Susan Blackmore: Memes and "temes" 

It's 2023 and the lecture is still amazing.

I would love to hear her view on archytypal imagery in art throughout history in relationship to memes.

I have a question. Blackmore states that memetics is almost exclusively a human phenomenon, but that strikes me as wrong. My dog was afraid of water until she saw other dogs swimming. Many animals use tools or language. I'm new to memetics, so maybe I'm missing something. Any ideas?

I think Susan Blackmore is fantastic. A personal hero of mine. I really recommend her book 'The Meme Machine'.

This is one of the most awesome lectures I have ever heard on so many levels. The humor and style of the speech itself, the energy of the speaker, and the depth of the concepts being presented. What a remarkable role model to inspire people about science again. We need more of this!

I just have to wonder if all these nay sayers from 7 years ago are still nay saying. Susan Blackmore is brilliant by the way.

ok everyone, wack your computer with a stick

All I can say is that i have never seen anything more convincing. Stunning idea!

Came here after her debate with JBP.

What a great talk.

The word "design" is a tricky word as it still conveys intelligence or agency behind it for many. Thus it becomes difficult when talking about memes and design not attributing agency properties on the memes, even worst it gets when memes also show emergency properties. I do that mistake, she does too but I think it most due to the limitations of language and interlinked concepts which are difficult to shake off.

o.O This is an incredible interesting talk! I want to learn more about temes, memes.. Does/how does a meme effect our biological evolution? How does memes and genes 'interact'? Will this new teme (if memes has an effect on evolution) have a similar effect on our biological evolution?

Actually Blackmore said other creatures use memes, just no where near the extent that we do. What noonej's dog did was indeed a meme.

Viendo esta charla en 2023 y no ha podido estar más acertada. La completa revolución tecnológica que estamos viviendo hoy es exactamente lo que ella postula. Increíble!!🤯

She's trying to differentiate between various forms of media. This is in-correct. As Marshall McLuhan discovered, there are four laws which govern the behaviour of all media/technologies. The laws (are just as true of gym-socks as they are of nuclear satellites or what she refers to as "temes". His discovery of these laws, levels the playing field between all technologies and thus makes them much easier to compare and understand. The law in particular that McLuhan observed is the nature of retrieval. All media become clichés eventually and are obsolesced. Later they are retrieved (sometimes centuries after they first appeared). Think of the carapace of an automobile as it retrieves the suit of armour a knight used to wear and all of the accompanying service environments associated with the horse power, taking you from village inn to village inn. Because all media are metaphors for some human faculty or sense, there is no need to distinguish between them via McLuhan's four laws of media - they are implied universally via our genetic code and thus the media extensions of these faculties or senses act as literal and figural metaphors - or memes. McLuhan's book "From Cliché to Archetype', written five years before Dawkins coined the word "meme", explains the process of cultural reproduction in a way that is far superior to Dawkins or Blackmore. The only thing it lacks is the very catchy word which acts as the unit of reproduction, "the meme". btw - the reason they do that with toilet paper is tied up in the fact that tearing into a new roll of toilet paper is messy, inconvenient and wasteful. The archetypal solution was to taper the end of the roll after opening it for the guest which has now grown into a cliché we all recognize. Clichés are after all, everything we keep (genes included). The retrieval in this case is a family of retreivals: anything you do to start a process for someone else, that makes the process easier and more convenient. McLuhan's 4 Laws: social-epistemology.com/2012/11/11/gregory-sandstrom-laws-of-media-the-four-effects-a-mcluhan-contribution-to-social-epistemology/#:~:text=McLuhan%20prescribed%20his%20so%2Dcalled,Obsolescence%20and%20Amplification%20or%20Enhancement.

I agree, I truly appreciate that there is a way to get to know what scientist are doing today, hear them talk with passion about their work and see what a wonderful universe of possibilities science has for us. Kudos for TED-Talks

Seems needlessly complex. Makes more sense to think of memes as extended phenotypes.

She is SO ON TO IT !

What a brilliant concept! Explains alot of what we see going on in our Era.

The selection part is in contradiction with the without the aid of Mind part. Selection needs a subject who selects. Chaos is no other than an unconceivable Mind.

I recommend Susan Blackmore's "The Selfish Meme" and, for a background perspective, her text "An Introduction to Consciousness" was a great survey. I first read about Dawkins' memetics in Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas". Blackmore's take on zen meditation might help answer your Freudian/Jungian question.

