To be or not to be - that is the meme

A short version of my reply to Ted's Daniel Dennett Breaks the Spell, (over at http://paintingfakes.blogspot.com/), could be as follows:

No explanation, memetic or otherwise, is about to threaten religious thought. The common element of all religious thought is that certain concepts or premises do not admit scrutiny - you just accept them. You either allow yourself to think that some concepts are inscrutable or you don't and this determines whether you are religious.

Thus, explaining how these inscrutable thoughts arise, or having cold evidence to prove they are the product of a brain and a meme, does not threaten the thoughts themselves. It simply enlightens the thinker as to how the thoughts come into existence. This enlightenment may threaten the thinkers presumptions about the origin of their religious thoughts - not divine, but human - and lead to the thinker to reject religion, but only if they are ready to reject faith as a mode of explanation.

A fuller repost to Ted's blog is below. It is long.

There was a nice cosmic coincidence between the prediction of the exact day of the Rapture, the event where a vengeful God is supposed to swoop upon the earth, gather up the faithful and then punish the unfaithful with a catalogue of atrocities, and Ted's 'atheist-slapping' piece over at his blog at http://paintingfakes.blogspot.com/. Ted reminds us that generalisations are dangerous devices, often effective in boggling the minds of the masses, but not fair in a reasoned sense and therefore largely inadmissible in reasoned debate.

Loonies like Harold Camping remind me that Christians (and most religious people) cannot be simply lumped together. Amongst the Rapturists there are two broad categories of belief - those who believe the date can be predicted and those who believe it cannot. There is also two schools of thought amongst Rapturists along a different dimension - those who believe God will actively avenge the believers for the persecution they have suffered and those who believe that unbelievers are largely left to their own 'sinful' devices, punishment enough.

Of course, there is also a large proportion of Christians who are not Rapturists at all. As Ted so eloquently explained in Jesus Preaches In Nazareth, (http://paintingfakes.blogspot.com/2011/05/jesus-preaches-in-nazareth.html), an exposition on a part of the Gospel of Luke, those Christians who have an expectation of a vengeful God bear a close resemblance to those Jews who supposedly rejected Jesus at Nazareth because he didn't fill the die of avenger, conveniently slaughtering the enemies that oppressed them. Many Christians would see the central message of Christianity being the forgiving of enemies and the salvation of all. Rapture stories get short shrift from these Christians. I'm guessing Ted is amongst them.

It is always difficult to criticise a group, such as Christians, in a way that does not bring an illogical device, such as a generalisation, to bear upon the topic. It is patently clear that, in recent history, the Catholic Church has harboured and protected paedophiles and the current Pope is implicated in cover-ups. However, this does not make Catholics, many of whom I consider good friends, advocates of paedophilia. In criticising the Church, we risk criticising those who reject utterly many of its teachings and practices.

This, I think, is a central premise to understanding religion and its history. One must seriously question whether Constantine becomes a Christian through a mystical spiritual conversion or a canny, somewhat cynical, pragmatic political action.

Generalisations must be used with multiple caveats and qualifications. There is no excuse for lack of qualification because our language is so well adapted to it (in a way that many other languages are not). As a simple example, (somewhat tangential and forgive the convolution if you can), consider the sentence:

"The police found the body in a ditch."

This is an accurate sentence but barely qualified. It contains generalisations (noun - police, verb - found) and a specific reference (body). Both could easily be qualified without exhausting the reader and to provide much more information for the reader to generate a reasonable impression of the event. For example, the sentence could qualify the noun 'police' by acknowledging the extent of the search required to find the body.

"The police from several stations in the Oakey area found the body in a ditch."

Alternatively, the extent of the search could be qualified in a clause that refers to and qualifies the verb:

"After an exhaustive search of the waterways around Oakey, the police found the body in a ditch."

Likewise, 'the body' can be qualified.

"The police found the badly decomposed body of a white man in his early sixties in a ditch."

The point of this diversion is to show how easily generalisations can be qualified without significant burden to the reader. Writers who do not bother to qualify generalisations are just lazy.

Thence to generalisations about Christians. If we criticise Christians with heavy qualification we do not risk the deductive error that generalisation so readily admits. So, I may confidently state the all Christians believe in God, but I must admit that or qualify that Christians have a myriad of beliefs in that area of faith alone. So, where can any generalised criticism be admitted without falling into a logical hole?

