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This digital document is an article from Business Publisher, published by JK Publishing, Inc on April 1, 2009. The length of the article is 347 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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Title: Range of new journals from Springer.
Author: Unavailable
Publication: Business Publisher (Newsletter)
Date: April 1, 2009
Publisher: JK Publishing, Inc
Volume: 23Issue: 15Page: 6(1)

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

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Of course, like all good memes, the ideas in Brodie's book aredouble-edged swords.They can vaccinate against the effects ofcognitive viruses, but could also be used by those seeking power togain it even more effectively. If you don't want to be left behind inthe coevolutionary arms race between infection and protection, readabout memes. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (86)

Memes at work?
Although I think that the concept of the meme and a science of memetics would be very helpful in understanding culture and how it develops, I'm not certain that all discussions of how memes work in present day society is necessarily new or helpful.Mr. Brodie's book seems to me, therefore, something of a "pop-psychology" book that represents itself as something more than it is.

Psychology as a field has already done and continues to do an adequate job of enlightening us on our behaviors and motivations without any need to refer back to Darwinian theories. Cordelia Fine's book A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives, for instance, discusses many of our subconscious processes, the "whys?" and "whats?" of our various opinions, prejudices, and behaviors, and does so with experimental evidence to support them.Evidence, however, is what is conspicuously absent from Mr. Brodie's book, "Virus of the Mind."Although much of what he tells the reader is undoubtedly true, it is also mostly a rehash of evolutionary theory, and where memes come into play, mostly of the sort of "just so" category of "proof."

I agree with the author that every society is "infected" by its own culture and that different aspects of any given culture can be passed on to "infect" others.Cultural anthropology has collected abundant evidence that mankind is capable of producing almost limitless forms of behavior and material artifacts and of passing these on between generations and neighboring groups.This is anything but new.Frasier's classic book on magic and religion, The Golden Bough, among others, contains vast amounts of information on culture (not all of them reliable facts, however).It proves, if nothing else, that anthropology as a discipline has been and continues to be thoroughly active in its study of what we do, why we do it, what we make and how we use it.

Our fascination with the almost expotential rise in material culture since the first stone tool and with the impact of technology on individuals seems to scream for an explanation.Just the simple fact that it took almost a million years from the invention of a simple shaped cobble tool to create another style of tool and another 800,000 before the next style after that, especially in the presence of the current speed of cultural change, challenges our big brains to come up with an answer to "why?"John Burke's series Connections 1 (5 - Disc Set) makes it abundantly clear as to why.It takes a certain critical mass of ideas before a new one can take shape; in short the birth of a new idea has to actually be possible in context.A Paleolithic hunter-gatherer would hardly have been able to come up with nuclear power as a substitute for environmentally polluting wood campfires!He would, in fact, have been unable to conceptualize the problem of pollution or that his environment might suffer from it, yet alone that the chronic congestion and cough he suffered was proof thereof.(Cockburn's book Mummies, Disease and Ancient Cultures on the health of early people preserved by various means reveals the commonness of lung diseases from this source of pollution). Furthermore, as this series also makes clear, changes in technology proceed in tandem.It requires at least a minimal investment in infrastructure to produce electricity, and that infrastructure has to wait until some degree of precision manufacturing is possible or even understood as necessary.Furthermore society has to be convinced that the new technology is useful.Hero of Alexandria is known to have invented and understood the principles of steam power in the first century AD, but Greco-Roman society functioned on slave labor and saw no reason to do otherwise.It was in fact awash in slave labor because of its successful military exploitation of a fair share of the settled world around it.Water power was not even regularly exploited until the cost of labor--slave or wage--became more dear.

What the author seems to neglect is that a science of memetics isn't about changing what we do, how we do it, or what we make--at least not at the outset--but about understanding how it fits into who we are and how we got that way.If memes like genes have something to say about our evolution and our "fitness" as an organism, just what is it and how does it work biologically?Susan Blackmore's book The Meme Machine (Popular Science) goes a long way in pointing this out, suggesting a definition of meme, suggesting how it might work, and suggesting how this might be tested experimentally.At this point in the incipient science it hardly seems appropriate to begin application of principles we don't even know exist to problems that already have other sciences invested in their research.