Interesting. Does interesting equal correct? I'd say the best thing about brains and language is that they support creation, invention (they also happen to support copying, but that's less interesting.) We are replicators only as long as we copy...but when we engage, create, our relationship with language goes deeper than symbiosis. It's as much a part of us as mitichondria.

I don't think there's a cut off point. Its not a matter of this species is intelligent but this one isn't. It is a trait. This particular trait has seen greater success in our species than in other species. The primary mechanic intelligence uses is [A] the ability to come up with ideas to solve problems, and [B] the ability to pass these ideas quickly and clearly to other individuals. If we assume that some ideas spread more rapidly than others based on success, we have the basics of evolution.

It comes down to how one understands design, most people think that design can only happen top-down, while people like Dennett, Dawkings, Blackomere and etc argue also for bottom-up design. If you ask what reason have ants to build the anthills the way they do, from a top-down perspective it wont make sense, but from a bottom-up it will make sense. The same with genes and memes, they have their reasons, and it involves system theory, from simple rules comes complexity and emergence, etc...

i should say that physicist David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti described what effectively is "memetics" in their speeches well before it's modern crystallization as a science. the architecture and argument is also present in some ancient eastern religions - buddhism.

I'm not sure if I buy into the "temes" bit just yet. I haven't thought about it long enough to dismiss it, but I've always assumed the next generation of replicator would be general AI. I suppose it could be otherwise though. very interesting

@noobyfromhell, the origins are still in the Greeks. Erastothenes measured the size of the earth, distance to the sun was measured, Archimedes discoveres all sorts of things, including integrals. These are tremendous achievements. Why should I be disappointed?

Intelligence is nothing without ideas. Memetics could be an answer as to why intelligence is so successful in our species. Our ability pass on and interpret ideas through language or observation is what made our huge brains worth all the trouble of maintaining in the first place. Individuals don't have to invent things on their own. We can prosper from each others ideas. We can work together. This is inseparable from individual intelligence. History is inseparable from intelligence.

@noobyfromhell, sorry, there were no other computations available. He had nothing but the length of his measuring stick, the length of shadow it made on summer solstice and the distance from Alexandria to Sienna (now Aswan) to rely on.

The strange thing about the study of memetics is, it is a lot like the hindu idea of the ego. Ego works in reverse though as it looks for idea's to attach to itself, where memes are thought of as a virus. Understanding both is quite interesting to see how 2 different perspectives can give you a great picture of how the mind works.

Very interesting talk. I hope she expands on this in some way.

she mad this speech not for just other tedsters, but knowing others will see this... clever use of the stage. explained the prime idea and then brought her point home!!! awsome!!!

@noobyfromhell, sorry, who didn't consider experiment necessary? Aristotel? He's the founder of this approach, so he has to be excused for a lot of things. All sorts of things we now take for granted in science: Occam's razor, control of outside conditions, repeatability of experiments, etc. appeared in the Middle Ages or later.

I don't think that memes are considered invisible beings any more than genes are considered invisible beings. Both are simply information.

Kurt Vonnegut's book Galapagos.

That's the core concept, yes. As for your question, its not really that we only exist to replicate information, but that we would not even be here without the replication of information. Without genetic variation and evolution we would not exist. The consequence is that a meme's only self-interest is that of self preservation. A meme doesn't care if it ends up ultimately hurting the host, or the host's peers or offspring, as long as it gets passed to other hosts. Racism is a malevolent meme.

She watched the Terminator too many times. Meme=Interesting Teme=Bad idea Technology only replicates as we use it and innovate it - thus it is a function of meme.

And Wallace?

Brilliant theory! However, it is not technically correct to compare memes to temes. The former can replicate only with help of humans while the latter can potentially "emancipate" itself.

A meme is simply a unit of cultural inheritance that can be passed on. Yes, we don't know what happens when memes interact in individual brains, and two people hearing the same meme can get two different ideas. Similarly, in genetics, two people can receive the same gene for a specific trait but display two different phenotypes based on the other genes that they are inheriting. This is not to say that genes and memes are the same thing but that their mechanisms are at least similar.

@naturalpreservation 2) For what I gather from you the main problem is agency, I even asked you about it, but I didnt feel I got and adequate answer from you, if at all. So I ask explicitly why, in your opinion, is cybernetics incompatible with the idea of agency in memes or genes for that mater?

No, it just means choose your side. Nothing wrong with going along with technology and letting it transform our world. As long as we can keep it a gradual process so that the old meme machines i.e. humans won't be too shocked or scared by each step. Eventually, everyone alive today who's against changing the world for technology will be gone and the next generation will be that much more open and accepting to it, until one day, it becomes the new reality.

