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Consciousness and Logic

in A Place For Thought, Analytical Philosophy, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Embodied, Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments


Among the problems with which philosophy and the various sciences must deal, the mind-body problem is still the most intriguing”

Wolfgang Kohler, The Mind-Body Problem, Dimensions of Mind, Ed. Sydney Hook, 1960

Among the most difficult issues faced by humans in science and in philosophy is consciousness. The problem with consciousness is that is has many sides to it. On the one hand there is the very difficult problem understanding what it is. Is is a stuff like say an electron is something i.e. matter, or is it it’s own stuff? That is the problem of substance. Then there’s another problem, that is: how is it that we are conscious? We know we have brains, but how do we go from a brain, which is matter (like a rock), to consciousness which appears to be pervasive? There are many more problems, for example, do we all experience the world in a similar way? Is consciousness the same as attention? Is it the same as perception? Is it an epiphenomena? Does consciousness have an effect on the brain? How do we know, other than verbal report, that anyone else is conscious?

None of these questions seem to have straightforward answers. Nor are they the only problems of consciousness. Needless to say that there are great many minds pondering these and many other issues attached to consciousness in great detail. Here however, I thought it might be interesting to ponder just a few of these questions.

The first thing worth noting about consciousness is that it is bounded. In order that consciousness is understood at all, it is worth noting it’s limits. And it is limited in many ways. It’s limits are also the cause of very many of the problems associated with it. For example, you are most probably not conscious of the internet speed of the average computer in Uganda. Neither are you conscious of how long it takes do download a jpeg in Wyoming (unless you are downloading one there right now). In the same vein you are not conscious of the color of the walls in your bathroom unless your bathroom unless you happen to be in your bathroom looking at the wall. Most likely you are in front of a computer looking at a scree reading these words – these are the things in your conscious field right now. And by extension you are also not conscious of another mind beyond the description of its contents that mind may give you. One way or another your mind is limited to its contents and by virtue of that limitation it is fair to say that consciousness has a structure, a structure defined by its content.

Now the problem is that the content of consciousness; the items we can most readily identify with it’s structure have been dismissed as a valid source of evidence. The problem is first, that words are red herrings; we all know that people’s ability to describe their own minds vary. Second, that we don’t know that we’re not talking to an articulate zombie (maybe a computer program with exquisite language abilities). Third,  people who have studied phenomenology don’t seem to be able to agree on what the basic constituents of consciousness in fact are. These problems combined have left much to be desired from first person accounts of consciousness.

But that said there are a few glaring problems with these problems. The problem of the red herring is the first worth tackling. The red herring problem is based on the finding that what people report is not always what is found to be going on cognitively. In the words of Jonathan Schooler of the University of Pittsburgh “You can’t always say what you think or think what you say”. And that leads to a rather interesting problem, on the one hand we know that we just can’t report everything that goes on in our minds. There are very many things we experience that we don’t have words for, on the other hand there are very many things that we express that don’t reflect our thought. For example when people are primed with visual stimuli they may say things biased by the prime, even if it wasn’t exactly what they originally thought. Then there is an additional problem, this refers to thought, but a certain amount of our consciousness is not focal, we have a fringe of awareness; a periphery to our experience that, by virtue of focusing on it is no longer the periphery but the focus of the report.

In other words, words don’t seem to secure much certainty. But this may be a bit of a misnomer. First, we are fortunate that we know a enough about the mind to be able to asses which effects are causing inconsistencies with verbal report. Secondly, much of the problem is associated with cognition and thought, not consciousness. If we are studying consciousness we’re not exactly studying cognition, the two converge but are not the same in the same way that attention is not the same as consciousness. we may be conscious of what we think in the same we are conscious of what we attend to, but we are also have consciousness of much of what we don’t think or to that which we attend. The composites of consciousness include and go beyond these things. Not to mention that both thought and attention are cognitive processes, can be manipulated through controlled conditions and measured. It is in that way that we understand them, but it is also in that way that we can understand consciousness. For the most part when we engage in a study we don’t take one persons word for something, even qualitative studies approach peoples reports thematically across several participants in a study. These ‘themes’ are then examined for consistency. In addition, one of the most important bounds for consciousness is the body. We know that our consciousness is limited, not just by the body but by the brain, and in conjunction with verbal reports, the two provide a crux for the kind of consistency sought when we study the mind.

