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.

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• Darwinism
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• memes
• Breaking the Spell

[leconfidant]

@sexyloser Exactly, thank you. A meme is basically an idea... accompanied by an evolution nerd telling you that it's a totally new discovery. I don't think this is a scene of scientific debate. I just want to point them to social work support.

[leconfidant]

@leedsmanc I was the child of two devout catholics. Agnostic in my teens.Buddhist all my adult life.

Dennet and Dawkins are doughballs. Memes are ideas. That's all. There's nothing new here that art and culture studies haven't understood perfectly well since the beginning. That ideas communicate and have a life of their own is totally obvious. The whole thing is an Emperor's New Clothes joke.

[leconfidant]

@GuyWithTheMustache There is a better term for your metaphorical meta-universal hive mind of ideas . Culture. Memetics is scientists discovering culture and imagining they are the first ones to get there. Memes are ideas. No-one can tell me the difference. Dawkins is saying they literally have a life of their own, but that is very obvious to people who work in culture. It's like a 3 year old boasting he can go to the toilet then offering to teach us how to do it.

[leconfidant]

@Lone432345 @Lone432345 It is bullshit, but you:re overlooking the process. I ideas always did float around the air. The technical word for this is :communication'. If you ask artists where their ideas for scripts etc come from, they say the ideas 'come to them' and they merely accommodate them. Nobody develops ideas out of thin air. Nobody 'designs' music or scripts. But the sheer commonplace of ideas moving around through language and culture makes memetics completely redundant.

[esoervik]

@leconfidant you can't possibly mean that children are valid to point to? I mean, they're not sexually developed, for one, and once those pieces align we see experimenting galore. Anyway, I'll leave it, as we just seem to have very different outlooks.

[Cyllid]

@leconfidant I didn't say that this was interesting or controversial. i said when what science reveals something that goes against what is the current knowledge, that it's interesting.

My issue was never with your objection to memes. More just how broadly you've appeared to me at least, to dismiss Scientific though.

[leconfidant]

@Cyllid Given the rich tradition of study of how ideas develop, I find it astonishing he makes no mention of them. We were always working against science's prejudice that culture development was logical progress. Now it's being "revealed" to us as a sophisticated discovery it's not. Well no shit? Welcome to planet earth. Interesting? Conflictual? No. The insights memetics brings to us is are ininteresting and controverrtial as a 3 year old boasting he can now go to the toilet on his own.

[leconfidant]

@esoervik Almost everybody is celibate as a child and it doesn't involve choices, preferences or anything else. But celibacy as an idea will survive, we know this, because ideas arw not physically attached to their owners. Dennet says so and I agree. But while Dennet hauls in the vocabulary of evolution. I'm quite happy to say that some people are hung up about it. some can't be bothered and some people just aren't very attractive, choices or not.

[esoervik]

@leconfidant the majority of people have sexual drives, and to be celibate in the face of those you need to have thoughts surrounding it, or at least be aware that you're doing something most people don't. If you're just purely asexual that's one thing... but in the face of the urge to be celibate? That's a choice and an idea, or several, are at the bottom of it.

[Cyllid]

@leconfidant So you're saying that the arts should have the final say in what is/isn't?

Everything else should just take what the arts has done and build from it?

Science is a ground-up process. I can see it, I can record it, I can recreate it, I can predict results with it... That it often coincides with what is already known doesn't mean it's useless, or that the things it is confirming are useless. It's the stuff that conflicts with what is known that is interesting anyways.