A meme () is an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.

A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.

The word 'meme' is a shortening (modeled on 'gene') of 'mimeme' (from Ancient Greek μίμημα ''mīmēma'', "something imitated", from μιμεῖσθαι ''mimeisthai'', "to imitate", from μῖμος ''mimos'' "mime") and it was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in ''The Selfish Gene'' (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, fashion and the technology of building arches.

Advocates of the ''meme'' idea say that memes may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition and inheritance, each of which influence a meme's reproductive success.

Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success. Some memes may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.

A field of study called memetics arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically. Developments in neuroimaging may however make empirical study possible. Some commentators question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units.

History

Origins

Max Stirner's 1844 ''The Ego and Its Own'' puts forth the idea that the individual is dominated by illusory concepts ('fixed ideas' or 'spooks'), which can be shaken and undermined by each individual, though he does not use the term meme for this. He offers examples such as nationalism and religion.

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek μνήμη ''mneme'', “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled ''Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen'' (loosely translatable as “Memory-feelings in relation to original feelings”). According to the OED, the word ''mneme'' appears in English in 1921 in L. Simon's translation of Semon's book: ''The Mneme''.

Laurent noted the use of the term ''mneme'' in Maurice Maeterlinck's ''The Life of the White Ant'' (1926), and has highlighted similarities to Dawkins' concept.

The analogy between culturally transmitted information and genetically transmitted information was perceived clearly enough by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus W. Feldman to allow them to formulate and analyze quantitative models of cultural transmission and selection. They published a series of papers beginning in 1973.

The word ''meme'' originated with Dawkins' 1976 book ''The Selfish Gene''. To emphasize commonality with genes, Dawkins coined the term "meme" by shortening "mimeme", which derives from the Greek word ''mimema'' ("something imitated").

Dawkins states that he did not know of the "mneme", and said that he wanted "a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'". Dawkins wrote that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission – in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.

Concept

Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesised that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behaviour. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.

Dawkins defined the ''meme'' as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation and replication, but later definitions would vary. Memes, analogously to genes, vary in their aptitude to replicate; memes which are good at getting themselves copied tend to spread and remain, whereas the less good ones have a higher probability of being ignored and forgotten. Thus "better" memes are selected. The lack of a consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about memetics. In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the natural or life sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer.

Transmission

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means). Malcolm Gladwell wrote, "A meme is an idea that behaves like a virus--that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects." Memes can replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation. They may also lie dormant for long periods of time. Memes spread by the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. Imitation counts as an important characteristic in the propagation of memes. Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behaviour of another individual, but memes may transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score. McNamara has suggested that memes can be thereby classified as either internal or external memes, (i-memes or e-memes). Researchers have observed memetic copying in just a few species on Earth, including hominids, dolphins and birds (that learn how to sing by imitating their parents or neighbors).

Some commentators have likened the transmission of memes to the spread of contagions. Social contagions such as fads, hysteria, copycat crime, and copycat suicide exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas. Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of memes from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate (rather than socially learned) behaviors.

Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion":

# ''Quantity of parenthood'': an idea that influences the number of children one has. Children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas that directly or indirectly encourage a higher birthrate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birthrates. # ''Efficiency of parenthood'': an idea that increases the proportion of children who will adopt ideas of their parents. Cultural separatism exemplifies one practice in which one can expect a higher rate of meme-replication — because the meme for separation creates a barrier from exposure to competing ideas. # ''Proselytic'': ideas generally passed to others beyond one's own children. Ideas that encourage the proselytism of a meme, as seen in many religious or political movements, can replicate memes horizontally through a given generation, spreading more rapidly than parent-to-child meme-transmissions do. #''Preservational'': ideas that influence those that hold them to continue to hold them for a long time. Ideas that encourage longevity in their hosts, or leave their hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, enhance the preservability of memes and afford protection from the competition or proselytism of other memes. #''Adversative'': ideas that influence those that hold them to attack or sabotage competing ideas and/or those that hold them. Adversative replication can give an advantage in meme transmission when the meme itself encourages aggression against other memes. #''Cognitive'': ideas perceived as cogent by most in the population who encounter them. Cognitively transmitted memes depend heavily on a cluster of other ideas and cognitive traits already widely held in the population, and thus usually spread more passively than other forms of meme transmission. Memes spread in cognitive transmission do not count as self-replicating. #''Motivational'': ideas that people adopt because they perceive some self-interest in adopting them. Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted memes do not self-propagate, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with memes self-replicated in the efficiency parental, proselytic and preservational modes.