By making statement which actually are true about all Christians. Christians who are simultaneously atheists are a quirky anomaly which don't disprove the generalisation, only show that some people are very confused. In that we can identify a belief in God as central to Christianity, a criticism of that belief is aimed squarely at all Christians, of all denominations, and is aimed fairly.

Generalisations about Rapturism in Christianity are not fair to apply to all Christians, since not all Christians are Rapturists. Thus, the measure of a generalisation is fairness and truth.
Thence to Dennet et al. Are the 'new atheists' fair in their depiction of Christianity? In the minds of many, myself and Ted included, they are not.

However, I come to this from a completely different angle than Ted. Ted refers to what is now a growing (logical) fallacy amongst Christians - that criticism of something should be precluded, rejected or disregarded if (a) the critic has not studied the subject to an extent acceptable to the reader and (b) from the inside. But, the ill-informed critic is not wrong; they just have a higher likelihood of being shown to be wrong.

I can judge a schizophrenic person, on casual acquaintance, to be dangerous, based on observed behaviour I consider to be dangerous. I may be right - un-medicated and in certain contexts, the person with mental illness may be dangerous, but I am probably going to be shown to be wrong by further investigation. Certainly, I don't have to be a schizophrenic to either be able to have an opinion on the illness or to make a true observation of it. I just might have a more complete insight from inside.

We should only reject Dennet's arguments about Christianity or religion if they can be shown to be wrong on further investigation or they do not follow logic, not on the premise of the extent of Dennet's knowledge or study of religion or his insider's insight. To exclude Dennet's arguments on this premise is a classic fallacy of argumentation.

Interestingly and somewhat ironically, the opinions of Dawkins and the so-called (and poorly labelled) 'new atheists' are premised heavily on the statements, stories and insights of believers and ex-believers. I guess the moral of the story is 'don't listen to Christians when they tell you what Christianity is all about".

Which leads me to my criticism of Dennet, Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris - they all appear to assume that Christians (and other religious folk) actually know what they believe and, further, actually follow their beliefs into action. They also see a coherence in religious thought which is patently wrong - witness the plethora of mini-denominations in any culture. Sometimes religion can be more accurately characterised as weak amalgam of individual revelations than a coherent system of thought.

Unlike Ted, I think it is a dangerous assumption to think that Jesus, the Bible or Christendom actually shapes the thoughts and actions of' loopies' like Camping. Given that humans have an uncanny knack of acting completely contrary to their professed beliefs, whatever the character of the belief (often not religious), there is no substantial reason to think religion is any different.

It is just as likely that religion is a product of a particular shaped brain given to self-delusion (or more accurately, a brain given to hiding its function and thoughts from its host) as it is an independent virus parasitically working on the brain to modify its behaviour. Or just as likely that a 'belief' meme interacts with a brain already primed for self-unaware-ness, producing behaviour that favours the replication of the meme (such as evangelising) over the host. We must, to be fair, entertain at least 4 hypotheses:

1. Brains are completely self-aware and memes just don't exist
2. Brains are not self-aware and permit thoughts that do not come to awareness but do express in behaviour
3. Brains are not self-aware and permit thoughts (that do not come to awareness) to govern behaviour, contrary to conscious intention.
4. Brains are not self-aware and permit thoughts (that do not come to awareness) to govern behaviour opportunistically, until the host becomes aware and changes their behaviour consciously.

Ted skates perilously close to another fallacy of argumentation - disagreement on the premise of incredulity (that isn't true because I can't believe it would be true). Our discomfort with the idea that we may be being manipulated in our mind by independent agents does not disprove the notion.

Only if we can conclusively prove the opposite - that we and we alone, in our mind, control our thoughts and actions, completely aware, are we in a position to argue against this proposition. Unfortunately, an awful lot of research seems to point to humans not being the masters of their own thinking and even crude party tricks convince us of how easily we are duped. While I may be introspectively aware of what I am thinking, this does not preclude in-mind agents acting unawares.

Which leads me to pondering such agents, the possibility of their existence and their mode of operation.

In our post-rapture world, where all the gullible Christians are now fleeced of their money and feeling pretty silly, we can reflect on how the world works. No-one can quite deny that the loony evangelists were effective. They took to vehicles proclaiming the exact date of the Rapture and sold it to the American public. The notion went viral. Most of my students asked me earnestly what I was going to do before the end of the world.

