and other topics, often made in helter-skelter fashion.

Spiral Dynamics has been criticized by some as appearing to be like a cult, with undue prominence given to the business and intellectual property concerns of its leading advocates.[55]

Metamodernist philosophers Daniel Grtz and Emil Friis, writing as Hanzi Freinacht, note that Spiral Dynamics provides unique insights, while also criticizing it for combining too many dimensions of development into one measurement. Their multi-part system combines aspects of SD with other developmental measurements, describing SD as the "awkward uncle" of their "Effective Value Meme" concept.[3] They also entirely dismiss the Turquoise level, saying that while there will eventually be another level, it does not currently exist. In support of this assertion, they note the lack of critique of metamodernism (which they roughly equate with the Yellow level), and explain those who self-identify as Turquoise as confusing level with their non-SD dimensions of development, state and depth. They also warn that attempts to build Turquoise communities are, in their view, likely to lead to the development of "abusive cults" as a result of trying to make the Turquoise level real when (in their view) it is not.[56]

Psychologist Keith Rice, discussing his application of SDi in individual psychotherapy, notes that it encounters limitations in accounting for temperament and the unconscious. However, regarding SDi's "low profile among academics," he notes that it can easily be matched to more well-known models "such as Maslow, Loevinger, Kohlberg, Adorno, etc.," in order to establish trust with clients.[57]

Spiral Dynamics has influenced management theory, which was the primary focus of the 1996 Spiral Dynamics book.[54][58][59] John Mackey and Rajendra Sisodia write that the vision and values of conscious capitalism as they articulate it are consistent with the "2nd tier" VMEMES of Spiral Dynamics.[7] Rica Viljoen's case study of economic development in Ghana demonstrates how understanding the Purple VMEME allows for organizational storytelling that connects with diverse (non-Western) worldviews.[60]

Spiral Dynamics has also been noted as an example of applied memetics. In his chapter, "'Meme Wars': A Brief Overview of Memetics and Some Essential Context" in the peer-reviewed[61] book Memetics and Evolutionary Economics, Michael P. Schaile includes Spiral Dynamics in the "organizational memetics" section of his list of "enlightening examples of applied memetics."[8] Schaile also notes Said Dawlabani's SDi-based "MEMEnomics" as an alternative to his own "economemetics" in his chapter examining memetics and economics in the same book.[62] Elza Maalouf argues that SDi provides a "memetic" interpretation of non-Western cultures that Western NGOs often lack, focusing attention on the "indigenous content" of the culture's value system.[63]

Spiral Dynamics continues to influence integral philosophy and spirituality, and the developmental branch of metamodern philosophy. Both integralists and metamodernists connect their philosophies to SD's Yellow VMEME.[31][3] Integralism also identifies with Turquoise and eventually added further stages not found in SD or SDi,[38] while metamodernism dismisses Turquoise as nonexistent.[56]

SDi has also been referenced in the fields of education,[64]urban planning,[65]and cultural analysis.[66]

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Spiral Dynamics - Wikipedia

Preparing for this article, I googled the word meme and generated 78,000,000 results! Looking back on 2013, the BBC published an article on-line listing its selection of the leading memes of the past year. Anyone who spends any amount of time surfing the internet will almost certainly have come across examples of that rather disreputable phenomenon, the internet meme, and marketing agencies, ever on the look-out for new ways to enter a customers psyche, have been fleet of foot in using them as tools in their viral marketing campaigns. You can even go to websites that offer to generate memes for you! The meme has certainly achieved a vibrant presence in popular consciousness.

In academic circles the meme concept, whilst having its dedicated supporters, has been viewed with suspicion by many, derision by some, and outright hostility by not a few. Memetics, a field of study developed from the 80s onwards, is often accused of trespassing in fields such as psychology or sociology, attempting to replace well established and coherent analytical tools and models with half-baked and insufficiently scientific notions. Luis Benitez-Bribiesca has described memetics as a pseudo-scientific dogma, and there are few more serious condemnations than that in the academic world! To say that the memes are controversial in academia is akin to suggesting that, after the Big Bang, the universe got rather warm, and the enthusiasm with which memes have been embraced by popular culture has, if anything, worsened the regard in which serious scholars hold them.

The meme first appeared in Richard Dawkins first book, The Selfish Gene (1976), and was an attempt to understand why some behaviours, from an evolutionary perspective, seemed to make no sense but, somehow or other, were found to be very common in human societies. As Dawkins emphasised, natural selection is a ruthless judge of its subjects and any frailty, physical or behavioural, is almost inevitably rewarded by a rapid exit from the gene pool. It therefore followed that any widespread behaviour, prevalent in a thriving population, no matter how immediately inexplicable, should give some advantage in terms of gene survival. Continued research aimed to understand the reasons behind animal behaviours has yielded results that are entirely consistent with this thesis.

