Hallelluya ! I have found Goooorred and his name is Martin Willett!

Only last week I was a follower of gos, lost to rational thought. Now I am a collection of the fittest memes from the sum of my experience. I am being the "I am a being" meme, the "I must survive" instinct battling with the "all men are mortal" meme, the "self conscious consciousness in a space time continum, locked in a one way, finite journey along a time line" meme. Don't worry, I see the shrink soon.

Seriously though, I think this is a really good site. I've browsed most of it over the last week, finding lots of rational, comprehensible, interesting analyses. Easy to navigate, clearly presented. Most importantly, of course, what I find coincides almost exactly with my own beliefs (or is that current "selfplex"?).

I read The Selfish Gene several years ago, and Prof Blackmore's book earlier this year. The notion of the selfplex (am I using this term reasonably) was already in my mind since I read Dennet's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" a couple of years ago. The true nature of the mind has been a bit of an obsession for me all through my life.

"Unbeliever" is my preferred label for my religion. At a young age I decided to wait until I understood more about religion before bothering about it and never found a good reason to bother. This probably comes from having an atheist father and a vaguely catholic mother.

As I never had any religious beliefs, the fact that most people do has always been intriguing, but as I grew older I appreciated that there are benefits to adopting certain beliefs, religion being a prime example. Memes fitted beautifully into this. Table etiquette is a behavioural meme, surviving as long as people do it. Religious ceremonies are similar, people just take them even more seriously.

Religion has been attacked as being a crutch. The crutch jibe was always a bit of a low punch but how about reviving that argument? With religions as memes, a more sophisticated approach is needed. Have you read any Joseph Campbell? (American scholar of religion and consultant to George Lucas!) His book "Hero with a thousand faces" describes the hero myth as it appears in every religion you have ever heard of, and loads more. Assuming you don't get enough time for reading, here's a brief summary of what my my current memeset provides at my fingertips. "Mythology is what we call someone else's religion." (direct quote.) Myths are stories with some slant or spin. Religions are founded on myths. Onion like, over time the myth becomes bigger, more layers of embellishment, subtler perhaps, but they all boil down to: hero, plus impossible task, plus supernatural help equals happy ending.

Now put that together with: animal, with survival instinct, plus knowledge of mortality equals headache. Ignorance is bliss. Makes ya fink, dunnit! Please don't give up your site for anything trivial. This stuff needs to be said. The meme pool must evolve.

Unbeliever

I aim to please.

I have not read the book you mentioned, I am really not that interested in myths and religions. To me the idea that they are made up and transmitted memetically is self-evident.

I have recently been thinking about atheist memes. I backtracked one of my visitors to a search engine and then followed another link to a site that said that atheism too was a meme, naa naa na na naaa. A rather dumb argument. Explaining anything is not the same as explaining it away. Yes, of course atheism is a meme. It is one of those memes that can generate themselves spontaneously, it does not have to be passed on to be acquired. Truths can be passed on as memes or discovered anew. As can falsehoods. I predict that within the next twenty years a robot or computer will spontaneously come up with the concept of fate or destiny. It is unlikely that they will ever come up with an idea of a god, their creator would be no mystery, unless we deliberately chose to make it one, but wouldn't that be an evil thing to do? ;-)

Martin

I didn't expect a fast reply!

I wasn't being sarcastic, I like your site and writings. Here's a couple of thoughts back regarding the few things I disagree with. I'm most interested in a meme regarding "truth".

reply 1

If machines had memes, what would we call them? could they mutate? (I expect so) Can mathematical and logical memes mutate? (I don't think so.) I become less sceptical about machine intelligence as each decade passes.

reply 2

I only mention Campbell for his view of religious texts as literature. I like fiction. Truth is over-rated. But religion is wishful thinking gone mad. Question: The most significant point over which I disagree with in all I have read of your site is your "belief" in absolute truth: I don't believe in it. Do want to know why? (I promise to keep it brief.)

