The Meme Machine

TAKING THE MEME’S EYE VIEW 45
progressively rewarded her for ever neater and neater begging, finally hiding the
dish behind my back and saying ‘Hup’. And in case you think this is unfair
treatment of a small weak animal by a large and powerful one I should point out
that she has successfully trained me to leave my desk to come and stroke her
when required.
Skinner also pointed out the similarity between operant conditioning and
natural selection – some behaviours are positively selected and others weeded
out. In this way learning can be seen as an evolutionary system in which the
instructions for carrying out behaviour are the replicators. Several selection
theories of learning and of brain development have been proposed but as long as
the behaviours cannot be passed on to someone else by imitation then they do
not become memes and the selection is not memetic selection.
Much of human learning is Skinnerian and not memetic, whether consciously
or not, parents shape their children’s behaviour by the way they reinforce them.
The best reward for children is attention, and rewards work better than
punishment. So if parents pay lots of attention to their children when they are
behaving well, and act uninterested when they scream or have tantrums, then
behaving well is simply in the best interests of the kids and they will do it.
Parents who do everything for their children end up with dependent children,
while those who expect their children to find their own games kit, and leave
them to reap teacher’s wrath if they are late for school, end up with children who
take responsibility for themselves. You may think you taught your daughter to
ride a bike but in all probability you just bought the bike, provided
encouragement, and trial and error did the rest. There is not necessarily
anything memetic in all of this (apart from the idea of riding a bike at all). Much
of what we learn, we learn only for ourselves and cannot pass on.
In practice, we can probably never tease out those things we have personally
learned by imitation from those we have learned in other ways – but in principle
the two are different. We know lots of things that are not memes. Some
authors, however, imply that virtually everything we know is a meme (e.g.
Brodie 1996; Gabora 1997; Lynch 1996). Brodie includes operant conditioning,
and indeed all conditioning, as memetic. Gabora goes even further and counts
as a meme ‘anything that can be the subject of an instant of experience’. This is
extremely confusing. It takes away any power of the idea of the meme as a
replicator and adds nothing to the already difficult problem of how to deal with
consciousness. If we are going to make progress we need to stick to our clear
and simple definition.