uring the last meeting, several separate parts of the discussion called attention to how knowledge acts to preserve or transmit itself in a community. In the discussions about wikipedia and the falling levels of trust in traditional media it was noted that the truth or validity of an idea was not necessarily an advantage in its ability to spread. This point brought to mind previous observations I had heard from different members of the group: Ryan Heuser on twitter asked whether it might be possible to observe the R-number of an idea, that is, its propensity to spread itself. Specifically, when the idea is grasped by a person, how many people on average does that person spread the idea to? Peter de Bolla in the Concept Lab often focused on the functional mode of concepts: what does the concept do to gain traction in a community, and how do certain types of concepts enable other types of concepts to do their work? David Deutsch, in characterising knowledge, casts knowledge itself as the agent that brings about its own persistence in the world: “knowledge is information which, when it is physically embodied in a suitable environment, tends to cause itself to remain so”.
Each of these views of knowledge as an active agent working to spread and preserve itself with little attention to its own usefulness or truth brought to my mind the concept of memetics. Of course, the analogy between the development of ideas and an ancestral genealogy is old, but the specific analogy between genes and ideas, memetics, was first drawn up by Richard Dawkins in 1976. The concept has since been the focus of work by Douglas Hoftstadter, Daniel Dennet, Susan Blackmore, and David Deutsch. What I find promising about the perspective of memetics is that it removes agency from individuals or communities and instead locates agency in the ideas themselves. Whatever the truth of this, it seems like it might be the kind of change in perspective that helps us to get ‘unstuck’.
Like self-replicating computer code or viral RNA, ideas contain both the message and the function through which the message is replicated and transmitted. In particular, what Bill Warner said about conspiracy theories in the last meeting emphasised that these ideas are really agents in themselves, honed to optimize their own transmission rather than any particular truth. So, if our goal is to “unstick” the kind of knowledge that Enlightenment is about, we could think not just about where the knowledge resides, what it contains, and who controls it, but also how the form of the knowledge itself influences its own “R number”.
There have been bitter debates in biology on the merits of a gene-centered model of evolution as opposed to the perspective of individual organism, kin, or group selection. There are interesting parallels here with the study of ideas: what conceptual forms are best designed to persist in minds, on paper, or on disk over time, and to re-make themselves across disparate groups?
As I have no training whatsoever in biology, Cliff found a promising potential collaboration with Bridget Algee-Hewitt, who is an expert in the biology and anthropology of genetic trait variation in modern humans. I have been slow to get these initial ideas down on pixels for this meeting, but I hope that by the next meeting we will have time to work together to explore how the analogy with natural selection and viral transmission can help us to understand the perspective of conceptual forms that use language to survive, adapt, and thrive — sometimes at our expense.