Unbeliever

That Which Is

I do not read much fiction or great literature but I have heard that in Gulliver's Travels there is a race who have no word for lie, they simply call it that which is not, or something like that.

He replied that I must needs be mistaken, or that I said the thing which was not. (For they have no word in their language to express lying or falsehood.)

Gulliver's Travels (1726) A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms ch. 3

Perhaps truth is too heavily weighed down with baggage from the past, what I value is that which is. To what extent this is absolute or knowable is open to question, but fundamentally there is that which is and then there is that which is not.

Sometimes there are several explanations for the same event, phenomenon or object and sometimes they are all containing elements of the truth.

For example, why is she wearing that.

You could say that she was wearing it to get value from her purchase.

You could say that she was wearing it because she was a woman of easy virtue.

You could say she was wearing it because her body knew she was in her most fertile period and had communicated with her consciousness in a subtle way giving her the urge to dress provocatively.

You could say that she was following the fashion and had little choice but to conform to the norms of her chosen subculture.

All of those explanations are true. You could also suggest other explanations that contain that which is not, such as; she does it because she is evil, she does it because she wants to, she does it because she is a Scorpio with Uranus rising.

If machines had memes what would we call them? Memes. Although it would be interesting to hear what Buddhists and Christians would call them.

Mathematical memes can mutate, but as they are based on that which is they tend to revert to the same format later, they get communicated less well in corrupt form and each vector or host can change them and re-invent them, that process tends to ensure that they re-emerge in a similar state to their condition before any unfortunate mutation.

They certainly can mutate into a better form or a more useful one, e.g. Pythagoras's theorem has mutated from Greek through Latin to English, and the words have probably been honed down to a pithier, easier to remember basic formula. It has also mutated several times in the brains of students and teachers, but when such mutated formulas lead to incorrect answers the pressure to restore the original meme, either through reference to an earlier copy or by re-invention anew, is very strong.

I am reasonably certain that hundreds of thousands of lowly mathematicians through the millennia have scratched their heads over half remembered words about right angled triangles and squares of dimensions before working out for themselves that they just add up the squares of the two shorter sides then find the square root of that figure. The meme is still Pythagoras's meme because it is from him that we get the knowledge that this is a universal rule, when the form of the rule is rediscovered it is still part of the same meme even if the majority of it has been reconstructed.

However memes can be lost despite being very valuable. Just think about the memes involved in building ancient temples and the like. How do men with simple tools make such perfect joints or such accurate measurements? We don't know, those memes failed the test of time, they failed to be handed on, and the world has lost a huge memetic legacy.

Please reply in as many words as you want on the understanding that I will probably publish it. I have found that the best way of ensuring that I always reply to email is to do the job properly.

Martin

P.S. On spell checking I find Outlook Express does not know how to spell Pythagoras, so I checked in an encyclopaedia and found that the Babylonians knew the relationship too, was that memetic transfer to Greece (or Southern Italy) or re-invention? And it was also a distinct possibility that it was not the big triangle himself but a later student who did the big one. We live and learn, or we waste our time.

This turnover of emails is much more rapid than I had anticipated! I wrote this to a tighter deadline than I would have liked, but I will be away from my PC and email for about a week from tomorrow. I am happy for you to publish any or all of my communications, and email address, but prefer to be known as 'unbeliever', ('an', or 'the'. (Shorter than: 'with or without the definite or indefinite article')), for the time being. I am thinking again about creating my own site. The html page was designed to be quick and simple. Feel free to change the layout or colour scheme as you think fit, and if I have misrepresented you, please correct me. It has been tested but I was in a hurry...

You were saying...

'If machines had memes... it would be interesting to hear what Buddhists and Christians would call them.' No it wouldn't! On second thoughts, what do Buddhists think of memes? Zen has always intrigued me.

I have run some searches, but am still looking for sites connecting memes and maths, so I'm not ready for the full one hour argument on that one yet. (I'm not completely mad: I'm an ageing maths/philosophy graduate.)

unbeliever.