In some cases, however, it is necessary to dig a little deeper and understand exactly what is benefitting from particular behaviours. Daniel Dennett, in his wonderful book Breaking The Spell (2006), gives the example of ants climbing to the top of blades of grass, and staying there, from which exposed position they are frequently devoured by grazing animals. It is impossible to account for this behaviour until it is realised that the beneficiary is not the ant and her genes but a tiny creature called a lancet fluke which has taken over the brain of the ant and compelled it to follow this course of action. It is part of the lancet flukes reproductive cycle to be eaten by a sheep or cow, and hitching a ride inside the ant is an excellent way to achieve this. Viruses also utilise the behaviour of their hosts. They enter an organism and use the bodys responses to their presence, such as sneezing or excreting, to facilitate their passage to further unwilling hosts. There are numerous other examples where one organism utilises or manipulates the behaviour of another to further its own genetic agenda; often at the expense of the other.

The lancet fluke, the virus, or any other organism furthering the spread of its own genes, has no malign intentions towards their hosts or, in fact, any intentions at all. What is being seen is a process that has evolved through natural selection and favours the genes of lancet fluke or virus, or whatever.

Expanding on these observations and discoveries, Dawkins wondered, when observing behaviours among humans, whether any similar process could be at work to explain why some ideas, which on the face of it seem injurious to those who hold them, continue to persist and proliferate. Devoting oneself to ones art, impoverishing oneself in the pursuit of Truth, or welcoming martyrdom for ones cause do not, it seems, represent behaviours which are obviously beneficial to the individual of for the spread of that individuals genes. So, given that this kind of behaviour clearly exists, and is widespread, what is reaping the benefit? Dawkins somewhat surprising answer was the ideas themselves. Ideas are clearly in competition with each other so perhaps theres a selection process going on, analogous to natural selection, through which some ideas prove successful and spread whilst others die out. He concluded that there was such a selection process and, to emphasise the parallel to natural selection, he coined the term meme which come from an ancient Greek root, mimeme, meaning imitated thing. Dawkins has also, perhaps a touch mischievously, referred to memes as mind viruses, which has been met, predictably, with howls of indignation from some circles. The point he is trying to make is that memes, just like viruses, are indifferent to the welfare or otherwise of their hosts and the only thing that counts, from their perspective, is that they persist.

For a meme to survive and spread in a competitive environment it must have attributes which give it advantages over other memes. Whilst advantageous to the meme they do not have to be to the benefit of the host. A new method to make blades sharper is valuable knowledge and will either spread throughout a population, if allowed to do so, or will be guarded jealously by those who already possess that knowledge. Either way its efficacy is an attribute which will guarantee its retention. On the other hand, an idea such as life after death has the attribute that, since people are scared of death, a belief in a hereafter is likely to be a popular notion and, indeed, is. Such a belief may or may not benefit the host. If it removes the fear of death to the extent that, say, martyrdom is positively welcomed, the host clearly does not benefit; at least in this life!

A meme may improve its prospects for survival if it becomes part of what Dawkins termed a memeplex. This is a situation where a number of compatible memes join together in a manner that is mutually supportive, and may be seen as a roughly analogous situation to that where genes work in concert with other genes in the genome. Political and religious beliefs and also the combined knowledge of experts such as blacksmiths or builders can be seem as memeplexes and they clearly help to secure the longevity of the memes of which they are composed.

Memes and memeplexes may evolve as alchemy evolved into chemistry or religions change over time. They are subject to outside influences and so they adapt. Memes may also die and be replaced by other memes as did the ether which scientists had always thought existed until the end of the 19th century. Whatever its fate however, its fate is dependent on a whole complex of variables which may or may not include its truth or its positive value to its host.

The whole meme concept, as was mentioned above, has been severely criticised as being, at best, poorly defined and, at worst, totally unscientific. Dawkins initially defined a meme as a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit ofimitation and there have been further attempts to define it more closely. He did not expect or intend for the concept to be taken up, away from the original context, with quite the enthusiasm it has been, and must have been as surprised as to its success as he was at the popularity of his book, The Selfish Gene. He has repeatedly cautioned that the analogy between memes and genes should not be taken too far and saw the whole idea as simply being one way to look at the way ideas spread and evolve. It is dangerous to simplify complex phenomena, subject to numerous and often unknown variables, into simple models, without attaching very strong caveats, and Dawkins has always been aware of this. Perhaps it is safest and most useful to view meme as one means by which one can get an idea as to how ideas, and particularly bad ideas, can contrive to spread so effectively in a culture; but without jettisoning the well founded theories provided by psychologists, sociologists and others.