Memes as discrete units

Richard Dawkins initially defined ''meme'' as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of ''imitation''". John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favourable or unfavourable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change." The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless if that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.

While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces. A meme has no given size. Susan Blackmore writes that melodies from Beethoven's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units. She notes that while the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony () form a meme widely replicated as an independent unit, one can regard the entire symphony as a single meme as well.

The inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to quantifiable key units is widely acknowledge as a problem for memetics. It has been argued however that the traces of memetic processing can be quantified utilizing neuroimaging techniques which measure changes in the connectivity profiles between brain regions." Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures. To illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of DNA. Memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.

The 1981 book ''Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process'' by Charles J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson proposed the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory. They coined their own term, "culturgen", which did not catch on. Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term ''meme'' as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book ''Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge'', which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.

Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions that must exist for evolution to occur:

# variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements; # heredity or replication, or the capacity to create copies of elements; # differential "fitness", or the opportunity for one element to be more or less suited to the environment than another.

Dawkins emphasizes that the process of evolution naturally occurs whenever these conditions co-exist, and that evolution does not apply only to organic elements such as genes. He regards memes as also having the properties necessary for evolution, and thus sees meme evolution as not simply analogous to genetic evolution, but as a real phenomenon subject to the laws of natural selection. Dawkins noted that as various ideas pass from one generation to the next, they may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves. For example, a certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool-making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture. Each tool-design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the meme's function directly affects the presence of the design in future generations. In keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes. Consequently, a successful meme may or may not need to provide any benefit to its host.

Unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show both Darwinian and Lamarckian traits. Cultural memes will have the characteristic of Lamarckian inheritance when a host aspires to replicate the given meme through inference rather than by exactly copying it. Take for example the case of the transmission of a simple skill such as hammering a nail, a skill that a learner imitates from watching a demonstration without necessarily imitating every discrete movement modeled by the teacher in the demonstration, stroke for stroke. Susan Blackmore distinguishes the difference between the two modes of inheritance in the evolution of memes, characterizing the Darwinian mode as "copying the instructions" and the Lamarckian as "copying the product."

Clusters of memes, or ''memeplexes'' (also known as ''meme complexes'' or as ''memecomplexes''), such as cultural or political doctrines and systems, may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes. Memeplexes comprise groups of memes that replicate together and coadapt. Memes that fit within a successful memeplex may gain acceptance by "piggybacking" on the success of the memeplex. As an example, John D. Gottsch discusses the transmission, mutation and selection of religious memeplexes and the theistic memes contained. Theistic memes discussed include the "prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased vertical transmission of the parent religious memeplex. Similar memes are thereby included in the majority of religious memeplexes, and harden over time; they become an "inviolable canon" or set of dogmas, eventually finding their way into secular law. This could also be referred to as the propagation of a taboo.

Memetics

The discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid 1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Memeticists have proposed that just as memes function analogously to genes, memetics functions analogously to genetics. Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas.

Principal criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. Questions remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a validly disprovable scientific theory. This view regards memetics as a theory in its infancy: a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors.

Criticism of meme theory

An objection to the study of the evolution of memes in genetic terms (although not to the existence of memes) involves a perceived gap in the gene/meme analogy: the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection-pressures neither too great nor too small in relation to mutation-rates. There seems no reason to think that the same balance will exist in the selection pressures on memes.

Luis Benitez-Bribiesca M.D., a critic of memetics, calls the theory a "pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution". As a factual criticism, Benitez-Bribiesca points to the lack of a "code script" for memes (analogous to the DNA of genes), and to the excessive instability of the meme mutation mechanism (that of an idea going from one brain to another), which would lead to a low replication accuracy and a high mutation rate, rendering the evolutionary process chaotic.

British political philosopher John Gray has characterized Dawkins' memetic theory of religion as "nonsense" and "not even a theory... the latest in a succession of ill-judged Darwinian metaphors", comparable to Intelligent Design in its value as a science.

Another critique comes from semiotic theorists such as Deacon and Kull This view regards the concept of "meme" as a primitivized concept of "sign". The meme is thus described in memetics as a sign lacking a triadic nature. Semioticians can regard a meme as a "degenerate" sign, which includes only its ability of being copied. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs.