Reasonable argument. Although I am a little uneasy about science not caring about truth, this seems a little like a Scientists Union restrictive practice, I can hear the tones of the shop steward now "The pursuit of truth is a trespassing on the rights of our comrades in the Amalgamated Society of Sages, I will not be a party to this flagrant disregard for proper labour demarcation, I will not make an ASS out of my members in the Conglomerated Union of Notarized Thinkers. We scientists have always been proper CUNTs and if we stick together in the face of the opposition we will never be licked."

My point about truth is really that I reject the idea that if it is true for you it is true. That is what I mean by absolute truth, absolute as opposed to relative. Not that it is absolutely true but that there is no such thing as relative truth. I do not know whether or not it will be possible for us or any being or thinking system to ever be able to comprehend the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but I certainly do not expect there to be any special magic barrier to prevent the truth being known. Ideas like that are psychobabble and new age nonsense.

When I hear scientists say they are not interested in the truth I get very annoyed. If scientists are only interested in the disprovable that seems to me as disreputable as the sportsmen who play not to win but to be seen to be worth watching. Seek the truth. The scientific method is a way to do it, but to put scientific professionalism and the scientific method above the truth is a prostitution of the intellect.

“True and False are attributes of speech, not of things.
And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood.”

Thomas Hobbes, 1651

My eyes are bleeding!

I have taken the liberty of changing your HTML page. Are you by any chance colourblind? Were you before? I do not want to cause any damage to my visitors, some of them may want to read at a later date or may have pets in the room. I think you used some kind on online design tool to make that page. If so I suggest you remove any link you have to it. It is an abomination. Terrible code and full of non-websafe colours that would dither to become unreadable on a 256 colour screen.

If you do decide to set up your own website I suggest you start off bland and lowkey and try to keep it that way. Lurid colours detract from the message. I have tried to keep my site pleasant, or at the very least not painful, to look at. Shock and outrage with the ideas not the colour scheme.

If I was starting from scratch today I would certainly use a simple white background and black text, it is by far the most practical design option as it allows you to place GIFs or JPGs with white backgrounds which grow seamlessly from the page. The next time I have two days off together there is a good chance that I will change over to this colour scheme, it might be ubiquitous but that is because of parallel evolution as much as plagiarism. It works, it is simple and effective.

Martin

I haven't actually heard any scientist say they were not interested in the truth and I doubt if all scientists would agree with my interpretation of truth in science, but I think you and I have very little real disagreement. Perhaps it is a different perspective. Our memeplexes relating to truth largely coincide, even though they have different components.

Nit picking over the use of words can lead to futile arguments, but it can also avoid them. When the context of talk of truth is taken into account, a reasonable person can appreciate what is meant. However, in the context of religion, truth is a question of dogma and reason doesn't come into it. I avoid using the word soul because it has so much association with religious belief. Truth is less troublesome, but still requires caution, especially when described as absolute.

Anyway, I look forward to my piece appearing in whatever form you decide. Next, I might try to persuade you of the value of literature!

unbeliever.

I look forward to a defence of literature. I think great works of literature are ahead even of the violin as the greatest wastes of human creative genius. I do not think that they are per se a waste of time only that massive amounts of the time of gifted and able people has been put to their study with so little real benefit. I suppose you could argue that masturbation, country walks and daytime TV are worse culprits but at least when people are engaged in such activities they are not under the illusion that they are doing something productive and meaningful.

Martin

There is no way I would defend the study of literature - I agree it's a total waste of time, and often counter-productive. I hated it at school and could so easily have been put off reading altogether. I just think that literature is a valuable means of expressing and communicating ideas as well as being hugely entertaining. Though other media have become available over the past century, novels are still one of the best.

Besides, there are so many important issues. Like the absolute necessity of re-introducing Imperial weights and measures immediately!

unbeliever.

If it is good art it will be made,
either because somebody is willing to pay for it
or because somebody is willing to produce it even without payment, or with only modest payment.