What if culture - even consciousness itself - were nothing more than an artifact of the interaction of selfish memes, ideas capable of replicating and co-evolving with supreme indifference to their impact on human hosts?
A meme-centered paradigm of human culture and consciousness is, to say the least, disconcerting. In Consciousness Explained, cognitive theorist Daniel Dennett captures the horror graphically:
I don't know about you, but I'm not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of other people's ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of themselves in an informational Diaspora. It does seem to rob my mind of its importance as both author and critic. Who's in charge, according to this vision - we or our memes?
A meme-focused vision of culture and consciousness acknowledges forthrightly that memes are not mere random effluvia of the human experience but powerful control mechanisms that impose a largely invisible deep structure on a wide range of complex phenomena - language, scientific thinking, political behavior, productive work, religion, philosophical discourse, even history itself.
But consider the matter more closely. What if it were possible to construct a new science of the meme - memetic engineering - analogous to the discipline of genetic engineering? Such a science would allow us to manipulate complex patterns of replicating memes and achieve consistent and predictable manifestations in the form of a precisely altered cultural phenotype. Who would then be in charge of the course of cultural evolution, our selves or our selfish memes?
This may sound like science fiction, but a possible precursor to memetic engineering has already been studied at the Santa Fe Institute. The 2050 Project - an effort jointly pursued by SFI and the World Resources Institute - used a computer modeling tool called Sugarscape to construct a "cartoon history" that mimics the true history of ancient Native American tribes, such as the Anasazi, and then assesses the impact of changes in various cultural inputs - availability of resources, migration patterns, altered assumptions concerning diffusion of cultural mores - on alternate histories that might have transpired but were foreclosed by intervening events in real history.
The objectives of this research, breathtaking in their implications, were described by the investigators in Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up, a project monograph:
The broad aim of this research is to begin the development of a more unified social science, one that embeds evolutionary processes in a computational environment that simulates demographics, the transmission of culture, conflict, economics, disease, the emergence of groups, and co-adaptation with the environment, all from the bottom up.
Research initiatives like the 2050 Project hold out the prospect of such a new kind of social science, as well as the possibility of a new science of memetic engineering. While predictions about the pace of scientific innovation are notoriously risky, my guess is that by the beginning of the 21st century the embryonic field of computer-based memetic studies either will reveal itself as an intellectual dry hole or will prove to be a technology of extraordinary power.
If the second scenario comes to pass, what are the long-term implications for our self-image as a species - endowed as we are with at least the illusion of free will and blessed, perhaps uniquely among the creatures of this earth, with the baffling gift of conscious thought?
First the dark scenario. Memes might come to be viewed explicitly as the primary actors in the drama of human history, exerting an iron-fisted control precisely analogous to that of Richard Dawkins's "selfish genes" in the pageant of biological evolution.
This is the disquieting vision that Daniel Dennett proffered - the human mind as a mere meat computer, conscious human beings as puppets dancing to the blind watchmaker's hidden melodies. But is this a fair reading of the philosophical implications of memes? Perhaps not. If we consider the matter carefully, we can glimpse a subtler message lurking between the lines of this emerging discipline. It is the same message implicit in the new science of evolutionary psychology, articulated by Robert Wright in The Moral Animal:
Understanding the often unconscious nature of genetic control is the first step toward understanding that we're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer.
So too in the realm of human culture, our best hope for eventual liberation from an endless succession of dangerous ideologies and blinding prejudices - our best chance for overthrowing the tyranny exercised by blindly replicating memes indifferent to their often devastating impact on the mortal vessels they selfishly commandeer - may lie in a 21st-century enlightenment centered, at least in part, on a rigorous new science of the meme.
