Definitions of a Meme

Pre-paradigmatic

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (7th c. BCE?)

‘Yâgñavalkya replied: ‘Your Majesty, speech itself (is knowledge). For through speech, Your Majesty, a friend is known (to be a friend), and likewise the Rig-Veda, Yagur-veda, Sâma-veda, the Atharvâṭgirasas, the Itihâsa (tradition), Purâna-vidyâ (knowledge of the past), the Upanishads, Slokas (verses), Sûtras (rules), Anuvyâkhyânas and Vyâkhyânas (commentaries1254, &c.); what is sacrificed, what is poured out, what is (to be) eaten and drunk, this world and the other world, and all creatures. By speech alone, Your Majesty, Brahman is known, speech indeed, O King, is the Highest Brahman. Speech does not desert him who worships that (Brahman) with such knowledge, all creatures approach him, and having become a god, he goes to the gods.’’

Katha-Upanishad (5th c. BCE?)

15. Yama said: ‘That word (or place) which all the Vedas record, which all penances proclaim, which men desire when they live as religious students, that word I tell thee briefly, it is Om.’

16. ‘That (imperishable) syllable means Brahman, that syllable means the highest (Brahman); he who knows that syllable, whatever he desires, is his.’

The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin (1871)

Through his powers of intellect, articulate language has been evolved; and on this his wonderful advancement has mainly depended.

…

It deserves notice that as soon as the progenitors of man became social (and this probably occurred at a very early period), the advancement of the intellectual faculties will have been aided and modified in an important manner, of which we see only traces in the lower animals, namely, through the principle of imitation, together with reason and experience.

…

A great stride in the development of the intellect will have followed, as soon as, through a previous considerable advance, the half-art and half-instinct of language came into use; for the continued use of language will have reacted on the brain, and produced an inherited effect; and this again will have reacted on the improvement of language. The large size of the brain in man, in comparison with that of the lower animals, relatively to the size of their bodies, may be attributed in chief part ... to the early use of some simple form of language,—that wonderful engine which affixes signs to all of objects and qualities, and excites trains of thought which would never arise from the mere impression of the senses ... The higher intellectual powers of man, such as those of ratiocination, abstraction, selfconsciousness, &c., will have followed from the continued improvement of other mental faculties

The Vision of the Past, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1922)

what we now propose is to regard the thinking envelope of the biosphere as of the same order of zoological [magnitude] as the biosphere itself. … And this amounts to imagining, in one way or another, above the animal biosphere a human sphere, the sphere of reflexion, of conscious invention, of the conscious unity of souls (the Noosphere, if you will) and to conceiving, at the origin of this new entity, a phenomenon of special transformation

Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Jung (1954)

Jung, while obviously writing extensively on Egregores, downplays the role of language, preferring ‘images’. (“Indeed, language itself is only an image.”)

Primitive tribal lore is concerned with archetypes that have been modified in a special way. They are no longer contents of the unconscious, but have already been changed into conscious formulae taught according to tradition, generally in the form of esoteric teaching. This last is a typical means of expression for the transmission of collective contents

in a footnote he is more explicit:

Hubert and Mauss (Mélanges d’histoire des religions, preface, p. xxix) call these a priori thought-forms “categories,” presumably with reference to Kant: “They exist ordinarily as habits which govern consciousness, but are themselves unconscious.” The authors conjecture that the primordial images are conditioned by language. This conjecture may be correct in certain cases, but in general it is contradicted by the fact that a great many archetypal images and associations are brought to light by dream psychology and psychopathology which would be absolutely incommunicable through language.

The Ticket that Exploded, William Burroughs (1962)

Word is an organism. The presence of the "Other Half” a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. … From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. … The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.

On the Origin and Evolution of Human Culture, Harold Blum (1963)

To aid in the following discussion I shall introduce the term mnemotype to describe the personal collection of memory images in a single brain. This will correspond to the accepted use of the term genotype to describe the genetic make-up of a single individual of a species

…

it seems necessary to assume that the information determining the cultural pattern of a society resides in the brains of its members where it is stored as personal sets of memory images, or mnemotypes. Storage of information may, of course, be supplemented by such devices as the written word or pictorial representation, but these operate through memory images in individual brains. Mnemotypes will differ among members of the society; but since the memory images belonging to one person are, for the most part, acquired from other members of his society, there must be rather close resemblance. Greater similarity is to be expected among closely associated members, as in families and clans, than within the society as a whole; but nevertheless, one may imagine a given society to be describable in terms of a population of mnemotypes distributed around a mean with few extreme deviations. Such a population I shall refer to as a collective mnemotype. The overt behavior of the individual members of the society will be determined by their individual mnemotypes; the behavior of the society as a whole by the collective mnemotype. We may distinguish conceptually between societies, and between groups within societies, in terms of their collective mnemotypes; and we may think of human society as a whole in terms of a collective mnemotype which is a composite of those of all existing societies. This treatment parallels the description of a biological species in terms of a population of genotypes and their corresponding phenotypes, but the two things are, of course, very different.