The basis for the problem discussed here has a long history. The problem of other minds (do other people have minds we can know), the problem of zombies (are we speaking to an automaton) and the Chinese Room Argument (just because a computer answers the questions correctly doesn’t mean it understands Chinese) are all very similar to the problems discussed here. They are all based on the logical difference between a report of experience and that experience itself. Science avoids these issues by systematically examining the problems from the third person. But science, especially the science of the mind also relies on the reports of people, as it should.

Logically the philosophical problems have the same shape, and they can be tackled in about the same way, scientifically. We are free to doubt just about anything. We can justify doubt that a world other than the world we immediately perceive exists. But we would also be radically inconsistent if we did. After all the only clue we have that we make an error in something we perceive is perception itself. It is the more consistent perceptions that we have that inform us about the inconsistencies between other perceptions. Science is little more than a systematic version of this principle. By exploring both the structure of our descriptions and the consistencies between our perceptions (and within our theories) we develop systematic accounts of the world which are then formalized. That is the start of an account of consciousness. But best of all it demonstrates how important consciousness is to its own explanation.As Ned Block of New York University points out:

the starting point for work on consciousness is introspection and we would be foolish to ignore it

But it is ignored. That justifies the claim by Block. Daniel Dennet in his theory of  heterophenomenology is clear that we can’t rely on consciousness, and many have urged for a reduction to the brain in our exploration of consciousness. In somewhat less dogmatic words John Taylor has said;

It is necessary to have a solid information processing framework for the brain before we embark on such an ambitious project even at the qualitative level

In my opinion it’s not that these people are necessarily wrong, it’s that they miss the point of consciousness. Nagel in one of the most significant essays of the 20th century (What is it like to be Bat)has clearly pointed out that a reductionist program has to be based on what it seeks to reduce and that a reductionism that does not capture the subjective character of experience is compatible with its absence. In my opinion this is right, it’s not that we should stat with the brain, it’s that what we understand about the brain in relation to consciousness has to be limited by what we discover in experience. The two in other words are not just joined at the hip, they are essentially dependent if we are going to have a genuinely good characterization of consciousness at all.

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Xenophanes, Wittgenstein and Meaning

in Analytical Philosophy, Broken Postcard, Humanism, Philosophy, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | 2 comments

Wittgenstein remarked “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”. It’s worth noting that the insight was not Wittgenstein’s alone. Xenophanes (approx 400 BC) stated “if oxen, horses…. had hands or could paint…horses would paint horse-like images of gods, and oxen ox-like ones”. Xenophanes continues “Ethiopians consider the gods..black..Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired”.

Wittgenstein parallels Xenophanes but they also refer to something quite different from each-other. Wittgenstein is making a comment about language and meaning, Xenophanes makes a comment about the Gods. Both however, make an interesting point about mind and human relations. It is in this context that both of their statements are worth expanding.

As individuals there is a degree to which we expect to be understood. It isn’t that we expect people to understand our words. The sense in which we expect to be understood doesn’t change if we use a translator. What we expect is that people understand what we mean.

In the same vein it is interesting that we assume that when we use words we expect they have the same values inter-subjectively. When we look at the world or other people we are limited in our ability to attribute reason by one thing; the limits of our own reason. Think, how many of us have given some reason for others behavior only to find out from them other reasons we may not have considered?

These are two strong assumptions to make. On the one hand we expect the world to understand us and on the other we expect the world to be like us. It seems to me that many errors are caused by these assumptions. First, it is indicative of most of our immediate history that it is our moral imperative to fashion a world that conforms to our reason. Secondly, that it ought to be intuitive to others that this is the case. However, it seems perpendicular to reason that our words and meanings ought to be shared on the basis of assumption.

The poet Fyodor Tyutchev wrote:

Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream, the things you feel.
Deep in your spirit let them rise
akin to stars in crystal skies
that set before the night is blurred:
delight in them and speak no word.
How can a heart expression find?
How should another know your mind?

