Re: [ontolog-forum] Dennett on the Darwinism of Memes

[Ali H <asaegyn@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Ronald,

+1 to your points. In what way would you elaborate the governing norms? 

In terms of the current discussion, it seems that an obvious prerequisite is that (a) the agent must come in contact with the meme, and (b) have some mechanism for interpreting and assessing it. I would imagine the cultural and social norms would factor in their assessment. 

Though I'm also reminded of the relatively recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker who seems to argue that there is some invisible hand of progress guiding ethical memes. Though this is challenged and rejected by John Gray in this article (http://www.vice.com/read/john-gray-interview-atheism?utm_source=vicetwitterus) and many others. Namely, they reject that there exists some inevitable cumulative progress of memes. Rather, they would argue that memes are propagated and selected not by some generic fitness factor, but by sustained, concerted efforts by individuals and groups, and gains in memes are more ephemeral than we may suspect, and even their institutionalize does not guarantee that they will persist (see for example the current erosion of norms against torture, norms for habeus corpus, norms for innocent until proven guilty or the right to due process).

This further reminds me of the work done by the Koch brothers in creating a massive meme generating machine (aka echo chamber), as cataloged to some degree in the following articles, from which I think one can track many of the norms that Ronald alludes to:

• http://www.truth-out.org/article/item/1856:inside-the-koch-brothers%E2%80%99-expensive-echo-chamber
• http://www.thenation.com/blog/161592/koch-brothers-echo-chamber
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/07/koch-brothers-database-2012-election

A brief summary - they've created and funded a broad network of people and organizations, where a meme can be seeded, repeated by another and another and another, to be exposed to their targets in ways that maximize the meme uptake. Efforts like theirs were significant factors contributing to how 70% of Americans believed that Saddam was behind 9/11 in the lead up to the war on Iraq, or why to this day, the United States lags far behind the rest of the world in taking global warming or environmental degradation seriously, or how more recently, 24% of Americans seriously think that Obama is possibly the anti-Christ.

Ignoring the effects and the means of propagation for memes seems pretty irresponsible to me :P.

Best,

Ali

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Ronald Stamper <stamper.measur@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear colleagues, 

Memes operate through specialised clusters of social norms. A well exercised perceptual norm draws the meme to our attention; then a cluster of semiological norms that encode its rich set of connotations, then triggers other powerful norms provoking attitudes of many kinds: emotions, behavioural dispositions, expectations, other perceptions . . . 

We cannot disconnect information from social norms without treating it as more or less a physical phenomenon, as computer science does.  Norms determine what information people need to function socially, especially collaboratively.  

I hope that discussing memes will draw attention to the essential role of norms in the functioning of every human information system, which distinguishes them from IT systems.  Disregarding norms allows us to treat semantics in the artificial, mechanistic, OWL-oriented paradigm that seems to dominate most Ontolog discussions.  Real-world semantics, is impossible without understanding the continual interplay between norms and signs (information).

Ronald Stamper

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