Fracchia and Lewontin regard memetics as reductionist and inadequate.

Potential lack of philosophical depth

In his chapter titled "Truth" published in the ''Encyclopedia of Phenomenology'', Dieter Lohmar questions the memeticists' reduction of the highly complex body of ideas (such as religion, politics, war, justice, and science itself) to a putatively one-dimensional series of memes. He sees memes as an abstraction and such a reduction as failing to produce greater understanding of those ideas. The highly interconnected, multi-layering of ideas resists memetic simplification to an atomic or molecular form; as does the fact that each of our lives remains fully enmeshed and involved in such "memes". Lohmar argues that one cannot view memes through a microscope in the way one can detect genes. The leveling-off of all such interesting "memes" down to some neutralized molecular "substance" such as "meme-substance" introduces a bias toward scientism and abandons the very essence of what makes ideas interesting, richly available, and worth studying.

Applications

Opinions differ as to how best to apply the concept of memes within a "proper" disciplinary framework. One view sees memes as providing a useful philosophical perspective with which to examine cultural evolution. Proponents of this view (such as Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett) argue that considering cultural developments from a meme's-eye view—''as if'' memes themselves respond to pressure to maximise their own replication and survival—can lead to useful insights and yield valuable predictions into how culture develops over time. Others such as Bruce Edmonds and Robert Aunger have focused on the need to provide an empirical grounding for memetics to become a useful and respected scientific discipline. A third approach, described as "radical memetics", seeks to place memes at the centre of a materialistic theory of mind and of personal identity.

Prominent researchers in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, including Scott Atran, Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, John Tooby and others, argue the possibility of incompatibility between modularity of mind and memetics. In their view, minds structure certain communicable aspects of the ideas produced, and these communicable aspects generally trigger or elicit ideas in other minds through inference (to relatively rich structures generated from often low-fidelity input) and not high-fidelity replication or imitation. Atran discusses communication involving religious beliefs as a case in point. In one set of experiments he asked religious people to write down on a piece of paper the meanings of the Ten Commandments. Despite the subjects' own expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus. In another experiment, subjects with autism and subjects without autism interpreted ideological and religious sayings (for example, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" or "To everything there is a season"). People with autism showed a significant tendency to closely paraphrase and repeat content from the original statement (for example: "Don't cut flowers before they bloom"). Controls tended to infer a wider range of cultural meanings with little replicated content (for example: "Go with the flow" or "Everyone should have equal opportunity"). Only the subjects with autism—who lack the degree of inferential capacity normally associated with aspects of theory of mind—came close to functioning as "meme machines".

In his book ''The Robot's Rebellion'', Stanovich uses the memes and memeplex concepts to describe a program of cognitive reform that he refers to as a "rebellion". Specifically, Stanovich argues that the use of memes as a descriptor for cultural units is beneficial because it serves to emphasize transmission and acquisition properties that parallel the study of epidemiology. These properties make salient the sometimes parasitic nature of acquired memes, and as a result individuals should be motivated to reflectively acquire memes using what he calls a "Neurathian bootstrap" process.

Religion

Although social scientists such as Max Weber sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute, Richard Dawkins called for a re-analysis of religion in terms of the evolution of self-replicating ideas ''apart from'' any resulting biological advantages they might bestow.

He argued that the role of key replicator in cultural evolution belongs not to genes, but to memes replicating thought from person to person by means of imitation. These replicators respond to selective pressures that may or may not affect biological reproduction or survival.

In her book ''The Meme Machine'', Susan Blackmore regards religions as particularly tenacious memes. Many of the features common to the most widely practiced religions provide built-in advantages in an evolutionary context, she writes. For example, religions that preach of the value of faith over evidence from everyday experience or reason inoculate societies against many of the most basic tools people commonly use to evaluate their ideas. By linking altruism with religious affiliation, religious memes can proliferate more quickly because people perceive that they can reap societal as well as personal rewards. The longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered religious texts.