Such a phenomena begs not only attention and derision - it must actually have an objective premise. But what? Is Camping simply a crackpot and that's enough said? But how do we account then for the ease at which his absurd idea was accepted and spread? Christians dived in on multiple forums to correct his prediction or to remind him that "we don't know when it will occur".

So, this is not something that can just be dismissed as the lunatic fringe. Something in the human psyche accepts doomsday predictions and awards those who create and propagate them with great attention and/or pleasure. Furthermore, somehow these ideas propagate without recognisable conscious human agency.

Authorship is one of those badly understood concepts. The self-organising nature of development serves genes well. Genes are not directed; they provide a propensity. There are no gene authors. There is no reason to believe memes are otherwise. Songs only have authorship in the sense of having what might be called an original ancestors.

We are not born composing. We learn it by exposure to music, some of which resonates. The resonating music can reform itself into what appears to be an 'original'. But how many songs using the eastern pentatonic scale suddenly arise in New Orleans? Our authorship is constrained by those meme to which we have access. Even our preference for music is influenced in this same way.

Its largely irrelevant, in one sense, if you call this a 'cultural phenomena' or a 'meme' - in either case, a physical medium is required and not just any old medium. No loony Rapture prediction ever got propagated by elephants whispering, or the wind blowing over the Sahara. This is distinctly human. And distinctly viral. It is an idea reproduced largely for its own persistence. The fleeced Christians do not benefit.

It is, however, somewhat lame to simply label something as a 'cultural phenomena', as if that were enough to explain how it works. Likewise, to be content to simply state that the 'mind is mysterious' is likewise impotent. On what grounds should we simply be content to accept that the subjective outcomes of the workings of the mind are impenetrable? Robinson (http://paintingfakes.blogspot.com/2011/05/absence-of-mind.html) would have us abandon the quest to know because we might fall into a trap of reductionism. I smell a rat. She doesn't want culture 'reduced' because it might threaten a religious thought she accepts as inscrutable.

There is another, well understood, idea replicant. Its called a gene. Genes are pure information. They 'persuade' their context to create an environment where they are reproduced. Genetic replication is well understood at, well, a genetic level. Cultural and psychological behaviours determined by genes are less well understood. Developmental genetics (how genes influence development) is a work in progress. The quantum machinery of replication seems to be problematic (New Scientist).

Now, because something is less well understood does not mean it is actually less credible. If this were the case, Darwin would have abandoned evolution on the basis that he didn't understand the DNA mechanism for it. An awful lot of science is understood first at a more superficial level, still very useful, before the underlying mechanism is known. Without such science, electricity, atomic physic and medicine, to mention a few, would not have developed.

So, rejecting memetics because it is in its infancy is a little foolish. We know little about the depths of our oceans, but we do not reject a little knowledge and understanding because there is more to be found. Is Steven Hawkings delusional because he guesses at the atmosphere of Europa (ice covering water) because exploration has not yet given a conclusive answer about its atmosphere when compared to understanding of the Earth's atmosphere? Memetics can't be lined up with genetics and 'marked down' and 'failed' because it is the less developed theory. That's neither logical or fair.

Not that the possible underlying mechanisms for memetics are not understood to some extent. Psychological study can map what the brain is doing; behavioural psychology has a fairly good understanding of how our minds develop and respond to stimuli. Linguistics does a good job of mapping historical development and evolution of languages. Unfortunately, the research to pull everything together hasn't quite happened.

Memetics has already been studied extensively, in one sense, in linguistics, but the gene model has not been applied because linguistics has been fixated with semantic, syntactic, graphophonic or vocal systems and really haven't worked very hard at understanding the replicating 'hardware' and its relationship to language. Or rather, that relationship is proving to be a 'thorny' study.

The replication of words (signifying ideas) has always been assumed to be a 'cultural phenomena' (as if this really meant anything). The 'culturalists' like Robinson are not unhappy for the mechanism to be vague because they keeps it out of the hands of grubby scientists - scientists who seem hell-bent on reducing the affective impact of a Shakespearean sonnet by giving you understanding of how its words react with your brain. Its the standard objection to science - reduction (miraculously) disengages my affective domain and turns me into a machine. Yes, I get that. Understanding that "to be" is a verb destroys my enjoyment of "to be or not to be". To coin a cliche - what bullshit!