A thought once uttered is untrue.
Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:
drink at the source and speak no word.
Live in your inner self alone
within your soul a world has grown,
the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blinded by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard…
take in their song and speak no word

This poem is a poetic paraphrase of the problems of translation, and the poets response is radical indeed. On the basis of our assumptions it just is the case that human lives can be lost. And to communicate our meanings in a world that doesn’t understand us is a tragic affair indeed. However, despite differences in culture, language and the values of one person and the next, there are very important problems with a world in which meaning and thought are believed to be heterogeneous. As a species we also share very many concerns, wherever we go and with whomever we speak to.

The thought expressed by Tyutchev is romantic. I don’t doubt that there is a degree to which it resonates with many of us. And that is the point. In as much as the poem has any effect, it does little to make its own case. If it were able to make its case it would be unintelligible, for the point is that it wouldn’t be understood by anyone other than the author.

Both Wittgenstein and Xenophanes are approximately correct. I doubt that lion’s would have the same use for language as us. However, I also imagine that if lions could speak (let’s assume that they had evolved a language as rich as ours) then they would share certain concerns in common, survival being one, and there ability to communicate their needs using that language for another. Xenophanes is also correct, we do tend to fashion Gods in our image. Worse, we fashion what we think Gods would want in our likeness as well, I personally can’t think of anything more perverse. That said, in as much as we are concerned with morality in any sense we really ought not consider Gods at all. It is our relationships as human beings that are far more important. After all, it is this world and in this life that our concerns for freedom, expression and justice are shared. It is therefore in this world that we ought to find some meaning between us and figure out the rest.

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An anatomy of the idea

in A Place For Thought, Analytical Philosophy, Art, Belief, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Design, Embodied, Logic, Psychology, Science, Sleep, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

Liv­ing day to day we some­times for­get the sig­nif­i­cance of our brain are with respect to the ideas that make up our worlds. In our brain are a con­sid­er­able num­ber of neu­rons with sig­nif­i­cantly more con­nec­tions. Odd as it may sound, there is noth­ing like the world in the brain, nor are there any clear ideas, just some gray and white mushy stuff. How your brain and my brain know a table is a table or an idea is an ideas is there­fore puzzling.

Of course as sci­ence has pro­gressed the ques­tions have been framed dif­fer­ently. The way in which the ques­tions have been framed has become and index for under­stand­ing how we relate to mean­ing in the world; under­stand­ing thought and the rela­tion­ships ideas have to each other is impor­tant if we want to under­stand how we relate to our cul­tural envi­ron­ment. Know­ing how our brains work will help us to frame our­selves in the con­cep­tual world of memes and archetypes.

A good place to start to think about our dreams. In our dreams our expe­ri­ences bear lit­tle resem­blance to the actual world. But when we dream we are as good as con­science. For all intents and pur­poses we see, move and exist in a world, albeit a dream world. The ques­tion is how? A lot of work has gone into try­ing to explain ‘how mat­ter becomes imag­i­na­tion’ (to bor­row a phrase from one of my favorite scientists).

To start to under­stand we must return to when we are awake; there is dis­tri­b­u­tion of activ­ity going on in our heads. Mem­o­ries encoded across regions of the brain are acti­vated, not just to explic­itly remem­ber some­thing, but to relate what we hear to the bank of infor­ma­tion already encoded in our brains. Those seman­tic net­works that become active rec­i­p­ro­cally influ­ence the way in which we encode the envi­ron­ment, we thus fur­ther per­ceive the world and our rela­tion to it in rela­tion to the meme­ories already banked up in our brains.

Prim­ing offers a rather good illus­tra­tion. If we are asked to study a list of words, and we are then given syl­la­bles and asked to com­plete them we are more likely to com­plete the syl­la­bles as the words that were in the list we stud­ied. On a seman­tic level, if we are ‘primed’ with a word like doc­tor, we would be more likely to think ‘nurse’ than say ‘tele­phone’, why, because they are seman­ti­cally related. Sim­i­larly, researchers have found that ‘prim­ing’ peo­ple with aggres­sively related stim­uli will get peo­ple to inter­pret oth­ers behav­ior dur­ing com­pet­i­tive games as more aggres­sive and will sim­i­larly trig­ger a more aggres­sive response than one would oth­er­wise have seen.

