Memes don’t exist (or things without existence)

Logical Arguments For The Non-Existence Of Memes

Of course it’s not like existence is a property that things can have. We can’t divide the world into those things which do and which don’t have the property ‘existence’. Existence is more like an intransitive verb, We do the existing and that’s that.

To say that there are two classes of things to which the property ‘exists’ does apply (the class of all things y) and the class of things that don’t ‘exist’ (the class of all things x) is also to say that the class of things that don’t have existence in fact do exist. One must exist in order that one really has any properties at all, including existence. A vicious circularity seems almost in force.

Memes just don’t exist; they are a chimera. For those of you who don’t know, memes are often likened to words, ideas or bits of information. In a sense they are what genes are to ontogeny. ‘Toasters’ are memes as is ‘the rain in Spain’. Toasters are devices that do something and the idea of what they do is a meme as is the way in which they do it. The rain in Spain connotes the idea of something that doesn’t happen, hence the saying many of us learnt as children ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plane’ before going on holiday.

Both toasters and the rain in Spain convey an idea to us and memetisists would have us believe these ideas are transmitted, mutate and evolve. What is more they shape our behaviour. Martyrdom, freedom and chastity are all memes that are interesting cases of this. They make us behave in ways that either kill us or that don’t allow us to further our genes. Either way they don’t obey basic principles of evolution as far as we are concerned. That facet of memes has led advocates of memetic theory to suggest that memes are a bit like viruses.They’re not interested in us at all, they’re interested in themselves and furthering their own existence. We’re hosts to our ideas in that respect. Also, like viruses they’re not conscious; viruses are just strings of nucleotides. But at least with viruses we know what the information is made of. As mentioned memes have been likened to bits of information. The problem is that talking about bits of information is a bit like talking about litres of liquid, what’s left unclear and undefined is what the litres or the bits actually are of.

We can call this problem 1 of memetic theory. Better stated, problem 1 of memetics is that memes aren’t clearly about anything at all; or what they denote has been left undefined. We know that there is information and we know that information is communicated but, we also know that stating this doesn’t prove that memes exist any more than it shows that they don’t; it shows us that the problem is much sharper than we originally thought. There is a full force machine within the academic community evangelising the meme meme as it were, who have skilfully managed to dismiss the one question that crops up over and over again; what do memes refer to.

Problem 2 is worth exploring and is related to the problem of universals. The problem of universals dates from the time of Plato. Plato suggested that there is a world of pure forms, in his conception they are the pure forms from which the imperfect forms in our world are shaped from.

The common way to think of universals is to think about either tables or triangles. There are a million different tables in the world but there has to be some ideal table from which all the different tables of the world are drawn, similarly there is no perfect example of a triangle naturally occurring in the world, yet in geometry dating from the time of Euclid we have been able to define the perfect triangle from Euclid’s axioms of geometry. Universals are what things have in common. It is not clear however that one meme has anything in common with another meme.

Bertrand Russell gave a good example of an argument for universals in ‘The Problems of Philosophy’ (1912). He phrased his argument by asking us to consider prime numbers; we know that there are numbers below 100 which are divisible by 1 and themselves, all of which we know (there are 25 below 100). We also know that we could indefinitely enumerate primes above 100 (see the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic) if we had the time (which would have to be infinite). Therefore we also know that there exist some number which is a prime that we haven’t yet found, or we can say there will always be a prime number we haven’t found. Since this is the case then we can say there exists number we can never find, as if we found it then it wouldn’t fit into our definition. Numbers are the best example of universals (they are the common property that all things have in common), and if we follow Bertrand Russell’s argument there are universals that exist that we can never know: better stated, these rules apply universally irrespective of human minds perceiving them.

But we can’t even say any of these things about memes. We can’t articulate any principles that govern the properties of their existence, nor can they be said to share anything in common with each other between the minds which they are hosted.

If they do share anything in common it would be the properties of class membership, but that is referring to an abstraction based on their idea and not any knowledge we have of them in particular. In a sense we have greater ability to talk about the class of all mythical four legged creatures in relation to unicorns and chimeras, at least we could in theory begin to enumerate them and, more importantly exclude some creatures from the class. In the case of memes on the other hand we are just told ‘there are some that don’t have words for them‘ (Daniel Dennett at TED). It would seem that meme theorists would have us include the whole of psychological phenomena and that is problematic as in order that you have a credible and useful class of things one must be prepared to exclude a certain number of objects too.

