Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes

http://www.ted.com Starting with the simple tale of an ant, philosopher Dan Dennett unleashes a devastating salvo of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of memes -- concepts that are literally alive.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at
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• Darwinism
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• Breaking the Spell

[leconfidant]

@erikachad 1)Religions have always been revised and reinterpreted (like the principles of discovery and observation).Therefore2)Not all religion is dogmatic3)No society ever survived without religion and those who gave it up collapsed or reneged.4)The concept of evidence is itself a mutating meme same as the rest. (Read Dawkins' definitions in Selfish Gene.) 5) I don't believe in god, but that you can't prove he doesn't exist is only an awareness of the limits of scientific evidence.

[erikachad]

@leconfidant You cant categorize science like that, there are the scientific principles of discovery and observation, then there is religious dogma. One can be revised and expanded upon and the other can't, one is necessary for progress and...Rationality is more than a meme, it doesn't need justification, it justifies itself through evidence, it exists in spite of... This argument is akin to the argument that one can't prove God doesn't exist, its not a serious thought.

[leconfidant]

@leedsmanc Mmm. It's the first time I had to make more than one post, but it was just so wrong on so many points, dissection.was educational. No regrets.

[leedsmanc]

@leconfidant Tedious. It's tedious talking to you. Your arguments are so devoid of relevance it's like debating with a damp towel.

[leconfidant]

@leconfidant 7) By far the most obvious framework for memetic replication is the common speach of common people. For replication, try 'communication'. For competition, try dialogue and thinking. For mutation, try 'confusion'. That gives you the whole framework right there.That some ideas are bad ones, albeit rather persuasive and therefore harmful is something my grandmother would expect everyone to understand. Emperor's new clothes.

[leconfidant]

@leconfidant I'm still indignant that only Darwinian thinking will explain this framework. 6) My mind drifted through about 20 different philosophies which outlined similar frameworks. Gilles and Deleuze, Le Rochefoucauld, Greco-Roman daemonism, shamanism, deconstructionism all took the position that language and ideas and concepts come to us and we are merely hosts.

[leconfidant]

@leedsmanc 6) There is no difference which memetics can discern between religious ideas and any other. Rationality itself, by memetic standards, can only be a another meme. By Darwinian thinking, survival fitness would be the measure of success of a meme, not logic. And religion isn’t doing badly as our co-evolution has a longer ancestry than the memes of modern science.

[leconfidant]

@leedsmanc 5) You gave yourself as an example of someone who is immune to ‘Buddhist bullshit’. But the notion that we are often hijacked by ideas which do us no good is something religions and sciences have always said. That is why I say that your own particular immunity to Buddhist bullshit has clearly failed. The position that we are not the managers of our minds is classically Buddhist. QED. So you yourself are my proof, whether you identify as religious or not. Sorry about that.

[leconfidant]

@leedsmanc 4) You said knowledge of our ideas gives us immunity to them. and compared this to the awareness of people fighting flu viruses. Knowing about the flu doesn’t make you immune. People and animals who are immune, are generally unconsious of their immunity. People who are dying of it have the clearest set of symptoms to indicate what they’re dying of. I refuted both the science and your metaphorical point. Knowledge that we can have bad ideas doesn’t stop people having them.

[leconfidant]

@leedsmanc

3) You said that I failed to understand that ideas can control us. I think controlling our ideas is an illusion. “I”, such as I am, am merely their dialogue, which is a more radical position than Dennet’s, although I do agree with his position that there is no ego. I took this position from the age of 18. I’m 43. And I repeat, it was a well developed notion from early Buddhism and Greco-Roman culture onward.