One other impor­tant things about sleep­ing is that when we sleep our minds have a chance to encode and rehearse infor­ma­tion that was impor­tant dur­ing the day, that is as well as process things that may have been on our minds. The same seman­tic net­works that are active dur­ing the day are active in our sleep minus the real world to order them. Of course this is a rather sim­ple account. But it’s the prin­ci­ple that’s impor­tant. The prin­ci­ple is that the world that we expe­ri­ence is related to active con­stel­la­tions of infor­ma­tion in our brains, formed by the activ­ity between neu­rons that struc­ture and encode that infor­ma­tion. That activ­ity has an impact on how we act on the world, and of course that has an impact on our expe­ri­ences, which fur­ther influ­ences the world that influ­ences us.

As human beings, as minds a sig­nif­i­cant part of that activ­ity is ideational. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of our expe­ri­ence is formed through ideas, con­cepts and seman­tic activ­ity. Things mean things (if I am per­mit­ted a circularity).

And that is the sig­nif­i­cance of mean­ing. The mean­ing we find in things dri­ves us. We relate to mean­ing of things. Jung in his book The Sci­ence of Mythol­ogy drew this point out (albeit psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cally), and if we think of the way in which we use rep­re­sen­ta­tional medi­ums, like deserted islands (Deleuze), or the sig­nif­i­cance of a Brand in the mod­ern world, we come close to under­stand­ing the sig­nif­i­cance of ideas in our lives. But they run deeper.

The con­cept of a schema is impor­tant in under­stand­ing the same point. Schema, or pat­terns that rep­re­sent some part of the world don’t come in-​​built like the abil­ity to rec­og­nize faces (or like the struc­tures that con­tain the schemata). The con­cept of the arche­type is of this form as is the con­cept of the meme. They share enough sim­i­lar­i­ties to be syn­onyms for each other. That is they are both ref­er­ents for ideas.

Com­bin­ing all of the ele­ments in this pic­ture we can begin to form an under­stand­ing of our rela­tion­ship with the world of ideas. Ideas, rep­re­sented often as objects, have sig­nif­i­cance by virtue of our rela­tion to them. The rela­tion­ship between the objects we encounter, the ideas that we form them and the ideas we get learn in soci­ety act as ref­er­ents, pro­vid­ing the envi­ron­ment with a sense of sig­nif­i­cance. That sig­nif­i­cance dri­ves our rela­tion­ship with our envi­ron­ment: press­ing for­ward en-​​mass the devel­op­ment of ideas con­tained in that envi­ron­ment shape a she­matic of ideational con­tent press­ing us with mean­ing. Thank­fully this is a par­tial pic­ture. One I hope devel­ops the impor­tance of ideas in the world as fac­tors in our rela­tion­ship with it. One that can help us bet­ter con­cep­tu­al­ize why some ideas work and some don’t as we cre­ativ­ity develop an image of the world we’re in.

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everything is ‘natural’

in Analytical Philosophy, Belief, Broken Postcard, Cities, Logic, Philosophy, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | 7 comments

Naturalism,clear thinking and our future

Everything inItsRightPlace.mp3

The physical world is causally closed. The statement is so broad and yet so pointed that understanding the implications in their entirety is impossible. Yet the meaning of the statement needs to be understood, and by everyone. We have all managed to apply in our own beliefs some parts of the tenet but, unfortunately not all. If we were to understand and apply all implications of that one single statement “The physical world is causally closed” our entire attitude to life, the planet and many of the choices we make would be radically different.

The statement that the physical world is causally closed needs some explanation. In essence it means that all of the phenomena we see in the world are caused by other things we find in the world and that the effects of all physical causes will be found in the world. This supposition is taken from the finding that the total of energy and momentum have always been conserved wherever they have been measured.

A more prosaic example comes from Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier who found that in chemical reaction matter may change its state but it’s total mass will remain the same. Rust is a good example, when iron rusts it also gets heavier because iron and oxygen combine.

The word natural has a long history and has come to be used in many contexts. Advocates of herbal remedies cite that their medicines are natural, people talk about homosexuality as unnatural and we talk about ‘the natural course of action’. However, understanding physical closure permits us to say that each of these statements are nonsense if they are taken even remotely literally. ‘Natural’ as term has its origins in Latin and Greek and roughly in Middle English was used to mean ‘in accordance with nature‘. It is in the sense that the word is used in Lucretius’s epic poem  ’De Rerum Natura‘ that it is used here. That is as a part of the property that things posses by virtue of existence and not as a moral quantifier or proof of goodness.