In the meantime, the meme, meme continues to spread and evolve. Within its memeplex, memetics, it may eventually become another unexceptionable term and a tool to shed light on the complexities of culture, perhaps not. It continues, though, to branch out in meaning and usage, in diverse cultural directions, evolving all the way, and seems set, less than 40 years after its was first coined by Richard Dawkins, to become a fixture of our cultural universe and our lexicon.

Mark Jordan is a writer, researcher and music promoter, based in London. He can be reached on [emailprotected]

Written By: Mark A Jordancontinue to source article at

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Whats in a Meme? - Richard Dawkins

If you have spent any time scrolling throughthe internet,you have probably encountered a meme. From Grumpy Catto Spider-Man pointing at another version of himself, memes are constantly being shared and altered over time.

Memes can be funny,satirical orcute. However, some memes canbedark and can potentially spread disinformation.

But what exactly is a meme? What do memes mean and how do they spread? Here's what you need to know.

Propaganda of the digital age: How memes are weaponized to spread disinformation

According to Merriam-Webster, there are two definitions for meme:

In general terms, memes can be anything, whether itbe a video, image or GIF, thatspreads and is repeated over time, becoming more entrenched within culture, said Mary Ingram-Waters, Ph.D., associatedean and professor at the University of Nevada-Reno Honors College.

"Memeshave to be translatable within a particular demographic group a group that hasa shared language, shared meanings, shared culture," she explained. "Memesthat really go viral, that really take off, can cross boundaries.So, they can be legible to lots of different kinds of groups."

A meme is an idea shortcut, triggering an understanding of something in multiple ways, said Ingram-Waters.For instance, an image of a dog making a side-eye glance can be utilized in a meme to call an idea or scenario into question or to denote suspicion.

Laughter is the best medicine: New study shows memes about COVID decrease stress

The term "meme" was coined in 1976 by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book, "The Selfish Gene."Along with memes comes memetics.

The word nowis defined as "the study of memes" but memeticsdescribes how ideas reproduce, change and evolve.Dawkins used"meme" to representanypiece of cultural information or content which operates viareplication, alterationand mutation,survivingthroughdissemination.

As a result, memes area cultural equivalent to a genein the sense they are passed from person-to-person and can be the basis for an evolutionary process.Just as there aregene pools of different iterations and characteristicsdue to replication over time,there are meme pools based on the same principles.

In other words, memes are similar toviruses they spread, replicate and make their way into facets of culture, leaving lasting impacts on history, similar to how viruses infect populations.

Just Curious:We're here to help with life's everyday questions

If it has a message or meaning behind it, anything can be a meme. A meme can includea video, image, text, GIF, among other mediums.

While you can use a popular image or person, such as Kim Kardashian yawning, you can use any random thing to make a meme. So long as the emotion and meaning behind the creation is recognizable and identifiable, you have made a meme, said Ingram-Waters.

The main key to a meme is its ability to be replicated. Take the woman yelling at the cat meme.

While the two images werenot connected in the beginning, they come together to form a meme featuring former "Real Housewivesof Beverly Hills"star Taylor Armstrong yelling at awhite cat sitting in front of a plate of vegetables.Armstrong's facial expression denote anger and frustration, while the cat looks equally as bothered and unenthused.

These emotions drive the memetic nature of the image. People can insert whatever statement, phrase or saying into the meme so long as it relates back to the emotions displayed, making itresonatewith a demographic.

"The woman who's upset and the cat who's staring at her in an accusatory way that can be recreated with other animals.It can be recreated with people," said Ingram-Waters. "You could rant. You can just put very random things in there. Butthat juxtaposition (of emotions) itself has become the memetic device."

Anything can act as a meme, all it needs is a relatability and the capability for revamping.

The Super Bowl halftime show reactions: See the best memes.

From Chuck Schumer to Stephen Breyer: Here are some viral memes from the State of the Union

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What is a meme? What you need to know about the cultural phenomena - USA TODAY

We're familiar with a lot of science fiction horror stories about the future, with A.I. Uprsings, alien invasions, economical collapse, cyperpunk worlds ran by corporate oligarchs, post nuclear war, meteor hits earth, etc.

But there is another, subtler, kind of science fiction horror story that goes back to the 50's which has already come to pass and we're all living in today. It's a genre involving advertising basically destroying the world and making people's lives a living hell.

An early entry into the genre was Captive audience in 1953, a world where it was illegal to block or interfere with advertising, even if it was to make yourself unable to hear it by wearing earplugs.

