Purveyor of Fine Memes?

As an experiment, I put this "brand-image" on my business card. I have been surprised to find how little recognition it gets: even at the British Association for the Advancement of Science 1996 meeting, Dan Dennett was the only person not to say "eh?" and start hunting for the footnote :-) (Where better to hand out a card with a footnote?)

But it describes more accurately than anything else what I do.

Meme is to mind as gene is to body.

The word "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins, in Chapter 11 of his The Selfish Gene. It has become attached to an interesting ferment of heterodox ideas - which, as Dawkins claims in a footnote, make it one of the more successful infectious memes. Gotcha! -- you may now be infectious.

It does seem to hold out the promise of real explanatory power in understanding consciousness. Take it in conjunction with ideas in Daniel Dennet's Consciousness Explained, and Stuart Kauffman's ideas in The Origins of Order - and something really interesting may happen.

I could, of course, afford to spend a lot more time thinking and writing about this if you commissioned an article (do it now!). You may want to look at some articles and larger publications first.

Oddly, Usenet discussion of memetics is often disappointing. I was introduced to the concept through the cybermind mailing list (though I haven't had time to go there recently).

There is some memetics stuff on the Web that's cool; and rather more flaky stuff which I won't link.

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