Not only is it the case that there are a great number of poisons in the ‘natural’ world, it is also the case that it is literally impossible for homosexuality to be unnatural. More broadly speaking, given physical closure all phenomena that we see are natural.

The natural sciences ought to encompass the investigation of all phenomena. However, they have come to mean (through the correct application of the term) the physical sciences (otherwise known as the Naturwissenschaften as opposed to the Geisteswissenschaften, or social sciences). In essence however, the approach employed by all sciences can be called naturalistic and within the present conception of the universe all of the phenomena contained within it are natural.

If everything said thus far is true then it is meaningful to make statements like ‘photography is natural’ and ‘pollution is natural’ also. Most people, will have a harder time digesting statements like these as opposed to the statement ‘homosexuality is unnatural’.

The difficulty lies in an innate bias. It also highlights our need to guard ourselves from nonsense. The bias comes not just from ambiguity about the word natural but the fact that we have come to assume that pairing the word ‘natural’ with a statement gives that statement moral significance. That is in effect the nonsense which I refer to.

The point is that everything that does occur, occurs in the world, if it occurs in the world then it is natural. The flip-side of the coin is that just because something is natural (or can be found in nature) it doesn’t make it either right or give it any special moral significance. It was a natural event that wiped out the dinosaur. That fact doesn’t make the potential extinction of the human race any more palatable, I happen to be quite attached to the interests of humanity.

There are a number of implications of the discussion so far that ought to be considered. In connexion with this post however, my interest is in the world that we live in.

It is no platitude to say that wherever we are we obey the laws of physics. Gravity is a pervasive feature in all of our lives despite the fact that most of us take little time to notice the effect it has on us. But existing in the natural world is not just about obeying laws such as the law of gravity. The natural world is as much about living in a complex system such as our environment. What is more the point about natural phenomena is that we are embedded within those systems and are component part of them.

In effect we are a part of a much wider system and that system houses us. However, much like  gravity we seem to be too well acquainted with our environment. So well acquainted in fact that it doesn’t seem to make significant difference to us if we destroy it in piecemeal fashion. Of course we don’t experience a great deal of pollution. Nor do we experience the effects of pollution immediately. Environmentalism is concerned with a concept and by virtue of being a concept it is far removed from us.

But that doesn’t change that fact that the destruction of the system that we live in could be the destruction event of our species. By extension this also suggests the possibility that another species one day in the far future will refer to us in making the same arguments. As human beings we have used our imaginations to great use. From migrating bands of hominid to static cities populated by millions of people living not on subsistence but beyond necessity our species has achieved a lot in a short space. However, it is a part of that achievement that we can  see that our actions now have, within the closed physical system that is the world we live, far reaching consequences.

The point is this: Given that we live in the natural environment, (and I see no option but giving ourselves to that fact) a certain clarity of thought is required about our lives within that context. So far we have allowed ourselves an incredible amount of fuzzy thinking on the subject. However, if we are to save the planet we have to divorce ourselves from all of the immediate luxuries of existence (such as gravity) and understand that as necessary as gravity is, so are the effects of our actions on the future of our species.

We are unfortunately predisposed to being told what we want to hear from politicians (lest we don’t vote for them). However, in order that a concerted effort is made by all, that effort will have to be concerted and universal. That means saying a number of unpopular things and effort on all our parts. It means that developing countries will have to develop within the context of change that is uncertain and in developed countries that incentive will have to be on the part of survival. It is after all survival that we are after and survival can only take part within a physical system that we know can sustain us. That system is closed and that leaves a great deal of responsibility on our shoulders.

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Memes don’t exist (or things without existence)

in Analytical Philosophy, Broken Postcard, Philosophy, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | 1 comment

Logical Arguments For The Non-Existence Of Memes

Of course it’s not like existence is a property that things can have. We can’t divide the world into those things which do and which don’t have the property ‘existence’. Existence is more like an intransitive verb, We do the existing and that’s that.