It's freely available online here:

https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v005n02_1953-08/page/n53/mode/2up?q=%22Captive+Audience%22+Ann+Warren+Griffith&view=theater

Now does this story seem impossible today? Can you imagine today's SCOTUS ruling against a major advertiser in a right to advertise case?

Another early entry I read as a kid was 'the room, from 1961 and it's amazing how prophetic it was with saturation advertising constantly battering at people's minds.

http://www.lfvhenglish.weebly.com/uploads/8/2/5/6/8256468/the_room_text.pdf

The only thing missing today is the advertising being pushed into people's dreams, but you know someones' working on it, don't you?

There is a novel called 'merchants war about advertising reaching levels that can cause instant addiction to products like MOKIE COKE! that destroy lives in short order and how a war between planets is fought via weaponized advertising that uses various neurological means to produce instant addiction.

This genre of SF apocalypse and horror doesn't get much press, probably because we're living in it and the advertisers don't want us to know about these stories. But it's the SF horror future that came true first. (Others are pending.)

We know that big business doesn't see human beings as people, it sees them as human resources to exploit for maximum profit. Now we're also seen as simply Advertising target units to be targeted with more and more ads that are carefully crafted with more and more knowledge of psychology, neurology and the science of memetics to have more and more influence over people while being so prevalent in all areas of life as to be inescapable.

The advertisers know we're tired of ads, they don't care. Put an adbocker on your net device, get greeted at most sites with WE HAVE DETECTED YOU ARE USING AN ADBLOCKER! PLEASE DISABLE TO CONTINUE! (I simply leave the site at that point.)

Maybe it's time for more mass public action against advertising. Has anyone considered charging internet advertisers with theft? Seriously, if you own and pay for an internet account, and advertisers use it to send you garbage (Which is what advertising most is. Annoying, irritating, useless, worthless garbage.) then they are essentially taking the access you're paying for, they're basically stealing your data flow. How is putting ads on a screen I own or into an email account I own different from them coming to my home and putting ads up on the walls, bedroom ceiling, etc? It's my property, and they're pouring ads into it and on it. Maybe advertisers should have to pay me for the bandwidth they take up that i'm paying for.

TV is of course as bad, with more ads than ever on tv you're paying for. I remember watching a dr. who christmas special (Yes, I said christmas, not holiday. I'm unwoke!) that was supposed to be two hours.

Out of 120 minutes 50 were ads.

Imagine paying for a 12 ounce steak, and when it arrives there's 7 ounces of steak and 5 ounces of garbage on your plate, because people paid to take 5 ounces of steak away and replace it with 5 ounces of garbage. That's what its like to pay for a 120 minute show and get 70 minutes of show, 50 minutes of ads.

If we pay for a show, then at least 3/4 of it should be show, not ads. We're not paying for ads.

The stories I linked to above may have seemed impossible when they were written, but they're largely come to pass today in some ways. I'm afraid if the public doesn't demand and maybe even fight for laws controlling advertising, advertisers will pay for and get laws controlling us as in the captive audience story above.

Maybe it's time for people to file class action suits against advertisers for theft of service, as in they're stealing out internet connections to force ads on us. Or 'theft of time as we're forced to lose time dealing with the ads, deleting them, clicking them down or suffering thru them if they are unskippable.

Of course this depends on the American public getting off its asses and doing something. Better buy up earmuffs while they're still legal...

The rest is here:

The Science fiction horror story that came true and we're living in now. - Daily Kos

Memetics is the study of memes, be they phrases, behaviors, or any idea that is transferred from person to person. What is typically thought of as a "meme" today is an internet meme. Memes in general are simply popular thoughts and ideas that drive culture change. A meme, in this way, is sometimes called a thought contagion or a virus of the mind, not unlike an "ear worm" or song that gets stuck in your head.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the term "meme" as a transmittable piece of cultural information. Similar to the way genes pass through parents to their children, as people share these bits of cultural information, they are replicated and further distributed until ultimately becoming a cultural phenomenon. Memetic evolution involves meme replication and distribution often through cultural transmission. For example, a man may share the story of his latest dream about a rocking chair amongst friends. Those friends then share that dream with their families, each interpreting the story a bit differently. The family members then spread their versions of the information across their social media pages, school groups, office teams, and such. Soon, the whole town is talking about their version of the rocking chair dream and it inspires local cafes to start putting rocking chairs on their patios for guests. Suddenly, the town is full of rocking chairs and this town's niche was created by the sharing of a single idea, or "meme".

This utilization of an evolutionary model to understand how information is interpreted and shared between people and throughout cultures is a further study into the human brain and its effect on cultural evolution. Understanding the complex system of the human mind and how it values information is beneficial for any customer-facing organization.

