The Meme Machine (40 page)

The second step is to copy the instructions rather than the product. I previously gave the example of a recipe for soup. It may be possible for a
cook to taste the soup and copy it, but the copy is likely to be better if he works from a recipe. Why? The general principle is that following recipes is not a reversible process, whether we are talking about the genetic instructions for making a body, or the recipe for a cake (Dawkins 1982). Follow the genetic instructions in the right way and under the right conditions and you get a body, but you cannot take the body and follow the instructions back to arrive at a person’s genome. The same is true of the soup. Of course you can try, but errors are bound to creep into the reverse engineering required to copy the product. You have to work out how it was done, and then do it yourself. If copies of copies are made the errors are compounded, and any good tricks invested in the original product are soon lost. It is far better to have clear instructions to follow.

The invention of writing makes possible all sorts of steps in this direction. Recipes for food are only one example, others are car–maintenance manuals, instructions on how to get to the party, user manuals for hi–fi systems or gas ovens, instructions for building model aeroplanes or decorating your house in the latest fashionable styles. In these, and many other cases, you may see a product or action and guess at how it was made, but verbal or written instructions are a great help.

Copying written instructions is also far more secure. Writing is digital and highly redundant so that errors in spelling or syntax, or degradation by photocopying, are routinely ignored in passing on recipes or instructions. The same instruction can be copied to millions of people, as many computer manuals have been, and each person receives the same information. The booklet can be passed on to reader after reader without losing any detail.

I am returning to this principle because it has been so important in the computer revolution. Computer programs are instructions. They work on the basis of copy–the-instruction not copy–the-product. Take a familiar suite of programs such as the word processor I am using to write this book – Word 6.0. Word has evolved gradually through several stages and there are now millions of copies of its various versions in the world living inside millions of PCs in offices and houses. Some people buy them on disks or CDs, others copy them (legally or not) from each other. When installed the programs all do the same things. They put up letters on a screen, move text around when commanded by the user, send data to printers, and so on. No human being, from watching the word processor at work or seeing the documents it creates, could reconstruct the machine code on which it is based. The fantastic success of the memes inside Word 6.0 is due not only to its usefulness to the humans who use it, but to the digital copying machinery on which it operates and the fact
that it is instructions and not products that are copied. These memes, or some of them, will outlive Word 6.0. If Word 8 or 9 is made it will doubtless reuse much of the code that formed earlier versions.

Note that the billions of products created by these word processors are not copied in the same way as the memes inside the word processor itself. But nor are they irrelevant to the copying process. If people were not happy with the program, and could not easily write all their letters, articles and books with it, then Word 6.0 would not be copied at all. It is the quality and quantity of the documents created that determines the success of the word processor they were created with. We can now see that these documents play for the memes, a similar role to that played by organisms for the genes. In this sense they are a vehicle, except that they do not carry the replicators around inside them. The documents themselves may disappear, but their existence determines which of the instructions for making them are copied and which are not. And potentially these instructions can be copied on for ever, just as genes can.

Many meme–copying steps have gone into the creation of the computers on which all this depends. They include the invention of language, its increased longevity by writing, increased communication between people by the building of roads and railways, the invention of telephones and televisions, the invention of digital computers, programming languages, digital storage devices, and finally the creation of user packages such as word processors, statistical packages, spreadsheets, and databases, which consist of memeplexes whose vehicles are the documents they make possible. We may expect this process to continue with the creation of more and more computer–based instructions whose operations are inscrutable to their users but whose products determine whether they are replicated or not.

Note that this evolutionary process has made memetic–copying mechanisms more similar to genetic ones. One of the great worries for memetics was the accusation that memes are passed on by Lamarckian ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’. We can now see that with further developments of meme–copying technology the tendency is, just as it presumably was for genes, towards a non–Lamarckian mechanism – that is, copy–the-instruction not copy–the-product. The precise way it is done will always be different for memes and genes but the basic evolutionary principles are the same. The competition between replicators forces the invention of better and better systems for copying those replicators. The best systems are digital, have effective error–correction mechanisms, and copy the instructions for making the products, rather than the products themselves.

Caught in the web

In 1989, the World Wide Web was invented. The Internet had already been expanding for many years, and what had begun as a small scheme linking a few government scientists, rapidly became a worldwide system through which anyone with a computer and modem could fetch stored information from all around the world. This was a great step for the memes. Memes can now be stored on the hard disk of a computer in, say, Melbourne, and at any time of day or night be copied almost without errors over phone lines or satellite connections to another computer in London, Florence, Chicago, or Tokyo, using the energy resources of countless human beings along the way.

These memes can be used to create other products (say school projects or business plans). They can be saved on disks at the new location, or to save space just the link be saved and the information called up again whenever needed. This last fact mirrors an interesting trick used by the human visual system. The visual world is so complex that storing even tiny fractions of the changing image would overwhelm even the vast storage system of the human brain. Instead, the brain throws away most of the information and relies on our ability simply to look again. We may have the impression that when we look out of the window we have a beautifully rich visual image, but in fact all our brains are holding is a little piece of the central image, a very rough sketch of the rest, and the ability to respond quickly to change and look again when necessary (Blackmore
et al.
1995). In the same way, when using the Net we can mark information we might want again without actually keeping it on our own computers. The memes stay where they always were, in Sydney or Rome; and we just have a quick route for getting them again.