Cultural evolution of a society would seem to be based on changes in the collective mnemotype, innovations coming through changes in the individual mnemotypes which compose it. New memory images could arise from new experiences related to the outside world, or from modification and merging during storage or in transfer between members of the society. Addition of new memory images together with new combinations of the old would result in a constantly changing collective mnemotype, which we may picture in a dynamic, near steady-state comparable to that of the genotype distribution of a biological species, but much more fluid.

Science and the New Humanism, Hoagland (1964)

Henry A. Murray (1) has coined the term idene in relation to social evolution as an analog to gene in biological evolution. We know that most genetic mutations are lethal and harmful; a very few constitute the basis of biological progress by appearing at a time when the environment happens to confer an advantage on the organism possessing that mutation. There is environmental selectivity to favor not only the rare gene mutation responsible for biological progress, but also social environ- mental selectivity to favor new ideas contributing to social progress. Like mutant genes, an idea may be before its time-that is, the social climate may not be right for its acceptance.

Many ideas are harmful and may even be lethal to the individual and to a society, especially when they become institutionalized.

Is Scientific Ethology Possible? Cloak (1975)

If we investigate this ambiguous usage, we fingd that what can be called the i-culture [ed: meme] of a people is the set of cultural instructions they carry in their central nervous systems. The m-culture [ed: extended phenotype] of the people encompasses the material structures, relationships among material structures, and changes in these relationships which are actually brought about or maintained by behaviors of those cultural instructions. Features of a people's m-culture thus include features of their behavior, their technology, and their social organization (and their ideology when considered as a set of verbal behaviors).

It is curious that while the elements of i-culture are tiny, unrelated snippets, acquired and stored in a rather helter-skelter fashion like a genotype, the behavioral outcomes of those elements, the features of m-culture, often exhibit a high level of orderliness, pattern, functional integration, etc., like a phenotype.

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The outcomes of the i-culture-m-culture interactions can be summarized thus: An i-culture builds and operates m-culture features whose ultimate function is to provide for the maintenance and propagation of the i-culture in a certain environment. And the m-culture features, in turn, environmentally affect the composition of the i-culture so as to maintain or increase their own capabilities for performing that function. As a result, each m-culture feature is shaped for its particular functions in that environment.

After certain specific kinds of m-culture features become common through repeated performance of their functions, we can begin correctly to say that m-culture features of that kind have their specific shape in order to perform their particular functions, and that they perform them in order to accomplish their universal ultimate function. They are teleonomie structures (Monod, 1971).

We can assign the term "ultimate" function to the maintenance and propagation of the i-culture because cultural instructions, through their behaviors, determine the specific shape or fine structure both of m-culture features and of their own replicas.

In other words, even if all the m-culture features of a certain kind were wiped out, a single set of the appropriate cultural instructions could reconstruct and repropagate them. But, if all those sets of cultural instructions were wiped out, the m-culture features could not ordinarily reconstruct them or replace themselves, and would also become extinct. So the ultimate function of both an i-culture and an m-culture is the maintenance and propagation of the i-culture.

Memetics (1976-)

The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins (1976)

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

Analytical Anrchaeology, David Clark (1978)

Analysis would seem to show that artefact-types are conceived in terms of detailed sets of similarities between numbers of artefacts such that the degree of similarity between artefacts within the type group is greater than any similarity between artefacts in separate type groups. One can imagine a similarity gradient falling-off exponentially towards yet other groups of internally similar type groups. Evidently the boundary between type clusters conceived in this way will be rather arbitrary in precise location. Furthermore, the type concept seems to express some relationship linking a population of artefacts with a structured or patterned population of attributes.

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To return to the immediate problem, we appear to have accumulated a certain amount of data about the necessary properties of an archaeological artefact-type. So far it has been noted that artefacts are defined by their component clusters of attributes. These attributes are of all kinds and states, reflecting aspects of raw material, shape, size, detail, and location of detail. We are now concerned not with the static phase pattern of a single attribute with in a population but with the clusters of tens or hundreds of different attributes that integrate to define artefacts as complete entities. It would seem that artefact-types are populations of artefacts that are richly cross-connected amongst themselves in terms of affinity between their sets of attributes. The artefact-type cluster represents a comprehensive population of arte­facts internally bound by a high level of similarity between the individual sets of attributes, even though these sets may share attributes with other type clusters and even though the artefacts with in the population vary amongst themselves within a polythetic pattern.