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What is Memetics? | Virtusa

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Memetics is an approach to evolutionary models of information transfer based on the concept of the meme.

The term comes from a transliteration of a Greek word and was used in 1904 by the German evolutionary biologist Richard Semon in his work Die Mnemische Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalenempfindungen, translated into English in 1921 as The Mneme.

In his book The Selfish Gene (1976), the ethologist Richard Dawkins coined the slightly different term "meme" to describe a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture, albeit in a different sense. In his book, Dawkins contended that the meme is a unit of information residing in the brain and is the mutating replicator in human cultural evolution. It is a pattern that can influence its surroundings and can propagate. This created great debate among sociologists, biologists, and scientists of other disciplines, because Dawkins himself did not provide a sufficient explanation of how the replication of units of information in the brain controls human behavior and ultimately culture, since the principal topic of the book was genetics. Dawkins apparently did not intend to present a comprehensive theory of memetics in The Selfish Gene, but rather coined the term meme in a speculative spirit. Accordingly, the term "unit of information" came to be defined in different ways by many scientists.

The modern memetics movement dates from the mid 1980s (a January 1983 Metamagical Themas column by Douglas Hofstadter in Scientific American was influential). The study differs from mainstream cultural evolutionary theory in that its practitioners frequently come from outside of the fields of anthropology and sociology, and are often not academics. The massive popular impact of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene has undoubtedly been an important factor in drawing in people of disparate intellectual backgrounds. Another crucial stimulus was the publication in 1992 of Consciousness Explained by Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett, which incorporated the meme concept into an influential theory of the mind. In his 1993 essay Viruses of the Mind, Richard Dawkins used memetics to explain the phenomenon of religious belief and the various characteristics of organised religions.

However, the foundation of memetics in full modern incarnation originates in the publication in 1996, of two books by authors outside of the academic mainstream: Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by former Microsoft executive turned motivational speaker and professional poker player, Richard Brodie, and Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society by Aaron Lynch, a mathematician and philosopher who worked for many years as an engineer at Fermilab. Lynch conceived his theory totally independently of any contact with academics in the cultural evolutionary sphere, and apparently was not even aware of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene until his book was very close to publication.

Around the same time as the publication of the books by Lynch and Brodie, a new e-journal appeared on the web, hosted by the Centre for Policy Modelling at Manchester Metropolitan University Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission. (There had been a short-lived paper memetics publication starting in 1990, the Journal of Ideas edited by Elan Moritz. [1]) The e-journal soon became the central point for publication and debate within the nascent memetics community. In 1999, Susan Blackmore, a psychologist at the University of the West of England, published The Meme Machine, which more fully worked out the ideas of Dennett, Lynch and Brodie and attempted to compare and contrast them with various approaches from the cultural evolutionary mainstream, as well as providing novel, and controversial, memetic-based theories for the evolution of language and the human sense of individual selfhood.

The memetics movement split almost immediately into those who wanted to stick to Dawkins' definition of a meme as "a unit of information in the brain", and those who wanted to redefine it as observable cultural artefacts and behaviours. These two schools became known as the "internalists" and the "externalists". Prominent internalists included both Lynch and Brodie; the most vocal externalists included Derek Gatherer, a geneticist from Liverpool John Moores University and William Benzon, a writer on cultural evolution and music. The main rationale for externalism was that internal brain entities are not observable, and memetics cannot advance as a science, especially a quantitative science, unless it moves its emphasis onto the directly quantifiable aspects of culture. Internalists countered with various arguments: that brain states will eventually be directly observable with advanced technology, that most cultural anthropologists agree that culture is about beliefs and not artefacts, or that artefacts cannot be replicators in the same sense as mental entities (or DNA) are replicators. The debate became so heated that a 1998 Symposium on Memetics, organised as part of the 15th International Conference on Cybernetics, passed a motion calling for an end to definitional debates.

The most advanced statement of the internalist school came in 2002 with the publication of The Electric Meme, by Robert Aunger, an anthropologist from the University of Cambridge. Aunger also organised a conference in Cambridge in 1999, at which prominent sociologists and anthropologists were able to give their assessment of the progress made in memetics to that date. This resulted in the publication of Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, edited by Aunger and with a foreward by Dennett, in 2000.

