Memes are fields

First published on Substack (Opens in a new window).

The synch of minds is weird.

For more than ten years now I'm thinking about memetics in the traditional, non-internetjoke way. In the classic analogy by Richard Dawkins, memes are akin to genes, ideas of all kind that reproduce and jump from brain to brain.

I think this is a wrong analogy because (as of yet) we can't find any replicator, a thing that actually reproduces and copies itself. Memetics as a biological metaphor fails because you can't find those replicators. Genes replicate in reproductive processes called mitosis and meiosis, via division and multplication of cells. Ideas, blueprints, concepts and qualia don't really do this.

But memetics don't fail as a physical metaphor, because ideas work like fields. Within their reach they synchronize neurobiological and psychological processes (Opens in a new window) across individual consciousnesses via interbrain synchrony (Opens in a new window). Seen this way, memetics describe the synchronization of minds through media, most effectively via social media.

The most well known pre-internet methods of interbrain synchronization were language and music. The former synchs a consciousness with the collective via speech and mass media, the latter via soundwaves. The former makes us think about the same stuff, the latter makes us dance.

Synch can be done in all kinds of ways, fashion or movies, live music (Opens in a new window) ofcourse, religious excercise (Opens in a new window) and mass events and so forth, but these synchronisations are limited in time and space by definition as an event. Social Media reach can be global and has potentially no limit, besides the number of human minds on this planet.

If you're crazy enough, you can now think about these memetic synchronization fields in entropic terms: Memes in conscious brains reduce entropy and create spontaneous orders, as described by Steven Strogatz in his book about the mathematics of "Sync (Opens in a new window)" (he actually has a chapter about memetics at the end of that book). And if you're completely bonkers you can state that the common goal of the universe is to form matter which forms conscious blobs of flesh that synch up to reduce entropy and thus to postpone the heat death of the universe (and then build intelligent machines that are even better at this). Asimovs psychohistory (Opens in a new window), the development of a collective consciousness and telepathy (Opens in a new window) become scientific plausible concepts viewed this way.

If you think this is crazy, eat this: our digital psychosocial playgrounds are actually hormone-marketplaces distributing oxytocin- and dopamine-shots (Opens in a new window). And oxytocin, the so-called "love-hormone", increases interbrain synchrony (Opens in a new window).

Basically, oxytocin made us social animals that formed tribes, then the development of shared intentionality (Opens in a new window) and the formation of ritualistic and shamanic religios behavior initiated the ability of our brains to synch up and form pre-collective consciousnesses, which optimized our brains for cooperation (Opens in a new window). Then the technologies of language, writing, print and now the web and social media intensified and enforced these abilities. Interbrain synchrony is largely dependend on visibility (Opens in a new window) and social media increased the visibility of human behavior and thinking manifold, so much that social networks reduced the famous “six degrees of bacon (Opens in a new window)” down to 3.57 (Opens in a new window).

If this is right, it has all kind of implications. Extreme synchronization based on oxytocin leads to tribalism, nationalism and fascism, the exclusion of the other (the "unsynched") and the crystalization of power in harmonized organizational structures. Leftwing thinking, dealing and operating with chaos and deriving new ways of seeing the world from it (which is why lefties are so good at things like art and philosophy), is a way to break these synchronization patterns, increase entropy, just to make place for new synchronizations to take place and reduce it again.

History then becomes a playground for synchronizing and entropic forces, a pendulum swinging from synched to chaotic states, reducing and increasing entropy along the way, creating ever more sophisticated ways of seeing and acting in the world: A waveform in itself, evolving towards what Teilhard De Chardin, one of the first thinkers about collective consciousness, called the Noosphere (Opens in a new window).

I'm not a scientist, nor a philosopher, and all of this is extremely speculative. I'm a blogger and my professional expertise lies within graphic design, typography and social media. You really shouldn't believe what I've just written.

But if any of this stuff is right, then the future gonna be very, very weird.