Aaron Lynch attributed the robustness of religious memes in human culture to the fact that such memes incorporate multiple modes of meme transmission. Religious memes pass down the generations from parent to child and across a single generation through the meme-exchange of proselytism. Most people will hold the religion taught them by their parents throughout their life. Many religions feature adversarial elements, punishing apostasy, for instance, or demonizing infidels. In ''Thought Contagion'' Lynch identifies the memes of transmission in Christianity as especially powerful in scope. Believers view the conversion of non-believers both as a religious duty and as an act of altruism. The promise of heaven to believers and threat of hell to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief. Lynch asserts that belief in the Crucifixion of Jesus in Christianity amplifies each of its other replication advantages through the indebtedness believers have to their Savior for sacrifice on the cross. The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments, and the proliferation of symbols of the cross in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.

The scientific community has not been receptive to religious memes as compared to the general non-scientific community. Such conditions of relative propagative difficulty could be expected to lead to accelerated religious evolution in an attempt to attract adherents. Robertson (2007) used a memetic approach to deconstruct two attempts to privilege religiously held spirituality in scientific discourse. Advantages of a memetic approach as compared to more traditional "modernization" and "supply side" theses in understanding the evolution and propagation of religion are discussed.

Memetic explanations of racism

In ''Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology'', Jack Balkin argued that memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of ideological thought. His theory of "cultural software" maintained that memes form narratives, networks of cultural associations, metaphoric and metonymic models, and a variety of different mental structures. Balkin maintains that the same structures used to generate ideas about free speech or free markets also serve to generate racist beliefs. To Balkin, whether memes become harmful or maladaptive depends on the environmental context in which they exist rather than in any special source or manner to their origination. Balkin describes racist beliefs as "fantasy" memes that become harmful or unjust "ideologies" when diverse peoples come together, as through trade or competition.

Internet culture

The term "Internet meme" refers to a catchphrase or concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based email, blogs, forums, Imageboards, social networking sites and instant messaging.

Meme maps

One technique of meme mapping represents the evolution and transmission of a meme across time and space. Such a meme map uses a figure-8 diagram (an analemma) to map the gestation (in the lower loop), birth (at the choke point), and development (in the upper loop) of the selected meme. Such meme maps are non-scalar, with time mapped onto the y-axis and space onto the x-axis transect. One can read the temporal progress of the mapped meme from south to north on such a meme map. Paull has published a worked example using the "organics meme" (as in organic agriculture).

Robertson (2010) used a second technique of meme mapping to create two-dimensional representations of the selves of eleven participants drawn from both individualist and collectivist cultures. Participant narratives were transcribed, segmented and coded using a method similar to grounded theory. Coded segments exhibiting referent, connotative, affective and behavioral dimensions were declared to be memes. Memes that shared connotative, affective or behavioral qualities were linked. All of the maps in Robertson's sample evidenced volition, constancy, uniqueness, production, intimacy, and social interest. This method of mapping the self was successfully used in therapy to treat a youth who had attempted suicide on five occasions (Robertson 2011). The youth and psychotherapist co-constructed a plan to change the youth's presenting self, and her progress in making those changes was tracked in subsequent self-maps.

See also

Dual inheritance theory

Electronic Revolution

Know Your Meme

Memetic engineering

Psycholinguistics

Sociocultural evolution

Survivals

Spiral Dynamics

Three hares

Viral marketing

Viral phenomenon

Viral video

The game (mind game)

Notes

References

[trade paperback ISBN 0-9658817-8-4 (1999), ISBN 0-19-286212-X (2000)]

Henson, H. Keith: "Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War."

Henson, H. Keith: "Sex, Drugs, and Cults. An evolutionary psychology perspective on why and how cult memes get a drug-like hold on people, and what might be done to mitigate the effects", ''The Human Nature Review '' 2002 Volume 2: 343-355

Heylighen, Francis, (1992) : "Selfish Memes and the Evolution of Cooperation", ''Journal of Ideas'' vol. 2, no. 4, pp, 77–84.

Jan, Steven: ''The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture'' (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

Moritz, Elan. (1995): "Metasystems, Memes and Cybernetic Immortality," in: Heylighen F., Joslyn C. & Turchin V. (eds.), ''The Quantum of Evolution. Toward a theory of metasystem transitions'', (Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, New York) (special issue of ''World Futures: the journal of general evolution'', vol. 45, p. 155-171).

External links

Dawkins' speech on the 30th anniversary of the publication of ''The Selfish Gene'', Dawkins 2006

"Evolution and Memes: The human brain as a selective imitation device": article by Susan Blackmore.