In 2005, Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission ceased publication and published a set of 'obituaries' for memetics. This was not intended to suggest that there can be no further work on memetics, but that the exciting childhood of memetics, which began in 1996, is finally drawing to a close, and that memetics will have to survive or become extinct in terms of the results it can generate for the field of cultural evolution. Memetics as a social, Internet-fueled popular scientific movement is now probably over. Many of the original proponents have moved away from it. Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have both expressed some reservations as to its applicability, Susan Blackmore has left the University of the West of England to become a freelance science writer and now concentrates more on the field of consciousness and cognitive science. Derek Gatherer found the academic world of the north of England to be unsympathetic to his ideas, and gave up to work as a computer programmer in the pharmaceutical industry, although he still publishes the odd memetics article from time to time. Richard Brodie is now climbing the world professional poker rankings. Aaron Lynch disowned the memetics community and the words "meme" and "memetics" (without disowning the ideas in his book).

Susan Blackmore (2002) re-stated the meme definition as whatever is copied from one person to another person, whether habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information. Further she said that memes, like genes, are replicators. That is, they are information that is copied with variation and selection. Because only some of the variants survive, memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. Memes are copied by imitation, teaching and other methods, and they compete for space in our memories and for the chance to be copied again. Large groups of memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes. In her definition, thus, the way that a meme replicates is through imitation. This requires brain capacity to generally imitate a model or selectively imitate the model. Since the process of social learning varies from one person to another, the imitation process cannot be said to be completely imitated. The sameness of an idea may be expressed with different memes supporting it. This is to say that the mutation rate in memetic evolution is extremely high, and mutations are even possible within each and every interaction of the imitation process. It becomes very interesting when we see that a social system composed of a complex network of microinteractions exists, but at the macro level an order emerges to create culture.

Dawkins responds in A Devil's Chaplain that there are actually two different types of memetic processes. The first is a type of cultural idea, action, or expression, which does have high variance; for instance, a student of his who had inherited some of the mannerisms of Wittgenstein. However, he also describes a self-correcting meme, highly resistant to mutation. As an example of this, he gives origami patterns in elementary schoolsexcept in rare cases, the meme is either passed on in the exact sequence of instructions, or (in the case of a forgetful child) terminates. This type of meme tends not to evolve, and to experience profound mutations in the rare event that it does. Some memeticists, however, see this as more of a continuum of meme strength, rather than two types of memes.

Another definition, given by Hokky Situngkir, tried to offer a more rigorous formalism for the meme, memeplexes, and the deme, seeing the meme as a cultural unit in a cultural complex system. It is based on the Darwinian genetic algorithm with some modifications to account for the different patterns of evolution seen in genes and memes. In the method of memetics as the way to see culture as a complex adaptive system, he describes a way to see memetics as an alternative methodology of cultural evolution. However, there are as many possible definitions that are credited to the word "meme". For example, in the sense of computer simulation the term memetic programming is used to define a particular computational viewpoint.

Memetics can be simply understood as a method for scientific analysis of cultural evolution. However, proponents of memetics as described in the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission believe that 'memetics' has the potential to be an important and promising analysis of culture using the framework of evolutionary concepts. Keith Henson who wrote Memetics and the Modular-Mind (Analog Aug. 1987) [2] makes the case that memetics needs to incorporate Evolutionary psychology to understand the psychological traits of a meme's host. [3] This is especially true of time varying host traits, such as those leading to wars.

The application of memetics to a difficult complex social system problem, environmental sustainability, has recently been attempted at thwink.org. Using meme types and memetic infection in several stock and flow simulation models, Jack Harich has demonstrated several interesting phenomenon that are best, and perhaps only, explained by memes. One model, The Dueling Loops of the Political Powerplace, argues that the fundamental reason corruption is the norm in politics is due to an inherent structural advantage of one feedback loop pitted against another. Another model, The Memetic Evolution of Solutions to Difficult Problems, uses memes, the evolutionary algorithm, and the scientific method to show how complex solutions evolve over time and how that process can be improved. The insights gained from these models are being used to engineer memetic solution elements to the sustainability problem.

In Selfish Sounds and Linguistic Evolution (2004, Cambridge University Press), Austrian linguist Nikolaus Ritt has attempted to operationalise memetic concepts and use them for the explanation of long term sound changes and change conspiracies in early English. It is argued that a generalised Darwinian framework for handling cultural change can provide explanations where established, speaker centered approaches fail to do so. The book makes comparatively concrete suggestions about the possible material structure of memes, and provides two empirically rather rich case studies.

Memeoid is a neologism for people who have been taken over by a meme to the extent that that their own survival becomes inconsequential. Examples include kamikazes, suicide bombers and cult members who commit mass suicide. Compare with Zombie

The term was apparently coined by H. Keith Henson in "Memes, L5 and the Religion of the Space Colonies," L5 News, 1985 pp 5-8, [4] and referenced in Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed., page 330. ISBN 0-19-286092-5.

