Susan Blackmore - Memes and “Temes” (TED, 2008)
Evolution = Design from Chaos without the Aid of the Mind.
Mimeme = That which is imitated.
Imagine a world of brains, and far more memes than can possibly find homes. The memes are trying to get copied. We are the meme-machines.
You get an arms race between:
- The genes which are trying to get the humans to have small economical brains and not waste their time copying all this stuff
and
- The memes themselves (like the sounds that people made and copied, which turned out to become language) competing to get the brains to get bigger and bigger.
All other species on this planet are gene-machines only. We are gene machines and meme machines. But that’s not all we new kinds of memes now.
I do honestly think we need a new word now for technological memes, let’s call them techno-memes or “temes,” because the processes are now different.
So we’re at this cusp now, of having a third replicator on our planet.
Don’t think intelligence. THINK REPLICATORS!
N = n x f(r1) x f(r2) x f(r3) x L
—Commercial on the end poses an interesting question as well.