When we actually discover the replicative mechanism for ideas - we have a Watson and Crick DNA moment - we will have something powerful indeed. Meanwhile, we need to describe how the replication works without such revelation, profoundly provisional as that might be. Next year, a Watson and Crick team will contradict us for sure.

Before I explicate further my view on memes and therefore Dennet's hypothesis, another aside into logic.

'Analogy', strictly speaking, means a comparison between two things - a source and a target. Neils Bohr used an analogy, in describing electron orbits, of the solar system. Analogies often position the target is an inadequate, incomplete or essentially flawed description or explanation of the source. The structure of the solar system is easily understood. Hence, the comparison helps to understand electron orbits but not, fully, the behaviour of electrons.

Analogies are often used to teach a concept. To say that something is an analogy often becomes synonymous with saying that the target is not true or that it is not real. It can be used to disparage an idea because the target is considered only a sort of 'ghost' of the real thing.
An analogy breaks down as the comparison weakens. However, two things may be analogous without one thing being considered 'superior' to another. For example, wings of insects and birds have an analogous function, but are evolved completely differently and have different structures. The significant feature in the comparison is the analogous, not insignificant, details. Neither concept, because they are the same, are less true or credible or complete than the other. Analogy can be used simply to describe how two systems or objects have a feature in common that is critical to the system or object.

I fear that Ted may be using analogy in its disparaging form - this isn't true because its 'just an analogy'. Dennet's analogy lacks substance because it sort of 'copies' something well understood but has no substance of its own (my take on Ted's words, but do read them again to see if this is a fair take).

Memes are analogous to genes not just because genes are a way of understanding memes. A meme describes a concept that self-replicates independently (details of how unknown). But the comparison is made not just for better understanding of one concept but because there is a similarity between observed phenomena of genes and memes.

We observe radio waves passing from transmitter to receiver without a medium and waves in an ocean passing from transmitter to receiver through the movement of a medium. An ocean wave is not 'untrue' or feeble conceptually because it is an analogy of a radio wave or vice versa - they have common features which we label 'wave'.

Memes and genes have common features in 'self-replication serving their own persistence'. A gene encodes information in protein chains; a meme encodes information in language, art, dance - in culture.

Rejecting memes as an explanation of culture is akin to standing in the 19th century and closing the door on genetics because it does not yet have enough evidence or conceptual scaffolding to support it. We must keep our minds more open, especially as we have history to remind us of such folly. We have the wisdom of retrospection and we should use it.

But I digress.

The relationship between language and the 'platform' on which it is generated is not crudely mechanistic. There is a complexity that is chaotic - elements interact with feedback loops to cause the final outcome to appear to be somewhat unrelated to the underlying mechanism.

None-the-less, language requires a mechanism and it can be understood. There is a limit to the length of words and sentences, governed by the power of the brain to both discriminate and remember. The mouth can only produce a certain set of sounds, especially in combination.
To recognise the complexity of language and the difficulty in 'unpacking' it does not preclude the notion that it has a mechanism that drives it. Describing the mechanism is going to be, necessarily, a simplification that is inadequate.

Criticising 'memes' as a mechanism is not particularly sensible, since the meme model must necessarily dispense with some of the complexity it describes in order to be accessible to our understanding.

There is no particular reason to believe that religion is less susceptible to cultural transmission, riding on a similar platform as language, than language or any other cultural expression.
I do wonder whether, if Dennet were describing the insidious rise of Fascism as an ideology in the 20th century via memetic means, Ted and other Christians might not find his thesis more palatable. Its easier to accept criticism of an ideology that you oppose. Studies of Hitlerian propaganda shown deliberate use of iconic elements of German thought of the era - appeal to fear of 'alien' elements amongst us, appropriation of the 'wholesome German woman' as an central figure, stark imagery of a 'strong' Germany.

Understanding these as simply the product of 'addled minds' does little to explain the universal acceptance and championing of the Nazis - memetics goes some way to identifying both the possibility of all humans being susceptible to these ideas and the clustering of these ideas within a nation (proximity of 'hosts' geographically and culturally) - both of which are now well recognised.

If memetics opens the possibility of understanding how our culture is sustained, we should not reject it because it literally threatens our 'sacred cow'. Even if Dennet doesn't execute an exposition of the history of religion particularly well, the central notion of religion as an independent agent in the minds of humans cannot be rejected.