Memetics- The cerebral virus

The evolution of ideas is a fascinating concept. Just as the biological entities evolve by a controlled change or replication of genes, similarly the mental evolution could be thought to be driven by an entity that can be segregated and held responsible for the way the mind thinks , responds or processes information. Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book”The Selfish Gene” first proposed the concept of a unit of cultural idea that he named the “meme” .

A meme consists of any idea or behavior that can pass from one person to another by learning or imitation. The mind is exposed to an environment that the rest of the biological being is not, an environment called “culture”. So, in terms of culture, the mind has to evolve in a manner different from the rest of the body. It is this threshold where biology is no longer dominant and material matter is substituted by abstract matter that competes to form the present state or level of consciousness. So, while the human body should evolve as a result of evolution of the genes as well as adaption to surroundings, the mind must evolve genetically and/or memetically in the presence of memes.

I propose, with my limited understanding that the cultural sociosphere (the realm of human culture) is nothing but a pool of ideas (memes) to which all human minds are connected by means of direct experience or imaginative power. The better educated and perceptive the human host is, the better is its connection to this huge bank of ideas, cultures, theories, gestures, practices, fashions, habits, songs, dances etc. that we name the Meme Pool . The human mind can be considered to be a meme machine or a vessel with both input and output points, similar to individual nodes in a computer network, that will react to an individual situations using the memes it has already integrated into its “hardware” as a result of frequent use or exposure. If the situation is something not faced by the host before, the mind will then connect to the meme pool, in order to extract the ideas that will let it face the situation in the most effective manner. Memes can thus be regarded as the software modules that can be ingrained on the cerebral hardware and used in applications. Only that software we use most frequently is made a copy of in our mental makeup and that is what we call the “self”.