I came away feeling that the author's intention was simply to infect me with yet another meme, one that encouraged me to buy the book and absorb the information as factual.In short it's another self help book.Unfortunately like most self help books, it requires the reader to apply its principles to a life in progress, which is not always easily done.Our lives play out in the midst of hundreds of others and are embedded in the culture in which we live them.Changes can sometimes be difficult.Which is why we have so many different self help books out there, and yet we still remain unchanged despite them.I am proof positive; I've read books on how to decrease clutter, reduce my spending, lose weight, gain confidence, stop being anxious, find love, etc.I still live in a messy house, buy way more than I actually need, am unhealthily overweight, lack any more confidence than I ever had, am habitually anxious, and totally loveless--although I'm frequently less happy when I'm in love, so I'm probably ahead of the game in that respect.I wasn't all that successful in changing myself; but the authors of the books were highly successful in getting them sold and me to buy one!Successful memes at work perhaps?

Great book for waking people up.
If you are looking for a hard core scientific study of memes than this book is most likely not for you. However, if you want an introduction to memes along with concise definitions, then this book is a good place to begin.

Memes are culturally conditioned ideas that replicate themselves; in this sense Brodie uses a metaphor of a virus to describe these culturally conditioned mutations. Memes - like viruses - follow normative conditions: i.e., like a virus a meme duplicates itself, it infiltrates, and it spreads. Whatever your ideology may be, the goal of an idea is to replicate, infiltrate, and spread itself to others.

This is the goal of politics, marketing, or any other ideological based system.

Brodie is attempting to bring awareness so people can then evaluate objectively the way they are being manipulated by political organizations, marketing gurus, business, religious leaders, or any other organization intent on influencing human behavior.

The book is worthwhile if for no other reason than to make one aware of the way cultural entities seek to hook your belief system - and using another popular metaphor - make you part of the BORG Nation of true believers: left, right, or middle.

Ultimately The Memes of This Book Won't Spread
Overly simplistic view of why some ideas become popular and others don't.Interesting because it analogizes spreading of ideas, or memes, to evolutionary spread of genes.There have been subsequent books on the subject, notably Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point,"and Seth Godin's "Unleashing the Ideavirus," that delve deeper into how memes are transmitted.

Brodie's Self-Promoting Mind Virus
I saw this book at Costco and was immediately attracted to the title, i.e., "What the heck is a "meme""? The title itself is a meme, which, I suppose, was Brodie's intent, I know it certainly piqued my interest. The book proved to be very informative for a person, such as myself, who was totally unfamiliar with memetics, and from that perspective it was well worth the read, however, I also found it rather self-promoting and somewhat disjointed. What was the purpose, for example, of the author's mini-tirade regarding the erosion of state's rights in favor of a more centralized form of government? To me, that was more of a personal political statement and a prime example of a mind virus. Though thought-provoking, the concept of memetics still remains nebulous to me but certainly deserves further exploration.

virus of the mind
I ordered this book for my husband who has completely devoured it.He is a total nonfiction reader and thought this book was excellent in all aspects.He recommends it to anyone interest in our current situation with the federal government and its policies. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (25)

Profoundly thought provoking
This book is a rare gem, providing the general reader with an interesting and valuble way of looking at the sometimes mysterious cults of popularity that many ideas including religions, taboos and politics engender. This is not a scholarly work (although it is based on substantial research) but a more of an introduction for the lay person to memetics.

I first read it when it first came out about 10 years ago, and likeEric K. Drexler's "Engines of Creation" it has kept echoing in my mind ever since.

Banal and trite - look at Goffman's work for the real thing
This book is a poor exposition of a poor theory. The idea of a viral analogue for ideas spreading is not that profound (it's a kind of lightweight analogy that fails to identify the nature of the host, the nature of the contagion, the nature of the conversion etc). If you want to read the best account of the standard Meme theory, then read Dawkin's Selfish Gene.

However, rather than that you might want to go back to a genuine mathematical epidemic model for the spread of beliefs. This was put forward by Goffman et in 1967-71 in a series of papers in Nature and other journals, analysing the spread of symbolic logic through Europe in the 19th century - these are very interesting to read in and of themselves, but also show why the Meme theory is insufficient in and of itself. Refs are

GOFFMAN, W., and NEWILL, V.A. Communication and epidemic processes. Proc. Royal Soc. A 298 (May 1967), pp316-334.

