Meme Pools, World 3, and Averroës's Vision Of
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
MEME POOLS, WORLD 3, AND AVERROËS’S VISION OF IMMORTALITY by Derek Gatherer Abstract. Dawkins’s concept of the meme pool, essentially equivalent to Popper’s World 3, is considered as an expression in modern terms for what Averroës knew as the active intellect,an immortal entity feeding into, or even creating, the passive intellect of consciousness. A means is thus provided for reconciling a materialist Darwinian view of the universe with a conception of nonpersonal immortality. The meme pool/active intellect correspondence pro- vides a strong basis for regarding science as a communal enterprise producing enrichment of the meme pool and expansion of con- sciousness. It also emphasizes the virtues of memetic conservation in relation to vanishing cultures. Keywords: Averroës; consciousness; Richard Dawkins; immortal- ity; meme pool; Karl Popper. Richard Dawkins has developed his meme concept as the philosophical basis for a militant atheism. The atheism, however, is not an inevitable consequence of the meme theory, even in its strictest form. This essay attempts to place the meme concept in a broader historical perspective and to show that it is compatible with religious belief. When set against the background of Karl Popper’s concept of World 3 and Daniel Dennett’s theory of consciousness as a virtual machine, the meme concept allows the synthesis of a philosophy of human consciousness that has many similari- ties to that of the twelfth-century C.E. Spanish Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (Latinized as Averroës). This philosophy permits a notion of immortality that does not necessarily relinquish materialism and demon- strates that acceptance of the meme concept need not necessarily lead to atheism, as Dawkins and his more zealous followers would maintain. The first step in this analysis is to unpack the meme concept. Derek Gatherer is a teacher and researcher in the School of Biomolecular Sciences, John Moores University, Liverpool L3 3AF, England. This article was written while he was a research associate of Corpus Christi College and the Department of Anatomy, University of Cambridge, England. Support was provided by the Medical Research Council of Great Britain. [Zygon, vol. 33, no. 2 (June 1998).] © 1998 by the Joint Publication of Board of Zygon. ISSN 0591-2385 203 204 Zygon THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE MEME The idea that human culture evolves in a manner analogous to biological evolution is not a new one, having been touched upon by Charles Darwin in 1859 as an aside in The Origin of Species (Darwin [1859] 1985, 406), but this understanding was largely supplanted by Marxist dialectical approaches in the early part of the twentieth century. The analogy between biological and cultural evolution was revived by Peter Medawar, among others, in the 1950s and received a major boost with Dawkins’s Selfish Gene (Medawar 1959; Dawkins 1976). Dawkins’s ideas on the evolution of culture are outlined in the final chapter of the above work, in which he presses the analogy to the point of coining a new term for the unit of selection in culture, the meme, deliber- ately similar to gene. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Marcus Feldman, and col- laborators were already using the term culturgen in a similar but more cautious approach to the same topic (reviewed in Cavalli-Sforza and Feld- man 1981; Cavalli-Sforza 1986), but Dawkins’s meme concept openly invited direct transposition of the terminology of evolutionary genetics to cultural studies, including religion. In keeping with Dawkins’s gene- centered approach to biology, the meme-centered approach to culture is totally reductionist and concentrates on the transmission and selection of individual memes. Dawkins’s definition of meme is somewhat laconic. He considers it sim- ply an informational replicator within the brain, just as the gene is a repli- cator within the genome. He does, however, give an extensive list of examples, including tunes, ideas, catchphrases, fashions in clothes, and ways of making pots or building arches. The last three of these are the standard material of cultural studies, but the first three indicate a poten- tially more atomistic approach. What these diverse entities have in com- mon is that they are transmitted from brain to brain by communication, verbal, literary, or otherwise, and can change and reshuffle components; in genetic terminology they can mutate or recombine in the process. That much may be granted, but the difference between a simple logical propo- sition and a complete belief system is obvious enough to make one won- der if the meme concept is precise enough to be of value. In order to resolve this difficulty, it is necessary to examine the genetic analogy in more detail. THE MEME AND THE LEVEL OF SELECTION Before we conclude that the meme is a vague mirage that disappears when we inspect it more closely, it is worth recalling that the