Journal of Memetics, a peer-refereed journal of memetics published from 1997 until 2005

Susan Blackmore: Memes and "temes", TED Talks February 2008

Category:Collective intelligence Category:Cultural anthropology Category:Evolutionary psychology Category:Futurology Category:Memes Category:Philosophy of mind Category:Units of information (cognitive processes) Category:Units of morphological analysis Category:Words coined in the 1970s

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Coordinates	21°58′30″N96°5′0″N
region	Western Philosophy
era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
color	#B0C4DE
name	Daniel Clement Dennett
birth date	March 28, 1942
birth place	Boston, Massachusetts
school tradition	Analytic philosophy
main interests	Philosophy of mindPhilosophy of biologyPhilosophy of scienceCognitive science
notable ideas	HeterophenomenologyIntentional stanceIntuition pumpMultiple Drafts ModelGreedy reductionism
alma mater	Harvard University (B.A.)University of Oxford (D.Phil.)
influences	Gilbert Ryle W. V. QuineWilfrid Sellars Wittgenstein Charles Darwin David Hume Alan Turing Richard Dawkins
influenced	Richard Dawkins Douglas Hofstadter Geoffrey Miller }}

Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and a University Professor at Tufts University. Dennett is a firm atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism," along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.

Early life and education

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut. When he was five, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash. His sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.

He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and spent one year at Wesleyan University before receiving his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963, where he was a student of W. V. Quine. In 1965, he received his Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy from the University of Oxford, where he studied under Gilbert Ryle and was a member of Hertford College.

Academic career

As of April 2009, Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, University Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies (with Ray Jackendoff) at Tufts University.

Dennett describes himself as "an autodidact — or, more properly, the beneficiary of hundreds of hours of informal tutorials on all the fields that interest me, from some of the world's leading scientists."

He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. He was named 2004 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.

In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.

Free will

While he is a confirmed compatibilist on free will, in "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want" — Chapter 15 of his 1978 book ''Brainstorms,'' Dennett articulated the case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views.

The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.

While other philosophers have developed two-stage models, including William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, and Henry Margenau, Dennett defends this model for the following reasons:

These prior and subsidiary decisions contribute, I think, to our sense of ourselves as responsible free agents, roughly in the following way: I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: "That's enough. I've considered this matter enough and now I'm going to act," in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.

Leading libertarian philosophers such as Robert Kane have rejected Dennett's model, specifically that random chance is directly involved in a decision, on the basis that they believe this eliminates the agent's motives and reasons, character and values, and feelings and desires. They claim that, if chance is the primary cause of decisions, then agents cannot be liable for resultant actions. Kane says:

[As Dennett admits,] a causal indeterminist view of this deliberative kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For [the agent] does not have complete control over what chance images and other thoughts enter his mind or influence his deliberation. They simply come as they please. [The agent] does have some control ''after'' the chance considerations have occurred.

But then there is no more chance involved. What happens from then on, how he reacts, is ''determined'' by desires and beliefs he already has. So it appears that he does not have control in the ''libertarian'' sense of what happens after the chance considerations occur as well. Libertarians require more than this for full responsibility and free will.

Other philosophical views

Dennett has remarked in several places (such as "Self-portrait", in ''Brainchildren'') that his overall philosophical project has remained largely the same since his time at Oxford. He is primarily concerned with providing a philosophy of mind that is grounded in empirical research. In his original dissertation, ''Content and Consciousness'', he broke up the problem of explaining the mind into the need for a theory of content and for a theory of consciousness. His approach to this project has also stayed true to this distinction. Just as ''Content and Consciousness'' has a bipartite structure, he similarly divided ''Brainstorms'' into two sections. He would later collect several essays on content in ''The Intentional Stance'' and synthesize his views on consciousness into a unified theory in ''Consciousness Explained''. These volumes respectively form the most extensive development of his views.

In ''Consciousness Explained'', Dennett's interest in the ability of evolution to explain some of the content-producing features of consciousness is already apparent, and this has since become an integral part of his program. He defends a theory known by some as Neural Darwinism. He also presents an argument against qualia; he argues that the concept is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism. Much of Dennett's work since the 1990s has been concerned with fleshing out his previous ideas by addressing the same topics from an evolutionary standpoint, from what distinguishes human minds from animal minds (''Kinds of Minds''), to how free will is compatible with a naturalist view of the world (''Freedom Evolves''). In his 2006 book, ''Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon'', Dennett attempts to subject religious belief to the same treatment, explaining possible evolutionary reasons for the phenomenon of religious adherence.

