Quote:
I read this quote again today
"We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. . . . We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."
Dawkins is to be admired for coming up with the formulation of Memetics; but he missed the point with this comment.
Your memes allow you to think that it is possible for you to rebel. But that may be an illusion; it's like the fallacy that what man does is fundamentally opposed to nature. It creates an adversarial relation between us (men) and nature. But since we are part of nature too, nothing we do is really opposed to it. It is as possible that we are merely carrying out what nature programmed us to do.
There's a kind of hard determinism emerging from these comments; but what I am trying to say is that we may only believe we should have an adversarial relation with 'our' memes because memes allow us, or even intend us to have one.
We don't have memes; the memes have us.
I have this suspicion that our belief in free-will and consciousness will be revised sustantially from our current formulation once more research is done along these lines.
I hear the screams of protest; but let me illustrate with an analogy.
Galileo was nearly burnt at the stake for challenging a consus view that the sun revolved around the earth. It seemed such a natural and obvious phenomenon; easily accesable to anyone with eyes. It became a doctrine which illustrated the importance (meaning) of what it was to be human (the chosen of God). It was an important element in the morality of its time.
But it was also wrong.
Currently the idea of free will is crucial in our society because it supports our legal structure and our ideas of personal responsability. But the possibility exists that it may be flat out wrong.
Just because something seems intuitively obvious does not necessarily make it right. In fact most good science is usually when we discover something that intially seems counter-intuitive.
Any comments?
Original comments by SomaSteve