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The outcome of these speculations suggests that an artefact-type has a reality which resides in a highly correlated inner core of attributes with in an outer group of attributes of decreasing levels of correlation. Each type may be represented by a nucleus cluster and its penumbra although closely related types will in evitably share attributes in their constellation shells whilst retaining distinctive and peculiar nucleus clusters and overall correlation stru cturing. In an analysis of the relationships between several different but related type populations it is the arrangement and interval between the constellations that express the interrelation between the artefact-types.

[The analysis in this book is particularly detailed with lots of pictures, and is presented in language that will map well to the continuous landscapes of brain-states and latent spaces. I’m going to copy a bunch more material from this book below, about the definition and dynamics of these artefact-types, as this is the best material I have seen so far for a basis of analytical memetics.]

At this point some attempt may be made to gather together the general information about the artefact-type concept as an entity.

(1) Artefacts belong at one and the same time to three broad categories or intersecting sets - to a type group, a specific type, and a subtype.

(2) Type group - the artefact-type group or family; a group of affinally related, collateral artefact-types characterized by a common component subset of attributes which define a complex constraining functional usage and raw material. A low-level affinity, perhaps less than 30 per cent, uniting the group as a whole.

(3) Type - specific artefact-type; an homogeneous population of artefacts which share a consistently recurrent range of attribute states within a given polythetic set. No two artefacts within the type need be exactly alike in any single attribute and no artefact need possess all of the attributes in the set - an intermediate-level affinity or perhaps 30-60 per cent uniting the population as a whole.

(4) Subtype - artefact subtype or variant; an homogeneous sub­population of artefacts which share a given subset within an artefact-type’s polythetic set of attributes. A sub-population with a high-level of affinity, perhaps 60-90 per cent, uniting the individuals within the whole.

(5) The artefact-type can be represented in terms of a nucleated constellation of attributes defining the polythetic set and arranged in terms of their correlation one with another in multidim ensional space.

(6) The artefact subtype populations should be represented as secondary nuclei or clusters of highly correlated attributes within the overall constellation of the artefact-type.

(7) The presence of several distinct artefact-type populations within a sample population should be represented by multiple and separate nuclei within the overall galaxy of attributes.

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In the dynamic model the nucleated constellation of attributes is continuously changing. New attributes join the system, old ones leave; attributes move from outer correlation shells into positions with in the nuclei; new secondary nuclei slowly emerge as correlated attribute complexes and former secondary nuclei defining innovating subtypes with in the type may move into central prominence as the modal type expression. Although the cosmological analogy is imm ediately apparent, it is the quite real and measurable intercorrelation of the attributes within the population which give the model this dimensional quality. The model that we shall now investigate for timetrajectory regularities is therefore the system ‘behaviour’ of the clusters of correlated attributes and their changing levels of intercorrelation.

Thus, the termination of an artefact-type system can take place in three ways:

(1) Transformation. The successive introduction of new attributes or attribute states to form a cumulatively new artefact format; simultaneously accompanied by the gradual loss of the key attribute syntax by the reverse process of directive correlation. If this transformation is severe and the threshold of the key format broken, then the transform may constitute a ‘new’ type. If the transformation remains within the key format threshold - then we have simply a new type-state or variant.

(2) Displacement. The physical displacement of one artefact-type from an assemblage or locus and its replacement by a new alternative - the outcome of competitive disjunction or equivocation.

(3) Cessation. The termination of the production of an artefact-type - its complete discontinuation without replacement, usually on grounds of redundancy.

[I could go on.]

Genes, Mind and Culture, Wilson and Lumsden (1981)

a culturgen is a relatively homogeneous set of artifacts, behaviors, or mentifacts (mental constructs having little or no direct correspondence with reality) that either share without exception one or more attribute states selected for their functional importance or at least share a consistently recurrent range of such attribute states within a given polythetic set.

[TODO: journal of ideas, journal of memetics]

Units, Events and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution, Aaron Lynch (1998)

MEME

A memory item, or portion of an organism's neurally-stored information, identified using the abstraction system of the observer, whose instantiation depended critically on causation by prior instantiation of the same memory item in one or more other organisms' nervous systems. ("Sameness" of memory items is determined with respect to the above-mentioned abstraction system of the observer.)

[TODO: feed this all into gpt4 and ask about parallels from neuroscience]

[TODO: feed this all into gpt4 and ask about parallels from ML]