Posted by Stephen Pusey on May 17, 1996 at 14:49:20:
In Reply to: Re: Virus posted by Joseph Nechvatal on May 02, 1996 at 18:09:01:
Found the 'Electronic Revolution' by William Burroughs at St. Marks Book Store in New York City. Its a new print - this year - 9th edition. It can also be found, with other texts by Burroughs, on the Web at www.hypereal.com/wsb/.
These things go around -
Now Burroughs expounds a theory that speech may have been caused by a virus, and by extension, that words, images, and the concepts they frame, are also viral. He further hypothesizes that speech/concept viruses could be engineered in the laboratory and used to control social behaviour by triggering certain pre-programmed responses. That was in 1970.
The word 'meme' (analogy - gene) has again, been appearing frequently in the media. It was first coined in 1975, by Richard Dawkins in his book 'The Selfish Gene', in which he defines the meme as simply a unit of intellectual or cultural information that survives long enough to be recognized as such, and which can pass from mind to mind. To quote:
"Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leading from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain."
He takes the argument further in his 1991 essay 'Viruses of the Mind':
"minds are friendly environments to parasitic, self-replicating ideas or information, and ... are typically
massively infected."
The replication is multiplied, the infection spreads. There is now even a study of 'Memetics'. This a not exactly a stealth virus, but one that glories in the limelight. Or perhaps it is only a decoy and preparing our minds for a new scenario of cultural infection. If all transmitted knowledge can be considered 'memetic' then we are no more than 'membots' - not the creators of knowledge, as we would conceitedly believe - merely the unwitting receivers and transmitters of intelligent viruses. Daniel C. Dennet, a principle proponent of memetic theory, writes in 'Consciousness Explained' (1991):
"Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes."
Dennet is credited with Dennett correcting some of the current misunderstandings of memetic theory that might found in facile pop sociobiology and cultural philosophy. He describes the meme as a unit of cultural evolution advantageous to itself that co-evolves as a protective and continuous network/infosphere, as integral to our phenotypes, as anything biologically pre-ordained.
It may be useful, in understanding the machinations of cultural switches in human behaviour to create this model of the human mind as being infected by entities with their own agenda for survival and reproduction. However, if we are to buy totally buy into this idea, as it seems that so many academics opportunely have, where does it leave us with regard to self-determinism? Are we to be only the hapless carriers of self-determining memes? Memetics will inevitably lead to memetic engineering. Actually, Burroughs proposed this in the 'Electronic Revolution' and illustrated how the use of spliced recordings of emotive incidents could be used to trigger predictable behaviour. And would not memetic engineering - seemingly an attempt to deliberately manufacture 'control switches' for human behaviour - be but the contrivance of a self-determining meme population to create a scenario more conducive for its reproduction? Who is then the puppeteer?
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