Although it may not be apparent now, I'm sure that this idea, still in its infantile developmental stage which we've dubbed memetics, is going to be one of the most mind bogglingly important scientific steps in all of history. Dolphins blowing bubble rings for play, tool use in dense orangutan populations and not in sparse populations... Memes hitch rides on other species, but we are clearly the most capable meme replicators in all of nature. Is it any wonder that culture has such wide variety?

Whether you like or not, evolutionary psychology and memetics are gathering more momentum and increasing relevance among the social sciences and there are here to stay. The explanatory models they provide were never meant to be an alternative but a complement. They provide the" why" question while, like your, social construction models provide the "how" questions. There is no competition that you should be afraid of.

@ShiftyMcSly I think it was on The Selfish Gene that Dawkins speaks of witnessing the creation of new songbird songs due to "errors" in the interpretation. These "errors" were passed from bird to bird. Thus, the bird memes are evolving. There is replication and selection in emergence. Think of fractals. The smaller levels replicate the bigger ones, or viceversa. If this replication is useful (e.g. more surface area), it is preserved by natural selection.

"each of this complex systems makes choices" I should have put choices under "", again choices implies a mind and that's not why I'm talking about. It has more to do with predispositions that can be changed according how the system reacts to variables, both external and internal changes. Again, it sums up to different point of view, top-down versus bottom up, and it implications.

@naturalpreservation. There might not be a Journal of Memetics, never cared to look for, and I dont see why there should be one. But there is a journal for Information Theory so if you take a look at the IEEE Xplore digital Library. Take a wide search for memetics, and you soon see it aint small topic, I got 100 articles, but the search only shows a maximum of 100, so it's fair to assume there are more than 100 articles related to memetics. That alone should tell you something.

That makes "Terminator' prophetic.

Empiricism itself is considered 'intersubjective verifiability' in that it doesn't pretend to be absolute truth or entirely objective... but statistically signficant with high confidence intervals.

Surveying the youtube landscape suggests to me that the Memetics Meme has not caught on like you'd think it would have? Which is puzzling.Perhaps the Memes are conspiring to keep it secret?

She introduced a new meme, Temes lol. how literal.

@Aldelirium she did actually mention that some animals do have memes, but it's really very limited. Most animals can't think about the meme's and cause variation in them, therefore they wouldn't really be considered memes because they wouldn't "evolve". I must disagree with your second point, emergence is just physical laws shaping the formation of something, there's no replication and no selection at all.

No.... we just barely know how to sense it; if we are 3rd-tier, that portion is still barely scaffolding. Never fear and never let yourself be distracted from entertainment; gravity is for art only.

I was today days old when i discovered Susan Blackmore

Nice talk. Couple of things though. Memetics also occur with other animals. For instance, the songs of birds. Meme could indeed be equivalent to idea. Genes imitate each other, and they aren't memes. Memes ang genes aren't the only replicators on this planet. You can see replication taking place in the phenomena of emergence. Snow flakes, crystals, clouds and fractals in general.

Any information! Anything you were taught, learned, saw or heard. It came from everywhere. Its a very simple concept.

There is a truly engaging concept expressed here regarding the logistics of what in essence is another means of human consciousness expressed, yet there is also a very troubling tendency which constitutes a dangerous meme in itself. In that she personifies temes as expressing their own volition (as if 'using' us for their own purposes), she is promoting the separation of responsibility from cognizance, a similar fault as misinterpreting a deistic religion (i.e. "the devil made me do it").

Bateson is highly recommandable - although difficult to read. I'm trained in psychology and what most fascinates me about Batesons work is the way his sees 'the thinking system' as not localized (f.x. in the brain) but distributed throughout the network of communication. F.x. the blind-man-with-a-stick-walking-down-the-street: where does the walking entity start: at the skin, at the end of the stick or does it also include part of the pavement? (...)

@lewisrain Probably more important for you to consider is that she says memes are both the thing copied and the mechanism of copying - she in fact insists in this video that memes are 'only that which is copied' - and then insitst that they are actually the means or mechanism of copying. Astonishingly, no one seems to recognise that this is a fallacy caused by thinking of memes as genes - which are both copied and copier. It's a schoolyard philosophy level error.

I think we are actually a Message.

It's not hard to understand what you're saying. But discussion is more interesting as a process of exploration through questions, than simply espousal of ideas. Here's a question for you: In Darwinism, people usually think traits are selected for survival effectiveness in various contexts. What would you suggest is the selection criteria for the generation of memes within the individual?