Memotype is the actual information-content of a meme.

A meme-complex (sometimes abbreviated memeplex, sometimes miss-pronounced/spelled Memoplex) is a collection or grouping of memes that have evolved into a mutually supportive or symbiotic relationship. Simply put, a meme-complex is a set of ideas that reinforce each other. Meme-complexes are roughly analogous to the symbiotic collection of individual genes that make up the genetic codes of biological organisms. An example of a Memeplex would be a religion.

cs:Memetikada:Memetikde:Memetikes:Memticahu:Memetikanl:Memept:Memticasv:Mem

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Memetics | Psychology Wiki | Fandom

Meme means copy. Bio means two. Biomemetics is (the study of) (the belief that) the tokenization of reality is a (continual) (and perpetual) copy of the number two. Yin and yang, ancient, zero and one, modern.

A meme is, technically, a copy (more technically, a copy of the number two). It looks (to Nature) like this:

The meme has meaning because it is, most technically, the circular-linear relationship between, a one and a two (an observer and an observation).

Thus, everything in Nature is a meme. Again, more technically, everything in Nature is a meme for the circular-linear relationship (of the numbers one and two). The word Nature, then, is a meme for the word circle. And, always, vice versa.

This explains tokenization and representation (tokenization as representation) (representation as tokenization). That is, we are, always, tokenizing our relationship with Nature (because Nature is, always, tokenizing its relationship with us).

It is impossible to separate Nature and its constituents (Nature and its tokenizations), thus, the meme is able to communicate with Nature and its constituents (because, technically, Nature and its constituents communicate through a meme) (the meme is, always, a circular-linear relationship between an individual and a group) (again, more basically, a one and a two) (an observer and an observation) (any alpha-numeric expression) (any algorithm) (any tokenization) (tokenization as a noun and tokenization as a verb).

Only a meme can communicate with a meme (meme is an other word for tokenization and, also, then, communication). Where all of us are memes creating (and communicating with) (tokenizing) memes.

The alphabet, and the number line, for example, are strings of characters, where the word string is a meme for a line, and a line is a meme for the diameter of a circle. So, all of the constituents of an alphabet, and-or a number line, are memes (tokenizations) (representations) for the circular-linear relationship between an individual and a group (Nature and its constituents).

Memes are mash-ups, mixes, and-or matches, of, (other) memes. This is because all memes are unified (tokenized, represented, communicated) by the diagram in this article (the conservation of a circle) (a zero and a one) (a circumference and a diameter).

So, for example, the word Einstein (and, Einsteins famous equation) is a meme for (and a tokenization of) a very smart person. The photo above (and, thus, the diagram) is, also, a meme for a very smart person. We are able to decode memes because we are, all of us, memes (tokenizations of) (the exact same circular-linear relationship) (very smart people).

Thus, Nature expands, and reduces, to the meme. Which is faster and easier to understand than a string of alphabetic or numeric characters (where all of the characters in any string, alphabetic or numeric) (symbols in general and specific), expand and reduce to one zero and one one (a circumference and a diameter) (the diagram). (Its impossible to escape the meme (the diagram) (the circular-linear relationship) if you, truly, want to understand Nature.)

The meme (for a circle) (the circular-linear relationship) (yin and yang, ancient, zero and one, modern) is found in all narratives.

In media, for example, (0 (1) 0) is a meme for this narrative: Nature-man-Nature (man against Nature, Nature wins). Likewise, (1 (0) 1) (man against Nature, man wins).

The meme above can, also, be interpreted to mean ((01)(10)), man against Nature (or a constituent of Nature) (man against woman, for example) (or man against man, or man against institution) where both win half-the-time (or, one-or-the-other wins all of the time) (its impossible to have a half without a whole) (a two without a one). Again, the meme is involved in everything.

Thus, all memes require one-one and one-zero (1) (0), and you can see, now, the narrative is exposed as the conservation of a circle, no matter how it is expressed (how it begins) (how it ends). This is because 101 is, also, a meme for beginning-middle-end (again, all narratives), or input-process-output (input-output-process). And here we can see the narrative can, easily, become chaotic, because, again, the meme chaos is not possible without the meme order (order-no-order) (101) again.

This explains magical thinking (also found in all narratives) (a meme for the conservation of a circle) (where we choose to see one side of a meme or the other). Where Nature is communicating with us and we are communicating with Nature (we our communicating with our selves) using the meme. (Read a book, watch a movie or a TV program, listen to music, go to a store, or an art museum) (you are communicating with a meme) (a meme is communicating with you) (in order to conserve the circular-linear nature of Nature).