To say that there are two classes of things to which the property ‘exists’ does apply (the class of all things y) and the class of things that don’t ‘exist’ (the class of all things x) is also to say that the class of things that don’t have existence in fact do exist. One must exist in order that one really has any properties at all, including existence. A vicious circularity seems almost in force.

Memes just don’t exist; they are a chimera. For those of you who don’t know, memes are often likened to words, ideas or bits of information. In a sense they are what genes are to ontogeny. ‘Toasters’ are memes as is ‘the rain in Spain’. Toasters are devices that do something and the idea of what they do is a meme as is the way in which they do it. The rain in Spain connotes the idea of something that doesn’t happen, hence the saying many of us learnt as children ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plane’ before going on holiday.

Both toasters and the rain in Spain convey an idea to us and memetisists would have us believe these ideas are transmitted, mutate and evolve. What is more they shape our behaviour. Martyrdom, freedom and chastity are all memes that are interesting cases of this. They make us behave in ways that either kill us or that don’t allow us to further our genes. Either way they don’t obey basic principles of evolution as far as we are concerned. That facet of memes has led advocates of memetic theory to suggest that memes are a bit like viruses.They’re not interested in us at all, they’re interested in themselves and furthering their own existence. We’re hosts to our ideas in that respect. Also, like viruses they’re not conscious; viruses are just strings of nucleotides. But at least with viruses we know what the information is made of. As mentioned memes have been likened to bits of information. The problem is that talking about bits of information is  a bit like talking about litres of liquid, what’s left unclear and undefined is what the litres or the bits actually are of.

We can call this problem 1 of memetic theory. Better stated, problem 1 of memetics is that memes aren’t clearly about anything at all; or what they denote has been left undefined. We know that there is information and we know that information is communicated but, we also know that stating this doesn’t prove that memes exist any more than it shows that they don’t; it shows us that the problem is much sharper than we originally thought. There is a full force machine within the academic community evangelising the meme meme as it were, who have skilfully managed to dismiss the one question that crops up over and over again; what do memes refer to.

Problem 2 is worth exploring and is related to the problem of universals. The problem of universals dates from the time of Plato. Plato suggested that there is a world of pure forms, in his conception they are the pure forms from which the imperfect forms in our world are shaped from.

The common way to think of universals is to think about either tables or triangles. There are a million different tables in the world but there has to be some ideal table from which all the different tables of the world are drawn, similarly there is no perfect example of a triangle naturally occurring in the world, yet in geometry dating from the time of Euclid we have been able to define the perfect triangle from Euclid’s axioms of geometry. Universals are what things have in common. It is not clear however that one meme has anything in common with another meme.

Bertrand Russell gave a good example of an argument for universals in ‘The Problems of Philosophy’ (1912). He phrased his argument by asking us to consider prime numbers; we know that there are numbers below 100 which are divisible by 1 and themselves, all of which we know (there are 25 below 100). We also know that we could indefinitely enumerate primes above 100 (see the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic) if we had the time (which would have to be infinite). Therefore we also know that there exist some number which is a prime that we haven’t yet found, or we can say there will always be a prime number we haven’t found. Since this is the case then we can say there exists number we can never find, as if we found it then it wouldn’t fit into our definition. Numbers are the best example of universals (they are the common property that all things have in common), and if we follow Bertrand Russell’s argument there are universals that exist that we can never know: better stated, these rules apply universally irrespective of human minds perceiving them.

But we can’t even say any of these things about memes. We can’t articulate any principles that govern the properties of their existence, nor can they be said to share anything in common with each other between the minds which they are hosted.

If they do share anything in common it would be the properties of class membership, but that is referring to an abstraction based on their idea and not any knowledge we have of them in particular. In a sense we have greater ability to talk about the class of all mythical four legged creatures in relation to unicorns and chimeras, at least we could in theory begin to enumerate them and, more importantly exclude some creatures from the class. In the case of memes on the other hand we are just told ‘there are some that don’t have words for them‘ (Daniel Dennett at TED). It would seem that meme theorists would have us include the whole of psychological phenomena and that is problematic as in order that you have a credible and useful class of things one must be prepared to exclude a certain number of objects too.

Problem 2 better stated is therefore that where on the one hand we can at least frame falsifiable arguments for the existence of universals we have no principles in order to frame memes. The idea of the meme is so broadly ill conceived that there is not a plausible method for accounting for their existence.