GOFFMAN, W. Mathematical approach to the spread of scientific ideas. Nature. 212 (Oct. 1966), pp449-452

GOFFMAN, W. A Mathematical Method for Analyzing the Growth of a Scientific Discipline (JACM 18(2) April 1971 pp12-28

GOFFMAN, W., & HARMON, G. Mathematical approach to the prediction of scientific discovery. Nature, 229, 1971 103-104.

GOFFMAN, W., & WARREN, K. S. Scientific information systems and the principle of selectivity (pp. 22-25). New York, NY: Praeger Publishers. 1980

GOFFMAN, W., & KATZ, M. J. Performance of ontogenetic patterns. Philosophy of Science, 48, 1981 438-453.

There is also a use of the system to examine the spread of the APL mathematical programming language in J. C. Rault and G. Demars - Is APL epidemic? or a study of its growth through an extended bibliography in the Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on APL 1972 pp1-21 1972, which revisits the idea with 400 references drawn from the literature

60 years out of date
When sociobiologists finally conceded that reductionalism could not quite be explained by genes, they had found a new holy ground with people like Lynch and Dawkins.The problem here is that what Lynch advocates is at least 60 years out of date.Cultural ecology, particularly, has moved much beyond garbage written in this pseudo-scientific book.Instead of evidence, we are given conjecture.What is worse is that this conjecture simply does not stand against the HRAF (Human Resource Area Files), an anthropological database of cultures.What Lynch presents as truths, is not found in the HRAF.His explanations DIRECTLY challenge 200 years of anthropology.His examples are terrible.Consider:

Memes that are against birth control "offer the clearest examples of the quantity parental effect. By raising extra babies, followers of these memes can outpopulate nonhosts across various times and places"

Roy Rappaport, as well as Marvin Harris would groan.Population control is likely as old as humans.Anyone even slightly familiar with Cultural Ecology knows that human populations of horticulturalists and hunter/gatherers go well below the carrying capacity.Although there are explanations for this, such as cyclical starvation, or the simple fact often raised that higher population would mean more work, they go _against_ Lynch's argument.Widespread infanticide and other methods of birth control are plentiful in the HRAF.It is true that humans could perform the rabbit strategy, but they DO NOT, which is a slap in the face to everything memes try to explain.

OR, consider: "Laws against eating shellfish, pork, and other parasite-laden animals may reduce morality rates, thus propagating the movement."

Marvin Harris who did earlier research actually went to the ethnographic databases to see HOW actual cultures behave.Result: pig taboos occurred in places where they competed with humans for food.Or consider cows, another parasite-laden animal, which cannot be eaten in places like India.After lengthy analysis, supported by QUANTIFIABLE data, the economics of eating cows just wouldn't make sense.Yet ANOTHER slap in the face for Lynch.

Lynch showcases problems of not only memes, but also of reductionalist neo-Darwinism.Its results continue to be unimpressive and unscientific to the extreme.

I recommend reading cultural ecologists; Marvin Harris, in particular, is a good place to start.

There's no such thing as a meme
A sack of conjecture clothed as science.

For example - optimistic people have more children leading to greater propagation of the 'optimistic personality meme' (p71). Interesting! In addition, one must hope that the development of a science of memetics can lead to the quantification of how much optimism 'reality warrants'. Thanks to the optimism meme we're all happier than we should be.

It should not be forgotten that the 'meme' is merely a vaguely defined, hypothetical element of social transmission; let's not get carried away. I bet Richard Dawkins wishes he'd never bothered coining the term. It just provides science fiction fans the opportunity to 'understand' culture.

Robert Aungur's 'The Electric Meme' demonstrates a more credible effort to grasp this rather strange notion.

Apparently, if you hold a seashell to your ear it's memes you can hear - not the sea (Anon,2003).

Insightful and Quick!
Of course Mister Lynch offers mostly superficial coverage to this all-encompassingtopic. To do more would have required a thousand-page tome that would have gone beyond the average reader's interest and comprehension.
As it is, he has expresssed an uncanny ability to see the true nature of what drives the realm of ideas and opinions, that causes some to replicate in such a way as to give the appearance of contagions. A clear message makes itself available to the astute reader, that beliefs and ideas that feel comfortable are most likely to be the ones that prove harmful--kind of like the way that good-tasting food is the kind your doctor eventually makes you avoid if you want to go on living. The bland, the ugly, that kind that takes a little work to chew, is the kind that ends up being the good stuff.
Mister Lynch wisely (I thought) left the implications of memetics for future resolution. His insights into the gaming nature of what drives the spread of ideas are what make this book a definitely worthwhile read, and a step to take before going after the deep stuff offered by other authors. ... Read more