Problem 2 better stated is therefore that where on the one hand we can at least frame falsifiable arguments for the existence of universals we have no principles in order to frame memes. The idea of the meme is so broadly ill conceived that there is not a plausible method for accounting for their existence.

Problem 3 requires a method of analysis I learnt from my father, it’s called ‘Getting Down To Brass Tacks‘ or just stating things as they are. No two human minds are the same in far more complex ways than no two naturally occurring triangles can be said to be the same. We all have not only uniquely different histories but, those histories and the minds in which they are embedded are a part of how those minds conceive ideas. What is more our ideas are in part social in context and they are also in part functional. In that respect they will change depending on their application and the functional context in which they apply, both socially and personally. These changes, to the best of our knowledge, occur in a physiological environment that requires massive complexity in a parallel computing machine known as the brain. And unlike numbers and the whole of mathematics, memes can not be applied to our understanding of the brain, they can only be properly called a constituent part. In order to even say that we would have to know something about them. In effect where we find room for ideas (and accept that on some given level no two are the same) we cannot do the same for memes.

Whereas we can talk about numbers and triangles with a certain amount of universality we can’t talk about memes in the same context, only the class of things which are memes. Numbers are of course classes (Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, Bertrand Russell, 1919). But we can apply numbers to things in the world despite never seeing the number 1. We see that there are instances in which the number 1 applies. What we are doing when we do that is applying the number to an instance of something in the world. Symmetry provides us with an interesting case. Humans have perceived and used symmetry ostensibly for a very long time. In that respect there is a psychological relevance to symmetry. However, humans have also devised a system for categorizing forms of symmetry and enumerated different patterns to symmetry which can beapplied to things in the world. Symmetry can therefore be properly said to be empirical.

Problems 1, 2, & 3 give us a unique insight into the ontological defence of meme theory. According to Daniel Dennett “well words exist don’t they“. But one must ask, in what sense do words in fact exist. When I tell my father in Law’s dog off for growling I don’t assume that the dog understands the words but I do know that the dog recognizes the tone of my voice and body posture. I don’t assume that words have quite the universality that is implicit in Dennett’s rhetorical question. Wittgenstein similarly said that if lions could talk it would be meaningless to talk to them. Words, as far as I am concerned exist in much the same way that George Berkeley would have them exist, that is only in so far as they are recognised and understood by human minds.

Well, what about ideas, I believe that ideas exist within the world of human minds in quite the same sense that words do, but I am far less certain about how they are composed. Well then memes ought to as well, right? That is the ontological stance of memeticists. The problem is it’s unclear that memes are anything like words or ideas, it’s also very clear that words and ideas are not the same kinds of thing as each other. Furthermore if memes were anything like words or ideas one would have to ask if we need them, that is ‘would they add anything useful to our understanding of the world or just further complicate it?‘

Words are a vehicle for ideas in the social sphere but memes (other than the whole of our psychology) don’t seem to have a vehicle, properties or significant relevance. What is more memes require a massive commitment to the existence of entities that we cannot know share enough properties in common to allow us to say anything consistent about them, let alone give them any status in reality.

What in effect problems 1, 2, & 3 tell us is that the idea of memes (for those of you logically inclined NB the asymmetry now between ideas and memes) is not only internally incoherent but inconsistent with what we do know and can say. They are not a fortiori given but, they are clearly are a posteriori not empirical. That is they are not given to any empirical proof (especially if we can say they are present in any psychological phenomena). In reality they can’t even be ostensibly defined.

But, it is from their precise lack of definition that they do derive some practical value, that is that until they are completely eliminated or a better argument framed, they provide excellent place holders for another theory; that is what makes them such good memes. That said it’s also worth noting that we have both an idea and a word for a chimera, but we’ve never found evidence for one other than their depiction in earlier cultures and that is why it is only their idea and the objects used to represent them that can truly be said to exist.

This allows us to come back to the classes we framed earlier: x & y (those that exist and don’t). We can say that that class y exists in our language and that the ideas belonging to y exist (as does the idea and the word meme), this much we can say without any complication. This fact also places the class of y into the class of all things x. But from this we also know that they don’t have objects to which they can refer. The class properly speaking therefore not only belongs to x, it is a sub-sub-class of x. Although the members of y themselves don’t exist, y is in effect a class of ideas which do exist. A better way of expressing this would be to say that there are class of terms whose ideas exist but fail to refer to anything in the world.

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