Philosophy Now Forum

What are the most significant memes?
I will start the ball rolling with standardisation and specialisation.

What's a "meme"?

I googled it and wikipedia says that it is a term coined by R. Dawkins and it is like a gene only in the area of the mind and thought.

A technical question: how can you measure the level of significance ? Is it just a feeling ? Should people vote democratically ?

Anything that sounds Latin and has the ending "ation" does not appeal to an average Anglo-Saxon mind too much, I would say.

Terms that are prestegious nowadays are probably: communication, technology, flexibility.

Terms that are not prestigious: quaint ? cute ? charity ?

Hello Moderator
I don’t I agree with this being re-categorised as a language topic. Memes are conceptual abstractions of features of culture. Language is about the communication of cognition, not about the cognition the language represents, in this case memes. It would be most appropriate in a forum for culture/civilisation, as one did not exist I categorised it as general.

Thanks for responding Arising_uk and duszek

A meme is a conceptual abstraction of a cultural artefact, as opposed to a physical abstraction like a diagram or a written word. It propagates by being useful, in a similar way that a gene propagates by being useful, hence the parallel. So a meme can be an idea, a belief, a value, or a pattern of behaviour. What constitutes a meme is to some extent subjective, as is what makes it significant. A meme is not a physical artefact or actual behaviour; it is a conceptual abstraction that requires a culture to propagate it, as opposed to an isolated individual. A meme often has a physical manifestation; so for example, the act of shaking hands is a reification of the hand shaking meme, and a particular jet plane is a reification of the powered flight meme, as would be a helicopter.

More examples: Belief in a deity is a meme, although belief in any specific deity is one nuanced example of the same belief meme. Altruism is a value meme that exists in many cultures and is even encouraged through philanthropy, which is itself a behaviour meme. Other examples might be the practice of telling jokes, the practice of agriculture, and the concept of a city.

For me significance comes from widespread use across cultures over a long period and with significant impact on human life. Often this translates into the more general the meme the more significant it is, but not always. The concept of the Internet is a very specific meme with profound implications, although it has had only a short life. Its significance comes from its ability to democratise other memes, specifically access to information and communication.

It is not quite clear to me why we need the term "meme". Would not the term "concept" be enough ?
You say "concept" in your last sentence and it sounds natural.

A MEME is a thing recognised in the breach. Memes do not represent clear and definable phenomena. They represent a poor analogy for genes which are materially distinct agents of biological morphology. Memes are vague and vacuous things which do not form distinct phenomena being infinitely divisible and their material reality has no uniform structure; they can exist as thoughts, feelings, representations in text and image. In effect the concept is basically meaningless.
Before Dawkins we used to call them "ideas". I can see no reason to privilege the conditions of the survival and reproduction of ideas by calling them 'memes'. Ideas and such cultural phenomena we might call memes, survive because they are transmitted and reproduced more than other ideas - tell us something we don't know already!
Memetics has nothing to say about the reasons why humans decide upon and choose to act as they do in promoting so-called memes.
For that we have history, anthropology, psychology and sociology. Disciplines far better qualified than biologists to consider these matters.

Does a meme have to correspond to some real thing ?

How about "justice" ?
People are very much concerned about what is just and what is not just.

Why call the 'idea' of justice a meme?

"A conceptual abstraction of a cultural artifact" says conceptualizer.

(Can an abstraction not be conceptual ? that is: is not a concept something abstract and an abstraction something conceptual ? that is: are these two not interdependent ?)

Justice seems a cultural artifact to me.
And if it does not to, Chaz, then why not ?

I use conceptualizer´s definition and try to see how to apply certain terms to it.

I'm puzzled by your questions.

Of course - ALL ideas are cultural artefacts. That does not mean we have to see then as memes!

I am just trying to understand Prof. Dawkins´s reasons for introducing a new term. After all, he is a professor in Oxford.
Conceptualizer may be one of his students.
If polite people try to cultivate reasonable thinking they deserve patience and attention, I think.

Hi duszek
I think it is quite reasonable to argue that all memes have a conceptual part, even a behavioural meme that is learned by imitation. So I suppose it is ok to think of a meme as a concept that is passed on from person to person.

I think justice is a significant meme as it has existed for a long time and seems to exist in all civilisations.

I use the term 'conceptual abstraction' because physical abstractions exist, such as a diagram. A diagram of a desk is not a desk; it is a physical abstraction of it. It represents some characteristic features of a desk which may be used to identify objects as desks or create objects that could be identified as desks. Nonetheless, it is likely that for every physical abstraction there exists a conceptual abstraction if one needs to recall it and manipulate it in the mind.

I must declare that I am not an expert on memes. If we all had to be experts in everything we discussed we would all have few discussions. If someone reading this is an expert on memes, then I would welcome a more thorough explanation. I believe the important aspect of the meme is the sense of it perpetuating by its own merits through civilisation. Not all concepts do perpetuate due to their own merits, so they are either not memes or at best are unsuccessful memes. A concept that having been created is never passed on is still a concept, but not a meme.

Dawkins thinks that he can understand the world by reducing it to its base materialist survival.
He is basically naive.

It should be becoming patently obvious to you that the sort of things the word 'meme' is supposed to represent, simply loose their meaning and significance when you use meme to describe them.
Meme says nothing about the things it describes.
Wearing your baseball cap on backwards is a meme, but so is that cap itself. Justice is a meme, and so are all the practices it encompasses, including the death penalty, and imprisonment.
Injustice is a meme too. Hate is a meme, and so is love. Pick an idea, a cultural practice, and you have a meme.
What is the use in calling everything a meme?
It seems to me to be the worse thing you can do, if you want to understand a thing is to reduce it to a meme.

Has anybody heard of propaganda memes?