The Meme Machine

52 THE MEME MACHINE
from your perspective when you carry them out yourself. You will see only
your hands from the near end of the ‘trumpet’. Somehow, your brain has to
create a transformation of the action I did that will enable it to instruct your
muscles to do whatever they have to do to get your action to look like mine to
someone else. Now it begins to sound complicated.
It sounds complicated because it is. Imitation necessarily involves: (a)
decisions about what to imitate, or what counts as ‘the same or ‘similar’, (b)
complex transformations from one point of view to another, and (c) the
production of matching bodily actions.
Once you realise how difficult this natural-seeming kind of act is, it is
tempting to think we cannot possibly do it – although obviously we do do it. Or
that a science of memetics cannot be based on something so peculiar. I am
reassured by simply reminding myself that human life really is like this. We do
copy each other all the time and we underestimate what is involved because
imitation comes so easily to us. When we copy each other, something, however
intangible, is passed on. That something is the meme. And taking a meme’s eye
viewer is the foundation of memetics.