Product Description
Do you think your thoughts, or do your thoughts think you? Do your core beliefs about reality - about God, about Humanity, about what's possible for yourself, other people or for the future of our planet - serve you, or do you serve your beliefs? Are you trapped inside a mental "box" of perceived limitation that impedes your worldly success, that thwarts your spiritual development, and which prevents you from manifesting the very best inner and outer life you can imagine? What if everyone, everywhere, shared this same, sad state? How might breaking out of our "boxes" and freeing our minds improve our lives, revitalize our culture and open the door to a bright and bountiful future for all Humanity?

Best-selling author Esra Free writes: [Casspriano] cuts through all the Traditional religious and New Age mystic mumbo jumbo to reveal a simple step by step path anyone can follow topersonal enlightenment and the positive transformation of our world. An amazing achievement! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Unique and Inspiring Wake Up Call
This is a second edition of Casspriano's 21st Century spiritual classic "FREE YOUR MIND," The Simplest Path to Personal and Planetary Awakening Step One:: FREE YOUR MINDwith a new cover, and a with few interior changes that,in my opinion, genuinely improve the book. The original introduction was kind of cheeky and out of place, tone-wise, compared to the very smart and wholly user-friendly rest of the book - in this edition, that intro is gone, replaced by the old chapter one, and the book has better flow and consistency for the change. The type is a bit smaller, but the lines are also a bit further apart (more white space between them), which overall, makes for a very comfortable read. I have been walking Casspriano's "Simplest Path" to mental/spiritual freedom for more than a year now, and I can honestly say, without hyperbole, that my life has been transformed, in a variety of very positive ways. Before entering onto "The Simplest Path," I had no real idea just how hypnotized I was by things like TV, advertising, pop culture, concern for how others see me or what they think about me, traditional religious concepts, etc. I'm just an ordinary guy, so I was not more obsessed by any of these things than anybody else is, just an average American living my life swimming in the ocean of media and cultural socialization we all experience every day in this country and in this time. Before applying the understanding of reality and the consciousness-awakening techniques in this book, I would have considered myself at least reasonably "above it all," a powerful personality, free of mind and will, in charge of my own life and experience. But all of that really is total illusion. It's just nonsense, "Maya" as the Buddhists call it. Thanks to a lot of hard spiritual work, using this book as a one-of-a-kind clear guide to liberation, I now know from personal experience that I have been sleep-walking my whole life. I know this because I have awakened from the sleep of what Casspriano calls the "meme dream." I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to wake up, too.

I am reposting here my review of the first edition of this book, since a lot of people tagged it as useful on the old product page:

A UNIQUE AND INSPIRING WAKE UP CALL

This is one of the most clear-headed books I've read in years on the subject of real, nitty gritty, get your hands dirty spiritual development (as opposed to the fru fru New Age variety). So much of what passes for "spirituality" in our time amounts to some author, celebrity, priest, philosopher or self-appointed guru telling us what to "believe," sight unseen, if we want to reach heaven, attain enlightenment, achieve "ascension," etc. Casspriano takes an at times startling opposite approach. For Casspriano, such unquestioned/unquestionable beliefs are not only NOT the path to spiritual awakening, they represent the chief obstacle blocking our realization of higher consciousness. And it's not just religious beliefs ("faith") he's talking about, but all our beliefs about reality, especially those that enclose our thinking in "boxes" that limit our freedom to find solutions to real-world threats like Peak Oil, overpopulation, Global Warming, etc. Though much of the book focuses on individual enlightenment, for Casspriano, these larger planetary issues are "spiritual," as well. Whether the issue is our personal inability to find happiness or Humanity's collective rush toward physical extinction, the cause is the same - our wrong-headed beliefs about what's real. The solution is the same, as well - continuous, deep questioning. Using Richard Dawkins' concept of "memes" as a central metaphor, Casspriano first breaks down the basic process of belief, showing the mechanism in our brains by which beliefs misdirect and control our psyches, then he walks the reader through an exploration of a series of ten "anti-meme questions" aimed at breaking down the walls of our mental "boxes" and setting our minds free. With each question, he supplies an exercise designed to allow the reader to attain a personal taste of reality "beyond the box," especially as flavored by that chapter's "Key Question." For the most part, this formula works very well (with a few rare moments of over-exuberance on the author's part, as already described in other reviews, though as a card carrying vegan environmentalist, I can't say I particularly minded), delivering a cumulative series of death-blows to some of the most basic "pillars" of our present human consensus reality. Beyond the walls those pillars supported lies real reality, where we are all interconnected and interdependent, and, in Casspriano's view, mutually destined for greatness, if we can just wake up and grab the reins of our runaway culture in time. This is not a book for spiritual "feel gooders" seeking soft assurances that they're perfect just they way they are and everything's going to be all right, no matter what. This is a wake up call, a tool kit and a concrete action plan for becoming individually enlightened and collectively saving the world, all rolled up into one. That, I think, is a cause well-worthy of exuberance.