Dennett self-identifies with a few terms:

Yet, in ''Consciousness Explained'', he admits "I am a sort of 'teleofunctionalist', of course, perhaps the original teleofunctionalist'". He goes on to say, "I am ready to come out of the closet as some sort of verificationist". In ''Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon'' he admits to being "a bright", and defends the term.

Role in evolutionary debate

Dennett sees evolution by natural selection as an algorithmic process (though he spells out that algorithms as simple as long division often incorporate a significant degree of randomness). This idea is in conflict with the evolutionary philosophy of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who preferred to stress the "pluralism" of evolution (i.e. its dependence on many crucial factors, of which natural selection is only one).

Dennett's views on evolution are identified as being strongly adaptationist, in line with his theory of the intentional stance, and the evolutionary views of biologist Richard Dawkins. In ''Darwin's Dangerous Idea'', Dennett showed himself even more willing than Dawkins to defend adaptationism in print, devoting an entire chapter to a criticism of the ideas of Gould. This stems from Gould's long-running public debate with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over human sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology, which Gould and Richard Lewontin opposed, but which Dennett advocated, together with Dawkins and Steven Pinker. Strong disagreements have been launched against Dennett from Gould and his supporters, who allege that Dennett overstated his claims and misrepresented Gould's to reinforce what Gould describes as Dennett's "Darwinian fundamentalism".

Dennett's theories have had a significant influence on the work of evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. He has also written about and advocated the notion of memetics as a philosophically useful tool, most recently in his "Brains, Computers, and Minds," a three part presentation through Harvard's MBB 2009 Distinguished Lecture Series.

He has recently been doing research into clerics who are secretly atheists and how they rationalize their works. He found what he called a "Don't ask, don't tell" conspiracy because believers did not want to hear of loss of faith. That made unbelieving preachers feel isolated but they did not want to lose their jobs and sometimes their church-supplied lodgings and generally consoled themselves that they were doing good in their pastoral roles by providing comfort and required ritual. The research, with Linda LaScola, was further extended to include other denominations and non-Christian clerics.

Personal life

Dennett lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and three grandchildren. He is also an avid sailor.

In October 2006, Dennett was hospitalized due to an aortic dissection. After a nine-hour surgery, he was given a new aorta. In an essay posted on the Edge website, Dennett gives his firsthand account of his health problems, his consequent feelings of gratitude towards the scientists, cardiologist, surgeons, EMT's, phlebotomists, orderlies, housekeepers, physician assistants, X-ray technicians, meal-bringers, launderers, physical therapists, perfusionist, neurologist, and nurses whose hard work made his recovery possible, and his complete lack of a "deathbed conversion". By his account, upon having been told by friends and relatives that they had prayed for him, he resisted the urge to ask them, "Did you also sacrifice a goat?"

Selected books

''Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology'' (MIT Press 1981) (ISBN 0-262-54037-1)

''Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting'' (MIT Press 1984) — on free will and determinism (ISBN 0-262-04077-8)

''The Mind's I'' (Bantam, Reissue edition 1985, with Douglas Hofstadter) (ISBN 0-553-34584-2)

''Content and Consciousness'' (Routledge & Kegan Paul Books Ltd; 2nd ed. January 1986) (ISBN 0-7102-0846-4)

(First published 1987)

''Consciousness Explained'' (Back Bay Books 1992) (ISBN 0-316-18066-1)

''Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life'' (Simon & Schuster; reprint edition 1996) (ISBN 0-684-82471-X)

''Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness'' (Basic Books 1997) (ISBN 0-465-07351-4)

''Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (Representation and Mind)'' (MIT Press 1998) (ISBN 0-262-04166-9) — A Collection of Essays 1984–1996

''Freedom Evolves'' (Viking Press 2003) (ISBN 0-670-03186-0)

''Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness'' (MIT Press 2005) (ISBN 0-262-04225-8)

''Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon'' (Penguin Group 2006) (ISBN 0-670-03472-X).

''Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language'' (Columbia University Press 2007) (ISBN 978-0-231-14044-7), co-authored with Maxwell Bennett, Peter Hacker, and John Searle

''Science and Religion'' (Oxford University Press 2010) (ISBN 0-199-73842-4), co-authored with Alvin Plantinga

See also

''The Atheism Tapes''

Cartesian materialism

''Conscious Robots''

Evolutionary psychology of religion

Greedy reductionism

Geoffrey Miller

Heterophenomenology

Intentional stance

List of Jean Nicod Prize laureates

Memetics

Multiple drafts theory of consciousness

Philosophy of Religion

American philosophy

List of American philosophers

Further reading

John Brockman (1995). ''The Third Culture''. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80359-3 (Discusses Dennett and others).

Daniel C. Dennett (1997), "Chapter 3. True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works", in John Haugeland, ''Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence''. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ISBN 0-262-08259-4 (reprint of 1981 publication).

Andrew Brook and Don Ross (editors) (2000). ''Daniel Dennett''. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00864-6

Don Ross, Andrew Brook and David Thompson (editors) (2000) ''Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment'' Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-18200-9

John Symons (2000) ''On Dennett''. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. ISBN 0-534-57632-X

Matthew Elton (2003). Dennett: Reconciling Science and Our Self-Conception. Cambridge, U.K: Polity Press. ISBN 0-7456-2117-1

P.M.S. Hacker and M.R. Bennett (2003) ''Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience''. Oxford, and Malden, Mass: Blackwell ISBN 1-4051-0855-X (Has an appendix devoted to a strong critique of Dennett's philosophy of mind)

Notes

References

External links

Inside Jokes Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams, Jr atThe MIT Press

Faculty webpage

Daniel C. Dennett at Internet Movie Database

Scientific American Frontiers Profile: Daniel Dennett 2000-12-19

Searchable bibliography of Dennett's works

Daniel Dennett on Information Philosopher

; Media

Edge/Third Culture: Daniel C. Dennett

Daniel Dennett multimedia files

Profile at TED several videos on dangerous memes, consciousness, others

Radio interview on ''Philosophy Talk'' 2006-01-17

The Nature of Knowledge Lecture at the University of Edinburgh 2006-03-14

On Preaching and Teaching ''The Science Network'' interview with Daniel Dennett 2007-11-02

''The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies'' video interview with Daniel Dennett 2010-03-05

Category:1942 births Category:20th-century philosophers Category:21st-century philosophers Category:American atheists Category:American philosophers Category:Analytic philosophers Category:Atheist philosophers Category:Atheism activists Category:Cognitive scientists Category:Consciousness researchers and theorists Category:Phillips Exeter Academy alumni Category:Wesleyan University alumni Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Alumni of Christ Church, Oxford Category:Living people Category:Memetics Category:People from Boston, Massachusetts Category:Philosophers of mind Category:Philosophers of religion Category:Philosophers of science Category:Tufts University faculty Category:Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Category:Jean Nicod Prize laureates Category:American non-fiction writers Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Category:Evolutionary psychologists Category:American skeptics Category:American humanists

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Coordinates	21°58′30″N96°5′0″N
name	Susan Blackmore
birth name	Susan Jane Blackmore
birth date	July 29, 1951
education	St. Hilda's College, Oxford, University of Surrey
occupation	Freelance writer, Lecturer, Broadcaster
spouse	Adam Hart-Davis
website	Official Website
footnotes	}}

Susan Jane Blackmore, PhD, (born 29 July 1951) is an English freelance writer, lecturer, and broadcaster on psychology and the paranormal, perhaps best known for her book ''The Meme Machine''.

Career

In 1973, Susan Blackmore graduated from St. Hilda's College, Oxford, with a BA (Hons) degree in psychology and physiology. She went on to do postgraduate study in environmental psychology at the University of Surrey, achieving an MSc degree in 1974. In 1980, she got her PhD degree in parapsychology from the same university, her thesis being entitled "Extrasensory Perception as a Cognitive Process." After some period of time spent in research on parapsychology and the paranormal, her attitude towards the field moved from belief to scepticism. She is a Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and in 1991 was awarded the CSICOP Distinguished Skeptic Award.

Blackmore has done research on memes (which she wrote about in her popular book ''The Meme Machine'') and evolutionary theory. Her book ''Consciousness: An Introduction'' (2004), is a textbook that broadly covers the field of consciousness studies. She was on the editorial board for the ''Journal of Memetics'' (an electronic journal) from 1997 to 2001, and has been a consulting editor of the ''Skeptical Inquirer'' since 1998.

She acted as one of the psychologists who was featured on the British version of the television show "Big Brother", speaking about the psychological state of the contestants. She is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.

