The Metaphor of Memes
I’ve been trying to visualize what a meme looks like. When I see one flying through the atmosphere, airborne between one mind and another, the meme resembles a sperm searching for an egg to impregnate. When I see a meme working in a mind, I see electrical bolts whose tips are the adventurous and conquering faces of missionaries and mountain climbers; they fly past each other, bowing their heads in acknowledgment, competitors paying respect. When I see a meme dying, a forgotten or discarded thought, the melancholic image of a drowning child’s water-wrinkled hand striving for the surface floods my mind. I can’t decide what it looks like; or rather, that’s all I can decide: what it looks like as opposed to how it looks. I can only relate it to something else; can’t relate it to itself.
Because of the difficulties of imagining a meme, I’ve moved on to imagining the effects of one. By this I mean that I’ve been trying to imagine what happens inside the brain when a new meme enters.
The first step in creating this image is to imagine the inside of the brain. I see it as a giant ball, an empty sphere. On the outside, it looks like a giant golf-ball similar to that structure at Disney’s Epcot Center; on the inside, it looks like the loading room in The Matrix: bright white with no shadows or horizons. This is an empty brain, but no brains are empty. The brain must be filled with concepts.
I’ve now moved from imagining the inside of the brain to imagining what a concept looks like, and how it relates to the brain-structure I’ve created.
A concept in this metaphor is analogous to Euclid’s geometrical point: indivisible. In three dimensions, a concept is a solid sphere. More importantly, each concept is also unique; though many are similar, no two concepts are exactly alike. It takes many concepts in collaboration to have an identifiable effect. The number of concepts working together that make it possible for me to identify the letter Q is so large as to be considered infinite; in comparison to the volume of the brain, however, the volume of concept-conglomeration that is “Q” is infinitesimally small.
Regardless of size, how do these concept-conglomerations (con-cons) arrange themselves? The concepts aren’t alive, which means they don’t have desire or autonomous movement, so what has to happen for them to conglomerate?
Imagine that the individual concept spheres have an outer shell that is unique. For some reason that is not the subject of this paper, the shells all consist of one of two patterns: the male and female patterns of Velcro. They can stick to some concepts but not to others, and never too strongly. As the brain sphere fills with concept spheres, some of the concepts form con-cons and others bounce around until they encounter a counterpart. In the first instance of this activity, which concepts contact which others is simply a factor of chance, of first-come/first-serve. But in all future instances, a causative agent pushes concepts one way or another.
This causative agent is the meme. It can enter the brain — the brain, from the outside, now has tubes connecting to it, similar to a dumpster at the bottom of a building’s system of trash chutes — through the eye, the ear, the mouth, the skin, or the nose. Once it enters (remember, I’m not imagining what a meme looks like, but only its effects), it flows through the concepts like a bullet through a tank of water. As every bullet leaves a unique imprint in the walls it passes through, every meme leaves its unique imprint in the tank of concepts. That imprint is a space between the concepts. Going back to the bullet in the tank of water, imagine a snap-shot of the instant when a bullet has left a certain space and the water molecules have yet to fill it in; extend that instant back one further, watch the water flow out of the trail of the bullet, as if the bullet were Moses walking through the Red Sea. That empty space is the wake of the meme. Now, leaving that emptiness, that wake of the meme, imagine another meme, leaving its own wake behind it, passing through the wake of the first from a perpendicular angle. The two wakes cross through each other; from above, they resemble a crossroads. Add a third meme flying through this at still another angle; a fourth meme and angle; a fifth; a sixth. The individual concepts are constantly being shifted by the memes. The dust of roadrunners is the effect of the memes.
Let’s look at it still another way, trying to find one view that is not as shifty as those that have come before are.
One thing with which I’ve been wrestling is how a meme exists when no two people can ever have the same concepts. I’ve reached the latter conclusion by realizing the slipperiness of language; you can never exactly understand what I am thinking because I can never communicate it nor can you understand it in an objective manner. Because of my experiences, I attribute every word I use with a connotation. You do the same thing. Because my experiences can never be the same as yours, the full meaning of the words I use are not equal to the full meaning of the same words in your vocabulary; similarly, the concepts we have are created by our unique experiences. While we may share similar experiences, we can never share the exact experience; same with concepts: they can be similar but never the same. That is why each concept in my visual metaphor is unique.
Now, if the effects of a meme is the wake it leaves as it shoots through the concept-tank, each wake will be unique, even if the meme came from someone else; the meme that is this sentence is leaving a different wake in your brain than it does as it flies through mine, the reason being that the edges of the wake are blurry. If we inspect the edges of the wake with a microscope, we see that each concept has its own unique shape; for example, the concept that makes up the very edge of a point in my wake is shaped differently than the concept at the same point in your wake; while the overall wake is similar, the exact details of it are different.
This has its effect on the meme as well. As it speeds through your concept-tank, some of your concepts grind the meme and others lose parts of themselves to it. The meme mutates. As it exits your brain and enters another, it is not the exact same meme that left my brain; your concepts have transformed it in a unique manner.
In some sense, however, it is the same meme. In the same way that a car that has been stripped of all of its parts is the same car as the one that left the factory. There is something identifiable to it, a sense of itself through the effects of time and experience. We are able to track a given meme (in this visual metaphor) by the pattern of its wake.
Let’s look at the brain-tank in two dimensions, as if looking at a fish tank from the side. I see it as a rectangle with the wide sides on the horizontal and the short sides on the vertical. A meme enters the tank from the exact center of the left vertical piece, moves about a quarter of the way through the tank, then, at a right angle, moves down for almost a third of the height; it take a sharp right, and moves straight for another 1/2 of the tank before turning upwards and going almost to the top edge of the tank; then it takes another sharp turn and exits the tank at the top right point of the tank. The pattern it took through the tank is, for all measurable purposes, the meme. If we were to look at the next tank the meme entered, we would see the same pattern. Though the concepts in each are different, the pattern they’re arranged in is the same.
As we can see, the only way to talk of memes is through analogy and metaphor. At some point, while writing this post, I forgot that, and I manipulated what the meme could do by what the metaphor would allow. In essence, I stopped talking about memes and talked only of the metaphor. This is what I mean when the study of memes is the study of metaphor. At least, this is what I think I mean.