Meme Theory: How much of our beliefs are self derived?

[rousseau]

Apparently.

So you were trying to say " bsupporting the economic unit to which you belong has enormous survival benefits," to the meme? Kid yourself.

I mentioned this to you in another post, in another thread, but you seem to be too quick to interpret the meaning of posts, before trying to understand their intent. This isn't the first time you've misinterpreted me. And I don't say that in an aggressive way, but you are actually misinterpreting me here, and have also done so a number of other times.

In fairness, I'm often discussing esoteric ideas, and am not super careful with my language. But it does make it considerably more difficult to express my meaning, when the posts aren't being read in good faith.

 

[ronburgundy]

Every now and then I'll hear someone say something that obviously hasn't passed through any filters of critical thought. They heard it from someone, who heard it from someone, and so on. And they repeat it and hold the belief because it has social value.

So the question is: how common is this type of thing? How much of the every day man's beliefs are only informed by his/her environment, and not at all by critical faculties?

And further, what conclusions about human nature can we draw from this?

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I'm going with 100%. Only once in a while we find someone who thought something unique and they're forever remembered in philosophy books or books on science. If you're not a Nobel prize winner or a renowned philosopher I think chances are pretty good that it's all memes. Some of it can be argued is random unintelligible (or unintelligent) noise.

I don't think humans are as special as we like to think they are.

An idea lacking "originality" does not indicate in was an adopted meme and not created by the person's own mind.
Take 10 people put them into similar environments in total isolation from each other or anyone else. They will develop ideas and most will be similar to each other. Take a time machine and kill Darwin, Lamark, and everyone at birth who thought of evolution in the 19th and 20th centuries and it would still become mainstream science in the 21st century.

Ideas created by processing of basic inputs are a product of human brains and their environments. Human brains are highly similar to each other and most people live in highly similar environments. So, ideas created completely independently will often be highly similar and "unoriginal".

I know I've had many instances where I reasoned about some basic information I knew and formulated some "new" ideas I had not heard before. But then when I did some more research to see if others have thought about it, they had. You can see this all the time in science and in students, where someone applies reasoning to a set of given info and hypothesize X, and it turns out that others have already hypothesized that.

Pretty much everything people believe is informed and shaped by their society and culture. Very little of our 'understanding of reality' is known from first hand experience and original thought.

Of course, but "informed and shaped by" is not the same as the whole fully formed idea being imported into the person's thinking. That certainly does happen, but so does people engaging in thought to construct an idea from pieces of information gained from experience (of which society is one aspect). Whether that internally constructed idea is "original" and never been thought before is completely separate from whether it was internally constructed or simply a meme copied into memory.

As to the OP query about exactly what portion of ideas are purely memes or internally constructed that is impossible to answer with any confidence. I do think it varies greatly between people. I think some people are meme machines just trying to import whatever existing ideas serve their goals. In contrast, others take a more skeptical stance toward existing ideas and try to think of flaws and imagine alternatives, thereby generating more ideas internally.

 

[Jokodo]

ronburgundy brings some good points.

An important thing to consider is that imitation is almost never simply copying what we see. It involves constructing a representation of what the other person meant.

There are studies with infants as young as 14 months that show them to copy an adult model's only if it appears to make sense. A famous study in 1988 appeared to show the opposite: They had an adult turn on a lamp on a table by hitting it with their forehead, and one week later, the infants were given the same lamp to play with, and two thirds touched it with their foreheads while none of the kids who hadn't seen a model do so did. This had been taken as evidence of direct imitation, or "monkeying" (ironically, monkeys don't do this, so this is one of the most misleading verbs of the English language).

More recently though it's been found that kids even at that age don't actually blindly copy the model's action: They do activate the lamp with their forehead when the model does so for no apparent reason, but when the model is huddled in a blanket and thus doesn't have their hands available, what the kids do instead is what they assume the model would have done, had she had her hands available - activate the lamp with their hand. So: Experimenter has hands free and activates lamp with forehead -> "there's probably a reason to do it that way, whatever it is"; experimenter doesn't have hands free: "the crucial thing is to touch it, I'll do it the way I know best, not her way"

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/cdr/2017/8080649/#B14
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_...kering&author=I.+Király&publication_year=2002

 

[Jokodo]

Apparently.

So you were trying to say " bsupporting the economic unit to which you belong has enormous survival benefits," to the meme? Kid yourself.

I mentioned this to you in another post, in another thread, but you seem to be too quick to interpret the meaning of posts, before trying to understand their intent. This isn't the first time you've misinterpreted me. And I don't say that in an aggressive way, but you are actually misinterpreting me here, and have also done so a number of other times.

In fairness, I'm often discussing esoteric ideas, and am not super careful with my language. But it does make it considerably more difficult to express my meaning, when the posts aren't being read in good faith.

I believe I did read your posts in good faith. You literally said that "memes that promote survival/reproduction survive with the most success". If this isn't just random noise, it gotta be an insinuation that beneficial memes spread more. There is no good reason to believe this to be the case, anymore than for viruses. It may just be one of those cases of "false positives are cheaper than false negatives". To the extent that the meme theory has some validity, it's in analyzing cultural ideas as a phenomenon that piggy-packs on our social learning skills and gains a dynamic of its own. No part of that implies that they're going to "promote survival/reproduction".

Of course, many ideas that are transmitted from person to person and accepted without fully understanding their reasons do promote survival and reproduction. People have, to great success, used bows and boomerangs and taken tips from more experienced hunters long before anyone could calculate a flight trajectory based on wind, air friction and gravity. But that's not the part meme theory tries to explain. Meme theory tries to explain how apparently useless ideas spread, and I'm not even sure it's particularly good at it.

To sum things up: Ideas spread and are accepted often without full understanding (or if you wish "uncritically") because the aggregate benefit of being a social learner greatly outweighs the potential harm from accepting random noise, so the mechanisms that makes it possible for them to spread are not, as a rule, selected against. This tells us literally nothing about the survival value of any individual idea spreading that way.

I believe you when you say you're as much a materialist as anyone. I don't believe that makes you immune against some pretty stupid ideas, including the idea that evolution will somehow produce an optimal outcome. You're actually in good company there, but that doesn't make it right.

 

[fromderinside]

Wow. So putting the cart before the horse becomes a meme. Who-da thunk. Lemark was the meme dreamer which Dawkins didn't take into account when he jumped out on the limb and sawed it off from the tree presuming the tree would fall and leave the limb.

It's good to know people are well trained in the SM here.

huff huff huff.

 

[Jokodo]

Wow. So putting the cart before the horse becomes a meme. Who-da thunk. Lemark was the meme dreamer which Dawkins didn't take into account when he jumped out on the limb and sawed it off from the tree presuming the tree would fall and leave the limb.

It's good to know people are well trained in the SM here.

huff huff huff.

Can you try to summarize the gist of your post in English? Also maybe indicate what if any of the previous discussion it links to?

 

[fromderinside]

Dawkins notion that there was an analog in language similar to genes is unsupported except in the minds of those who don't know about what they are talking.

Clear enough. If you find empirical evidence post it.

 

[Angry Floof]

Pretty common, I'd say. All it takes to run with an idea is mere suggestion. We're wired to mimic each other, which has made for cohesive societies and therefore survival.

We're also individuals with a great capacity for thinking before we speak and for questioning even our closest groups. But that shit's hard, takes up needed resources like glucose and oxygen, and offers no direct survival value, so brains don't insist on it.