Problem 3 requires a method of analysis I learnt from my father,  it’s called ‘Getting Down To Brass Tacks‘ or just stating things as they are. No two human minds are the same in far more complex ways than no two naturally occurring triangles can be said to be the same. We all have not only uniquely different histories but, those histories and the minds in which they are embedded are a part of how those minds conceive ideas. What is more our ideas are in part social in context and they are also in part functional. In that respect they will change depending on their application and the functional context in which they apply, both socially and personally. These changes, to the best of our knowledge, occur in a physiological environment that requires massive complexity in a parallel computing machine known as the brain. And unlike numbers and the whole of mathematics, memes can not be applied to our understanding of the brain, they can only be properly called a constituent part. In order to even say that we would have to know something about them. In effect where we find room for ideas (and accept that on some given level no two are the same) we cannot do the same for memes.

Whereas we can talk about numbers and triangles with a certain amount of universality we can’t talk about memes in the same context, only the class of things which are memes. Numbers are of course classes (Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, Bertrand Russell, 1919). But we can apply numbers to things in the world despite never seeing the number 1. We see that there are instances in which the number 1 applies. What we are doing when we do that is applying the number to an instance of something in the world. Symmetry provides us with an interesting case.  Humans have perceived and used symmetry ostensibly for a very long time. In that respect there is a psychological relevance to symmetry. However, humans have also devised a system for categorizing forms of symmetry and enumerated different patterns to symmetry which can beapplied to things in the world. Symmetry can therefore be properly said to be empirical.

Problems 1, 2, & 3 give us a unique insight into the ontological defence of meme theory. According to Daniel Dennett “well words exist don’t they“. But one must ask, in what sense do words in fact exist. When I tell my father in Law’s dog off for growling I don’t assume that the dog understands the words but I do know that the dog recognizes the tone of my voice and body posture. I don’t assume that words have quite the universality that is implicit in Dennett’s rhetorical question. Wittgenstein similarly said that if lions could talk it would be meaningless to talk to them. Words, as far as I am concerned exist in much the same way that George Berkeley would have them exist, that is only in so far as they are recognised and understood by human minds.

Well, what about ideas, I believe that ideas exist within the world of human minds in quite the same sense that words do, but I am far less certain about how they are composed. Well then memes ought to as well, right? That is the ontological stance of memeticists. The problem is it’s unclear that memes are anything like words or ideas, it’s also very clear that words and ideas are not the same kinds of thing as each other. Furthermore if memes were anything like words or ideas one would have to ask if we need them, that is ‘would they add anything useful to our understanding of the world or just further complicate it?‘

Words are a vehicle for ideas in the social sphere but memes (other than the whole of our psychology) don’t seem to have a vehicle, properties or significant relevance. What is more memes require a massive commitment to the existence of entities that we cannot know share enough properties in common to allow us to say anything consistent about them, let alone give them any status in reality.

What in effect problems 1, 2, & 3 tell us is that the idea of memes (for those of you logically inclined NB the asymmetry now between ideas and memes)  is not only internally incoherent but inconsistent with what we do know and can say. They are not a fortiori given but, they are clearly are a posteriori not empirical. That is they are not given to any empirical proof (especially if we can say they are present in any psychological phenomena). In reality they can’t even be ostensibly defined.

But, it is from their precise lack of definition that they do derive some practical value, that is that until they are completely eliminated or a better argument framed, they provide excellent place holders for another theory; that is what makes them such good memes. That said it’s also worth noting that we have both an idea and a word for a chimera, but we’ve never found evidence for one other than their depiction in earlier cultures and that is why it is only their idea and the objects used to represent them that can truly be said to exist.

This allows us to come back to the classes we framed earlier: x & y (those that exist and don’t). We can say that that class y exists in our language and that the ideas belonging to y exist (as does the idea and the word meme), this much we can say without any complication. This fact also places the class of y into the class of all things x. But from this we also know that they don’t have objects to which they can refer. The class properly speaking therefore not only belongs to x, it is a sub-sub-class of x. Although the members of y themselves  don’t exist, y is in effect a class of ideas which do exist. A better way of expressing this would be to say that there are class of terms whose ideas exist but fail to refer to anything in the world.


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