(Parentheses (in any language) are an obvious example of a (circular-linear) meme.)

So, once you think this through, it explains the confusion and the clarity in a complex communicative environment.

It, also, explains, why we are, all of us, moving toward a memetic reality that communicates a point of view (one side or the other), where both sides of a point of view are, always, communicated by the same meme (an observer makes a decision about which point of view (which observation) the meme communicates).

While the meme is, technically, a constant, the interpretation of the meme, is, always a variable (where, again, the meme is the circular-linear relationship between variable and constant (again, always, one and two)).

Lovers of the meme are dependent on haters of the meme, and, always, vice versa. Because a meme is dependent on the circular-linear relationship between a lover and a hater (always, two observers)(in one way, or another, always, the number two)(the conservation of a circle).

Thus, the meme is a constituent of Nature (and the constituent of Nature is a meme) (the conservation of a circle).

Memetics move all of us to a simpler (and, thus a far more complex) understanding of Nature (complexes in all disciplines) (emojis, tik-toks, instagrams, texts, hashtags, tweets).

Weve moved past ancient thinking (which is based on time, while Nature, and, therefore, Natures constituents, have no understanding of, and, thus, no requirement (no use) for, time) (where the word time is a meme for sequence, (and, always, vice versa) (again, the circular-linear relationship)).

Where an understanding of how (and why) memetics operates in Nature exposes the true meaning of Einsteins equation (all equations) (all Einsteins).

Conservation of the Circle (memetics) (tokenization) (representation) is the core, and, thus, the only, dynamic in Nature. (For the memetic genius in you.) (For the memetic genius in all of us.) (The memetic genius called Nature.)

See, also, articles on Biomemetics

See, also, articles on Tokenization

See, also, articles on Representation

See, also, articles on Meme

See, also, articles on Self

See, also, articles on Virtual Persona

See, also, articles on Fundamentality, Universals, Abstraction, Identity, Complementarity

And, especially, Youd Better Understand Miranda

Music is (as is art in general), always, a meme (it demonstrates, and proves, the conservation, and the tokenization, of a circle) (lifes ups and downs) (the moodiness in all of us) (so, listen while you think) (while you interpret the meme for your self) (it doesnt take much to remind you: youll hear a circle in the background) (no matter what you listen to) (no matter how you interpret what youre listening to):

To prove Nature is a memetic circle, watch (or, listen to) trees blowing in the wind, look closely, and you will see (hear) (feel) (observe) an always-present (always-moving) circle (circular-linear relationship) (memetics in action).

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Memetics. Meme means copy. Bio means two. | by Ilexa Yardley | The ...

Today, we talk about memes.

Meme (pronounced /mim/, me-mm) describes a basic unit of cultural idea or symbol that can be transmitted from one mind to another and, inherently, everyone knows what memes are. In our everyday lives we live with memes; for example, catchphrases and clichs often serve the purpose translating non-literal, cultural ideas, while similes and metaphors hint at what words portray. Those are all memes.

So why devote an entirely new word, and even a study, to something that has existed for eons?

LOLCATs, a popular Internet meme, cat pictures with grammatical inconsistencies. Photo courtesy of icanhazcheezburger.com

The reason is: we live in a different time, where culture and international exchange is pervasive, especially with technology closing that gap. And, precisely because of this, as well as the emergence of the Internet society, multifaceted, non-standardized memes emerge to take the role for cultural and sub-cultural descriptors.

Whats fascinating about the present meme culture is its dependency on virality. If it lacks the audience and their appreciation (either on the positive or negative spectrum), then it will simply fade into obscurity. Presently, although an Internet meme is often correlated with pictures with offensive or funny taglines, it has proliferated for a much longer time. The intricacies of a meme lies in what the masses find appropriate to express an idea, regardless how simple or pointless it may be.

Rick Astley, English singer-song writer, at Macys 2008 Thanksgiving Parade. Photo courtesy of Ben W.

But, precisely because of this Internet culture, we find a convergence in meanings and creative output, even away from the Internet. For example, in 2007 an Internet phenomenon known as Rickrolling became a meme, where users are tricked, via bait and switch, into watching the music video for Rick Astleys 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up. Within a year, this practice has merged into mainstream media, and Rick Astley made an appearance at the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2008, effectively pushing him back into the spotlight as a popular cultural icon since his retirement in 1993. It can be very much argued that such memes (like Rickrolling) brought together a cultural concept, across the digital and international boundaries, to further tell us the story the advent of viral ideas on social media, as well as global change and connectivity.

For more resources regarding the study of memetics and memes visit the meme tag in the librarys catalogue.

Read more from the original source:

Memes: What are They and Why They Are Important