@naturalpreservation As I mentioned to you before, memetics are very new to science, even the very definition of what a meme constitute is much debated, and having no "locus" as genes have, makes them different from genes. That said, when looking at it from the perspective of information, thats what essentially genes and memes are, the analogies become obvious.

According to Dawkins, Professor Juan Delius of University Of Konstanz in Germany has written a paper on what the neuronal hardware of a meme might look like. Google "Juan Delius neuromemetics" to find the names of the papers.

Well, evolution is not the survival of the strongest but the fittest, that doesn't mean only better adapted to the environment but most importantly the better adapted for replicating, that means reproduction. And she understands that perfectly clear, as she talk about adaptation as means of better replication.

Unfortunately from what I can see, her argument cannot defeat Jaegwon Kim's Physicalist perspective. I tried to argue in my philosophy of mind class for emergent properties to explain for mental causation, but emergentism leads to a dualist perspective, as emergent properties seem to appear "out of the blue" with no physical explanation. According to physical closure, only physical properties may cause physical properties.

If you like Bateson, you should then recognize a lot of what she is talking about in Bateson's work. Bateson was way ahead of his time with is Cybernectics and system theory, if he had been alive today I would have love to hear him talk about memetics. Memetics are complex system of patterns with emergency properties, thus you shouldn't be surprised if they appear to have a "mind" of their own. Besides we are also talking about design without the aid of mind, which is still a difficult concept.

I'm not sure if you are refering to me or to lamapaj. Just to be sure: point 3 was about memes, not the evolution. And I did not wrote anything about neandarhtals being our direct ancestors. I did not wrote that evolution has any direction, quite on a contrary. Its purely accidental. My speculation was based on scientific work of couple of scientist. Their theory was not proven, but it describes process which led to inteligence in quite convincing way.

@klindred, memetics belongs to the Platonic tradition, not Aristotelian tradition of hard science. Other things from Platonic tradition: Hegelian dialectics, Freudian and Jungian psychology, Levi-Strauss's structuralism, semiotics, and even Richard Dawkins's selfish gene. I am not sure where to put Darwinism itself. Perhaps it spans across Platonic-Aristotelian division. You can call it philosophy, of course. But what does that change?

@Thimbledunk Thanks for your reply. I don't recall her saying theat memes were the means of copying. I thought the brain was the means of copying - a brain made adept at copying through "mimetic drive" (the best copiers survive, and this drives brain growth?) "Blackmore thus eliminates any effect on human behaviour, such as social, economic, political." I don't understand: her theory is all about effect on human behaviour. What do you perceive as Blackmore's ideological agenda?

I think she has it backward. She acts like memes drive us, but it is humanity that imitates, therefore creating a meme. The "information" we mimick did not jump on us, we choose to imitate for whatever crazy reason we have.

OMG wait, I figured out why you capitalized the words you did: you were looking up the basic terms at the time, and thought phrases like "Scientific Processes" and "Logical Thought" were supposed to be capitalized...

Evolution in fact requires "good enough copying" to work effectiviely. Most cultural copying is nowhere near good enough to start the process off reliably. BUT one subset is. Mechanical copying, copying of skills and expressions, has a demonstrable high level of fidelity and a likely mechanism for achieving this. Victoria Horner has shown how human infants (as opposed to chimp infants) will copy actions with high fidelity even though they are counterintuitive.

Fascinating!!!!

Was anyone else distracted by her right hand? Anyone know what happened to her? Great lecture though. I'd like to check out more from Susie.

It would be a crazy world if tigers had been selected by the replicators to become the big brain meme machines. Or maybe aardvarks, or wombats.

Perhaps everything is a meme. Ever thought of that?

Actually, Talking about the subject in question , its hard not to be so enthusiastic.

How did the 1st meme, lets say ear-rings, come about, if meme is imitation and responsible for bigger brains (capable of imagination) ? I could see how that something new and shocking , like jewelery, in early civilization could spawn/evolve a culture of jewelery wearing, since standing out in a crowd is likely to get yourself a mate, but how did it start?Is she saying that those who happened to be born with bigger brains were more likely to produce new memes?

Those who had better ideas typically survived and reproduced more than their counterparts. This created a selection towards people with better ideas. As we got smarter and smarter, our brains got bigger and bigger. And, apparently, vaginas did as well.

What happens when AI evolves faster than humans and starts competing with us in an evolutionary race to be the host to the third replicator? Sounds like a good premise for terminator 7 "the replicators".