gene is equally elu- sive at close quarters. The classical “beanbag” genetics of Mendel has long since been superseded by the more flexible approach of molecular biology. Derek Gatherer 205 The modern concept of the gene is of a string of nucleotides of highly variable length and frequently indeterminate boundaries, at least when promoter and enhancer regions are considered. Nevertheless, the aban- donment of the gene as an indivisible and well-defined entity has cer- tainly not rendered classical beanbag genetics invalid. Individual nucleotides are the units of mutation, but the gene is still the best approximation to the unit of function. Thus, the use of the gene/meme analogy does not require that the meme be absolutely defined in terms of either its form or its informational content. Memes with low informa- tional content, such as simple propositions, may be considered analogous to nucleotides. At the other extreme, large integrated complexes of memes, such as religions, are analogous to genomes. This hierarchical structuring of the meme concept strengthens the analogy between genes and memes and allows us to proceed to a consideration of memetic evolu- tion. Like genes, memes propagate within a population either because they enhance the survival of those that carry them or because their capac- ity to replicate is so great that they are able to escape from this requirement. SELFISH MEMES Selfish memes constitute Dawkins’s most famous development of his meme concept. Dawkins conjectures that memes, like genes, may be self- ish, in the sense that they may spread by containing features that promote their replication rather than by having any truth-value or even any benefi- cial effect on the fitness of those that carry them. Dawkins posits that such selfish memes may be regarded as mind viruses (Dawkins 1993), sin- gling out religious memes for special consideration as such. This anti- religious position has some similarities to Karl Marx’s notion of religion as the opium of the people, but whereas Marx’s opium may have contributed some selective advantage to those who carried it by virtue of being a psy- chological crutch or motivating agent (“the heart of a heartless world.... the spirit of spiritless conditions” [Marx (1844) 1975, 244]), or advanta- geous to some ruling class as a means of keeping the lower orders happy, Dawkins sees religious memes as being maladaptive to those that carry them and to society as a whole but highly self-perpetuating owing to their efficiency of transmission and resistance to replacement by other memes. A memetic view of culture might therefore appear to be fundamentally incompatible with religion, and Dawkins would insist that this is the case. In order to begin subverting this view, it is first necessary to consider the tradition in which Dawkins’s criticism is situated. 206 Zygon ACRITIQUE OF MIND VIROLOGY AND ITS PLACE IN ENGLISH RATIONALIST ATHEISM Dawkins’s (1993) views on religion have a flavor that is distinctively Eng- lish. Unlike Continental atheists, who either, like Marx or Freud, wish to replace religion with equally elaborate belief systems or, like Nietzsche, seek to appeal to irrationality or pagan religious impulses, the English tra- dition in atheism generally purports to dispense absolutely with religion in order that reason and science may be given a clearer, less superstitious, and more luminous environment in which to flourish. Alister McGrath (1994, 449), drawing on the sociological work of Anthony Giddens, refers to four elements of religion that are frequently attacked by its oppo- nents, namely, (a) monotheism, (b) moral prescriptions, (c) explanation of the world, and (d) supernatural events. Dawkins’s argument would seem to be that mind virus components account for aspects (b), (c), and (d). The inherent gullibility of human beings, coupled with their desire for consolation, leads them to believe in irrational supernatural ideas. These ideas include the stipulation that the believer should spread the ideas to new hosts, who in turn receive their childish comfort in return for assis- tance in proselytization. This is the principal means by which the mind virus spreads rapidly from host to host. Several flaws may be identified in this argument. First, it relies on an assumption that religious experience is merely a comfort device, designed to reassure the believer. Even a cursory examination of any number of theologians would demonstrate that religion is frequently as unnerving as it is comforting—for example, Martin Luther, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and so forth. Second, it suggests that religious believers, and that includes those who are scientists, are in some way lacking in the ability to distinguish rational sense from superstitious nonsense. Third, it neglects the mind virus–like nature of the mind virus concept itself. And fourth, many modern theologians conceive of religion without any of the compo- nents (b), (c), or (d) referred to above. The third point requires a little elaboration.