Free The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore

Basalla, like Gould, throws out both kinds of progress. I would throw out only the first. Today’s technology is far more sophisticated and complex than that of 10000 years ago, and that is progress of the second kind. But, there is no progress towards some predetermined or ultimate goal. We did not have to go from stone axes to fax machines – we did have to go from stone axes to something more specialised, more designed and more improbable. In Dennett’s terminology, there has been ever more exploration of the Design Space of possible artefacts. In Dawkins’s terminology, technology has been slowly climbing its own Mount Improbable. This is technological progress, if not progress towards anything in particular.
    So why do we have fax machines? Why Coca Cola cans and wheelybins? Why Windows 98 and felt–tip pens? I want answers to these specific questions. ‘Because we want them’ is not a sufficient answer. ‘Because we need them’ is clearly untrue. If we want to understand how the fantastic complexity of our technological world came about it is not enough just to say that technology evolves, without providing a mechanism. In later chapters I shall explain how a memetic approach can help.
    Scientific ideas also evolve and there have been many theories that attempt to explain how. The influential philosopher Karl Popper, in one of his best known contributions to the philosophy of science, suggested that scientific knowledge is gained by the falsification of hypotheses, not by accumulating proof or evidence
for
theories. Science can then be seen as a competitive struggle between rival hypotheses in which only some survive.
    Popper also applied Darwinian thinking in his three ‘cosmic evolutionary stages’: World 1 is the world of physical objects such as trees, tables and human bodies; World 2 is the world of subjective experiences including feelings, emotions and consciousness; and World 3 is the world of ideas; of language and stories, works of art and technology, mathematics and science. World 3 is largely autonomous, even though created by us (Popper 1972), and its contents have effects on the other worlds by a kind of downward causation. So, for example, scientific theories may appear as World 1 objects (the scientist, the journal papers, theexperimental apparatus, and so on), but they are more than just physical objects. The ideas
themselves
influence those objects. The problems, hypotheses, theories and intellectual struggles work through World 2 and into World 1. Scientific ideas really do change the world: ‘once theories exist, they begin to have a life of their own’ (Popper and Eccles 1977, p. 40).
    How can an idea change the physical world? Popper was struggling here with a difficult and important problem, related to the value of reductionism in science and the viability of materialism as a world view. I do not think he solved it. His three worlds contain very different kinds of material and he has to propose a tricky kind of interactionism to link them. Interestingly, he touches on the role of imitation but without realising how it might help. For example, in explaining how artistic ideas can have real effects, he says ‘a sculptor may, by producing a new work, encourage other sculptors to copy it, or to produce similar sculptures’ (Popper and Eccles 1977, p. 39). In his terms, the ideas in the sculptor’s mind (World 3) affect the experiences of others (World 2) and thus lead to new sculptures (World 1).
    In memetic terms, all that happens – whether in science or art – is selective imitation. The emotions, the intellectual struggles, the subjective experiences – these are all parts of the complex system that leads to some behaviours being imitated and others not. And it is because imitation lets loose a second replicator that ideas begin to ‘have a life of their own’. In this way, memetics provides a mechanism for the evolution of scientific ideas that Popper’s three worlds