@S2Cents Memes & genes will either be preserved or go extinct over time based on their usefulness to the replicators. It's not the other way round. Genes are useful and therefore continue to survive only because they make gene products that are useful to us. If those products don't serve us, the genes die out over time. Only genes that help the species can survive over time. This whole concept is rather circular. "We define memes thus, therefore they MUST behave as we predict."

Don't worry dude you are not the only one here who finds this fascinating. I'm from the social sciences, as you know a huge debate has been going on for a long time, the nature vs. culture debate. There was a biologist/social anthropologist named Gregory Bateson who wrote a book about the necessity of unifying nature and culture, he saw they shared some common properties, among them the propagation through stochastic processes, he was also a system theorist, way ahead of "The selfish Gene".

@Zodslayer maybe its something that becomes so ingrained it becomes part of culture....tradition i guess....

The big brain is more of a benefit than a risk. Memes did not force us to have big brains as to have one is a prerequisite to meme production.

Councillor Hamann: There is so much in this world that I do not understand. See that machine? It has something to do with recycling our water supply. I have absolutely no idea how it works. But I do understand the reason for it to work. I have absolutely no idea how you are able to do some of the things you do, but I believe there's a reason for that as well. I only hope we understand that reason before it's too late.

@Thimbledunk Yeah, I'm in the midst of a P.h.D which takes a critical stance at such theories. Its not that science isn't useful, it just has its limitations. It's kind of annoying when Blackmore and Co. try and explain something as complex as cultural transitions with an obvious lack of knowledge in the literature. Also, the idea of Memes has been around for about 60 years pre-Dawkins and it has been showed time and again by many thinkers that it is theoretically flawed (e.g. Tim Ingold)

Erm... That is not an apt anaology. In the case of "pink unicorns" there is no observed phenomenon for which it is necessary into invoke them as a possible cause of said observation. Right now the state of 'memetics' is compatible to the time before Mendel and the discovery of DNA. We know that there is a hereditary process going on just not what the unit of heredity is and the mechanics of it's operation.

I suggest that the 'meme seller' is usually a person of some perceived high status. We ape successful humans. Do we desire to be like the successful? Why do we desire that which we desire in the first place. I also suggest that language is a teme, as are alphabets. (Where will oriental ideograms be in 100 years?)

Susan Blackmore rocks.

categorisation based on cultural norms is a meme, hence the teme.

Hello there themezoom! After watching this video and your "Unmapping the Web" with all its parts. I must say the idea of "temes" is like the very equivalent of the next generation of youth in a way of its own. I greatly believe the cause of this new idea that Susan has brought up is from this day and age. Look at the year 2000, All the people whom as of now are about age +20 back then in that year. Most of them have developed depression and sociopathic behavior.

Neo: If we wanted, we could shut these machines down. Councillor Hamann: Of course... that's it. You hit it! That's control, isn't it? If we wanted, we could smash them to bits. Although if we did, we'd have to consider what would happen to our lights, our heat, our air. Neo: So we need machines and they need us. Is that your point, Councillor?

It's not hard science, because the full mechanism of requirements for hard science wasn't there. But the basic attitude and the direction is there.

I read Dawkins "Selfisch Gene" and i understood the memes, but temes... i don´t know, have to think about em.

The crowd not laughing after the second Darwin diss, an example of the human meme.

That was Tuber77's point. She contradicts herself - the beauty of Darwinism is that complexity and design can arise out of a purely blind process. At this level, replication happens passively. But cultural ideas or designs have designers, intentions. We are a social species, so we have an evolutionary orientation to culture, and that entails sharing and passing down ideas, but it falls outside of Darwinian processes. It is not explicable via Darwinian processes, because ideas are not...

Have you read her book The Meme Machine?

Correction; speech developed, because need of oxygen was promoting certain mutations which led to such construction of our breeding apparatus, that "speech" become available option. Sorry, I omited that part.

@noobyfromhell, I agree Greeks didn't do hard science. But they stand at its foundations. I guess like the ancestor of whales didn't swim in the sea, but it's still the ancestor of whales. Obviously, Greeks did experiments and developed theories from them. Erastothenes measuring the size of the earth was an experiment. Archimedes law is theory based on experiments. (cont.)

Councillor Hamann: I suppose we do, but down here sometimes I think about all those people still plugged into the Matrix and when I look at these machines, I.. I can't help thinking that in a way, we are plugged into them. Neo: But we control these machines, they don't control us. Councillor Hamann: Of course not, how could they? The idea's pure nonsense, but... it does make one wonder just... what is control?