Use of the World Wide Web is free. This may change, but at the end of the twentieth century you pay only for the computer and phone lines that connect you to the system. Out there in cyberspace lie all the stories, and pictures, and programs, and games, that millions of people have lovingly put onto their Web sites, creating a virtual world of digital information. There are multi–user domains, or MUDS, that are imaginary places that people have constructed for others to come and play in. For some people these virtual worlds are more real than ordinary life (Turkle 1995). There are controls on who can enter a MUD but they are not financial controls. This is odd if you think of the Internet as something that humans created for their own benefit, because you might expect them to pay for it. It makes more sense when you think of the memes as having created the
Web to aid their own replication, and competing with each other to get your attention. If memes can get copied they will, and the Internet copies a lot of memes.

Does the Net need us? Yes, at the moment it does, though not necessarily for ever. We made the hardware and software on which it depends and we need to keep maintaining it, or the copying system will collapse. More importantly, our biologically evolved nature still drives, to a very large extent, which memes are successful. They are, naturally enough, those to do with sex, food, and fighting. The most common topic for searches on the World Wide Web is sex. MUDs allow people to take on invented identities and engage in meeting, chatting up, and having virtual sex with people whose location and even biological sex they may not know. The vast majority of computer games are based on killing and warfare. Any memes which can get into or tag along with such memeplexes are more likely to succeed. In this sense, the Internet still needs us, and is driven by human genes as well as memes.

However, many changes lie ahead. Already there are free–floating programs which move around in cyberspace, called bots (short for robotic programs). The way forward in artificial intelligence seems to be to build small and stupid units that together do clever things. We can imagine the Net becoming full of such autonomous stupid creatures that run about doing useful jobs. For example, as the Net increases in size and complexity, which memetic principles dictate that it must, there will be increasing problems of traffic flow and control. One idea is to create little programs based on insects laying chemical trails, that move around providing information about traffic flow on different routes. Others might perform error–correction tasks or censorship duties. At the moment, the only viruses or parasites are ones deliberately created by malicious (or just mischievous) human beings, but could bots mutate into viruses and start clogging up the system? Certainly, copying errors happen in any system and occasionally they lead to a product that proliferates. General evolutionary principles suggest that this may occur if the fantastic copying and storage system of the Net is maintained for long enough.

Other programs simulate people; they can carry on conversations and do things like psychic readings, or take part in games. There are ‘chatterbots’ with whom you can converse when you get lonely. In multi–user games people have been fooled by bots claiming to be real people. In a large system over a long time such bots could presumably mutate into more and more efficient ‘people’.

Many people seem to assume that because we built the machinery on
which the net runs, we are in control of it. This is clearly not so. British Telecom can no longer understand its own telephone network, and the whole worldwide system looks set to become bigger and more complex still. Indeed, if the memetic analysis I have given here is correct, then so long as human beings maintain the infrastructure, the system will proliferate out of anyone or anything’s control – like a vast natural ecosystem.

The same applies to robots. At the moment, they mostly carry out simple tasks under human control, but memetics raises the following interesting possibility. For robots to become like humans – in other words, to have human–like artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness – they would need to have memes. Rather than being programmed to do specific tasks or even to learn from their environment as some already can, they would have to be given the ability to imitate. If they could imitate the actions of people or other robots, then robot memes would begin to spread from one to another, and a new kind of memetic evolution take off, perhaps inventing new kinds of language and communication. The robot memes would drive the robots to new activities, giving rise to motivations that we could only guess at. We humans might not be capable of imitating everything the new robots did and so we might be quite excluded from their kind of cultural evolution. We would certainly not be in control of it.

All this raises interesting, and perhaps frightening, questions about the nature of human control and human identity. In any case, memetics raises those questions from its very foundations. I have carefully avoided them so far but the time has come to ask the difficult ones. Who am I, and what am I here for?

CHAPTER 17

The ultimate memeplex

‘We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators’. So ends Dawkins’s book
The Selfish Gene
in which the whole idea of memes began. But who is this ‘we’? That is the question I want to ask now. The ‘ultimate memeplex’ of my title is no science fiction futuristic invention, but our own familiar self.

Think for a moment about yourself. I mean the ‘real you’, the inner self, that bit of yourself that really feels those heartfelt emotions, the bit of you that once (or many times) fell in love, the you that is conscious and that cares, thinks, works hard, believes, dreams and imagines; I mean who you really are. Unless you have thought about this a good deal you probably jump to many conclusions about your self – that it has some kind of continuity and persists through your life, that it is the centre of your consciousness, has memories, holds beliefs and makes the important decisions of your life.

Now I want to ask some simple questions about this ‘real you’. They are: What am I? Where am I? What do I do?

What am I?

You may be one of the large majority who believes in the existence of a soul or spirit. Ethnographic studies show that most cultures include notions of a soul or spirit, nearly half believing that the soul can separate from the body (Sheils 1978). Surveys show that in the United States 88 per cent believe in a human soul, and in Europe 61 per cent, figures in line with high levels of belief in God, life after death, and supernatural phenomena (Gallup and Newport 1991; Humphrey 1995). Presumably, people assume that the soul is their inner self or ‘real me’ and will survive when their body dies.

There is a long history of philosophers and scientists trying to make sense of such a view. In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher Rene Descartes took a wonderfully sceptical view of the world, doubting every belief and opinion he had. He decided to treat everything as though it were absolutely false ‘until I have encountered something which is
certain, or at least, if I can do nothing else, until I have learned with certainty that there is nothing certain in the world.’ (Descartes 1641, p. 102). Amidst all his doubts, he concluded that he could not doubt that he was thinking. Thus he came to his famous ‘Cogito ergo sum’ -1 think therefore I am – and to what is now known, after him, as ‘Cartesian dualism’: the idea that that thinking stuff is different from physical, or extended, stuff. Our bodies may be a machine of sorts but ‘we’ are something else.