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Slide 1: The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think by Robert Aunger A Species Should Not Define A Kingdom From biology to culture to the new new economy, the buzzword on everyones lips is meme. How do animals learn things? How does human culture evolve? How does viral marketing work? The answer to these disparate questions and even to what is the nature of thought itself is, simply, the meme. For decades researchers have been convinced that memes were The Next Big Thing for the understanding of society and ourselves. But no one has so far been able to define what they are. Until now. Here, for the first time, Robert Aunger outlines what a meme physically is, how memes originated, how they developed, and how they have made our brains into their survival systems. They are thoughts. They are parasites. They are in control. A meme is a distinct pattern of electrical charges in a node in our brains that reproduces a thousand times faster than a bacterium. Memes have found ways to leap from one brain to another. A number of them are being replicated in your brain as you read this paragraph. In 1976 the biologist Richard Dawkins suggested that all animals -- including humans -- are puppets and that genes hold the strings.
Slide 2: That is, we are robots serving as life support for the genes that control us. And all they want to do is replicate themselves. But then, we do lots of things that dont seem to help genes replicate. We decide not to have children, we waste our time doing dangerous things like mountain climbing, or boring things like reading, or stupid things like smoking that dont seem to help genes get copied into the next generation. We do all sorts of cultural things for reasons that dont seem to have anything to do with genes. Fashions in sports, books, clothes, ideas, politics, lifestyles come and go and give our lives meaning, so how can we be gene robots? Dawkins recognized that something else was going on. We communicate with one another and we get ideas, and these ideas seem to have a life of their own. Maybe there was something called memes that were like thought genes. Maybe our bodies were gene robots and our minds were meme robots. That would mean that what we think is not the result of our own creativity, but rather the result of the evolutionary flow of memes as they wash through us. What is the biological reality of an idea with a life of its own? What is a thought gene? Its a meme. And no one before Robert Aunger has established what it physically must be. This elegant, paradigmshifting analysis identifies how memes replicate in our brains, how they evolved, and how they use artifacts like books and photographs and advertisements to get from one brain to another. Destined to inflame arguments about free will, open doors to new ways of sharing our thoughts, and provide a revolutionary explanation of consciousness, The Electric Meme will change the way each of us thinks about our minds, our cultures, and our daily choices. Personal Review: The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think by Robert Aunger I struggled with portions of this book, but it is a righteous endeavor that takes Richard Dawkins and the quasi-discipline of memetics closer to where we need to be if we are to map cultures and languages and learn how to proliferate a culture of peace and prosperity. This is a very important work, and while I might have given it a four for its somewhat dense presentation, the author is brilliant, the topic is important, and I do not agree with those who are overly critical of this work. It is a pioneering work, and should be read together with Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, which is an edited work with a number of great minds (mostly UK) coming together to both collaborate and collide. I have three pages of notes that I will condense here. + Consciousness, Cognition, Culture are new terrain + Ideas have a life of their own + Culture is a form of grouip legacy mind, knowledge, wisdom + The table of contents of this book is extraordinary, worthy of closse reading all by itself + Cultural evolution appears to spiral with biological evolution
Slide 3: + Social intercourse replicates (and I would add, mutates) information + Mind virus can be understood by looking at computer viruses + A "meme" is an infectuous idea + Roots in cognitive studies in 1960's, sociobiology (E. O. Wilson) in 1970's + Evolutionary psycholkogy flips sociobiology by claiming that it is not the behavior but the decision process leading to the behavior that must be studied + Human share 97.5% DNA with chimpanzees + Group IQ and the emerging studies of bacteria and baboons lends credence to this work. + I ask myself, "Why are languages and cultures dying?" We need to do for 183 languages and their cultures what we have been trying to do for the environment. I am finally ordering a book Paul Hawkins recommends, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, a book that talks about all the knowledge of earth stewardship that existed until Columbus brought European diseases and guns to the Americas. + Cultural ecology having trouble proving itself + Culture, not the environment, is our intellectual and emotional context + Epidemiology provides a model for studying viruses + Human behavior appears shaped by genes, memes, and the environment + Citing Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, a book I liked very much, the author suggests that social learning amplifies individual knowledge, and is vital in complex circumstances. I recommend Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration and Five Minds for the Future for further study. + Culture is a dynamic for information sharing + Citing Pinker (I like this author's meticulous respect for ideas from others properly cited), Information is the ultimate gift without a price tag + Pasge 140, "Why does information matter? Because the *structure* of the universe--that is, matter and energy==is a function of the distribution and quantity of information. + Author discusses E=mc2 and how the idea went from Einstein, to his parrot, to his parrot's new girlfriend, to a visitor who had been struggling for a decade with the question Einstein answered. From this I realize the equation that will govern the rest of my life: P2 = M4IS x I5 Prosperity and Peace can be achieved by combining the Swedish concept of Multinattional Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing (M4IS) with Intelligence, Imagination, Intuition, Initiative, and Innovation (I5). We need to get away from the material world and explode the mental world by connection the five billion poor with cell phones and sharing knowledge with them one cell call at a time.
Slide 4: The author points out that most of what we know is not in our heads, but stored in artifacts (e.g. the human genome data no one mind could handle). On page 327, some provoicativee statements about a new mental planet with its own ecology. I am absolutely wowed by the author's conclusion: we only just begun to understand ourselves and the societies we inhabit. Am beginning to think I am going to have to spend some time at Cambridge and Oxford as well as Harvard and Stanford and MIT as well as the foundations. As a result of reading this work, I have planned three edited works for 2009: GIFT INTELLIGENCE: How individual and organizations can orchestrate and optimize giving CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE: Nurturing the Five Minds Everywhere ABNORMAL Intelligence: From Bacterial to Extra-Terrestial Am shaking my head as I finish this up and move to review the other book. This is deep deep good stuff that could help us chart a course for growing a new generation that values peace and prosperity over war and cheating. See also: Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming A Power Governments Cannot Suppress Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world For More 5 Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price: The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think by Robert Aunger 5 Star Customer Reviews and Lowest Price!