Memetics

Susan Blackmore has made contributions to the field of memetics. The term ''meme'' was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book ''The Selfish Gene''. In his foreword to Blackmore's book ''The Meme Machine'' (1999), Dawkins said, "Any theory deserves to be given its best shot, and that is what Susan Blackmore has given the theory of the meme." Other treatments of memes can be found in the works of Robert Aunger: ''The Electric Meme'', and Jon Whitty: ''A Memetic Paradigm of Project Management''.

Blackmore's treatment of memetics insists that memes are true evolutionary replicators, a second replicator that like genetics is subject to the Darwinian algorithm and undergoes evolutionary change. Her prediction on the central role played by imitation as the cultural replicator and the neural structures that must be unique to humans in order to facilitate them have recently been given further support by research on mirror neurons and the differences in extent of these structures between humans and the presumed closest branch of simian ancestors.

At the February 2008 TED conference Blackmore introduced a special category of memes called ''temes''. Temes are memes which live in technological artifacts instead of the human mind.

Personal life

Blackmore is an active practitioner of Zen, although she identifies herself as "not a Buddhist". Blackmore is an atheist who has criticised religion sharply, having said, for instance, that "all kinds of infectious memes thrive in religions, in spite of being false, such as the idea of a creator god, virgin births, the subservience of women, transubstantiation, and many more. In the major religions, they are backed up by admonitions to have faith not doubt, and by untestable but ferocious rewards and punishments."

On 15 September 2010, Blackmore, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in ''The Guardian'', stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK. On 16 September 2010, Blackmore wrote in ''The Guardian'' that she no longer believed that religion is a virus of the mind.

She is married to the writer Adam Hart-Davis.

Publications

Books

''Beyond the Body: An Investigation of Out-Of-The-Body Experiences'', Academy Chicago Publishers, 1983, ISBN 0-586-08428-2 (first edition), ISBN 0-89733-344-6 (second edition)

''In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Parapsychologist'', Prometheus Books, 1987, ISBN 0-87975-360-9 (first edition), ISBN 1-57392-061-4 (second edition, 1996)

''Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences'', Prometheus Books, 1993, ISBN 0-87975-870-8

''Test Your Psychic Powers'', with Adam Hart-Davis, Thorsons Publishing, 1995, ISBN 1-85538-441-8, ISBN 0-8069-9669-2 (reprint edition)

''The Meme Machine'', Oxford University Press, reprint edition 2000, ISBN 0-19-286212-X

''Consciousness: An Introduction'', Oxford University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-19-515342-1 (hardcover), ISBN 0-19-515343-X (paperback)

''Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction'', Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-19-280585-1

''Conversations on Consciousness'' Oxford University Press, 2005 ISBN 0-19-280622-X

Articles

Notes

Further reading

"Why I Have Given Up", in ''Skeptical Odysseys: Personal Accounts by the World's Leading Paranormal Inquirers'', edited by Paul Kurtz, Prometheus Books, ISBN 1-57392-884-4, chapter 6, 85–94. available online

"The Elusive Open Mind: Ten Years of Negative Research in Parapsychology", ''Skeptical Inquirer'', 11:244-55. available online

"A Critical Examination of the Blackmore Psi Experiments", ''The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research '', 83:123-144. available online

External links

Susan Blackmore's website

Susan Blackmore's blog on The Guardian's ''Comment is Free''

TED Talks: Susan Blackmore on memes and "temes" at TED in 2008

Susan Blackmore at The Internet Movie Database

Interview with Susan Blackmore

The Meme Machine, Interview of Susan Blackmore

Audio interview with Dr. Susan Blackmore, exploring her journey from a disillusioned parapsychology researcher to an author on human consciousness.

Alister McGrath (author of 'The Dawkins Delusion') at Bristol University on the motion that "belief in God is a dangerous delusion". 13 November. 2007.">Sue Blackmore debates Alister McGrath (author of 'The Dawkins Delusion') at Bristol University on the motion that "belief in God is a dangerous delusion". 13 November. 2007.

Category:Consciousness researchers and theorists Category:Parapsychologists Category:British atheists Category:British humanists Category:British psychologists Category:Alumni of St Hilda's College, Oxford Category:Alumni of the University of Surrey Category:1951 births Category:Living people Category:Atheism activists Category:Memetics

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