Interior Dialogue

I. Memeplexes and other plexes Friday, 26 March, 2010

This is the first of a series of posts which will discuss time, science, mathematics, computation and emergence. Since I will make reference to historical aspects, I will begin by giving some of the terminology associated with intellectual and cultural evolution as I see it: my particular version of memetics. I will illustrate with the memes of “time”, “change”, “interaction”, “observation” and “predictability”. These, and other memes, such as, in particular “predictability,” will be important in the subsequent posts.

A meme is any concept which may be communicated between human beings. Since communication is never perfect, and since the thought processes of each human often modify received concepts before recommunicating them, memes mutate and evolve with time. The rate of evolution may change from extremely  fast (bad ideas – they quickly disappear, this is the fastest kind of evolution) to moderate (ideas that seem good at first, but eventually change, or are abandoned) to slow or very slow (ideas that change little over long periods of time – such as the numbers).

Other authors have tried to define memes in various ways, in order to distinguish them from other ideas. However, I believe that any such distinction is artificial. All abstract concepts may be communicated, to some degree. Those that are hard to communicate simply have higher mutation rates than those that are easy to communicate, and which mutate slower. Any concept that may not be communicated at all is not really a concept, but a state of mind. A state of mind is a concept only to the extent that it can be communicated. Biological evidence suggests that abstract thought and language co-evolved in the human brain. Consequently, any distinction between memes and other concepts is artificial.

But memes are not moving through intellectual space independently of each other. They interact. When two or more ideas “collide” in a single mind, they are modified, or sometimes one may disappear (be abandoned), or they may give birth to new ideas. Rereading the previous sentence it also becomes clear that memes interact in ways exactly analogous to physical objects. This is not accidental. Abstract thought evolved, in part, because it enabled humans to put together and take apart physical objects according to their needs. Stone+rope+stick=hammer. Thus, it makes sense that mental objects may at first have been designed by evolution to mimic physical objects. In modern science there is a technical term for such mimickry: modeling. Mental objects (i.e. memes) originally evolved as models of the external world.

And just as physical objects, memes form aggregates, which may, under the right conditions, evolve together. In the physical world these are known as natural cycles (the water cycle, the carbon cycle, the gas and dust cycle which sustains star formation). In the biological world, these are known as metabolisms, or as symbiotic, or interdependent cycles. In the mental world these are known as memeplexes (the differential calculus, Tibetan Buddhism, the natural languages, etc.).

But in most presentations of memetics, one aspect is overlooked. Memes interact not only with each other (via conscious thought) but also with physical objects (via action and perception). Consequently, the notion of memeplex must be enlarged to allow aggregates or cycles containing both mental components (memes) and physical components (objects). This enlarged notion I will call a “plex”. Technologies are typical examples of plexes, since they involve mental objects (physics, math, design concepts, fabrication techniques) as well as physical objects (the physical realization of the respective technologies). The design concepts may be said to co-evolve with the physical realizations because each imposes constraints on the other. They are interdependent via processes such as fabrication (mental > physical) or reverse engineering (physical > mental). Other examples of plexes are political systems, religions, scientific theories, and clothing fashions. Their respective physical components are guns and voting ballots, icons and other objects of worship, experimental apparatus, and billboards and TV ads.

In the following posts, I look closer at change and related memes in the context of their plexes.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Alexandru Ioan Căbuz 2010.