A Unique and Inspiring Wake Up Call
This is a second edition of Casspriano's 21st Century spiritual classic "FREE YOUR MIND," (The Simplest Path to Personal and Planetary Awakening Step One:: FREE YOUR MIND)with a new cover, and a with few interior changes that,in my opinion, genuinely improve the book. The original introduction was kind of cheeky and out of place, tone-wise, compared to the very smart and wholly user-friendly rest of the book - in this edition, that intro is gone, replaced by the old chapter one, and the book has better flow and consistency for the change. The type is a bit smaller, but the lines are also a bit further apart (more white space between them), which overall, makes for a very comfortable read. I have been walking Casspriano's "Simplest Path" to mental/spiritual freedom for more than a year now, and I can honestly say, without hyperbole, that my life has been transformed, in a variety of very positive ways. Before entering onto "The Simplest Path," I had no real idea just how hypnotized I was by things like TV, advertising, pop culture, concern for how others see me or what they think about me, traditional religious concepts, etc. I'm just an ordinary guy, so I was not more obsessed by any of these things than anybody else is, just an average American living my life swimming in the ocean of media and cultural socialization we all experience every day in this country and in this time. Before applying the understanding of reality and the consciousness-awakening techniques in this book, I would have considered myself at least reasonably "above it all," a powerful personality, free of mind and will, in charge of my own life and experience. But all of that really is total illusion. It's just nonsense, "Maya" as the Buddhists call it. Thanks to a lot of hard spiritual work, using this book as a one-of-a-kind clear guide to liberation, I now know from personal experience that I have been sleep-walking my whole life. I know this because I have awakened from the sleep of what Casspriano calls the "meme dream." I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to wake up, too.

I am reposting here my review of the first edition of this book, since a lot of people tagged it as useful on the old product page:

A UNIQUE AND INSPIRING WAKE UP CALL

This is one of the most clear-headed books I've read in years on the subject of real, nitty gritty, get your hands dirty spiritual development (as opposed to the fru fru New Age variety). So much of what passes for "spirituality" in our time amounts to some author, celebrity, priest, philosopher or self-appointed guru telling us what to "believe," sight unseen, if we want to reach heaven, attain enlightenment, achieve "ascension," etc. Casspriano takes an at times startling opposite approach. For Casspriano, such unquestioned/unquestionable beliefs are not only NOT the path to spiritual awakening, they represent the chief obstacle blocking our realization of higher consciousness. And it's not just religious beliefs ("faith") he's talking about, but all our beliefs about reality, especially those that enclose our thinking in "boxes" that limit our freedom to find solutions to real-world threats like Peak Oil, overpopulation, Global Warming, etc. Though much of the book focuses on individual enlightenment, for Casspriano, these larger planetary issues are "spiritual," as well. Whether the issue is our personal inability to find happiness or Humanity's collective rush toward physical extinction, the cause is the same - our wrong-headed beliefs about what's real. The solution is the same, as well - continuous, deep questioning. Using Richard Dawkins' concept of "memes" as a central metaphor, Casspriano first breaks down the basic process of belief, showing the mechanism in our brains by which beliefs misdirect and control our psyches, then he walks the reader through an exploration of a series of ten "anti-meme questions" aimed at breaking down the walls of our mental "boxes" and setting our minds free. With each question, he supplies an exercise designed to allow the reader to attain a personal taste of reality "beyond the box," especially as flavored by that chapter's "Key Question." For the most part, this formula works very well (with a few rare moments of over-exuberance on the author's part, as already described in other reviews, though as a card carrying vegan environmentalist, I can't say I particularly minded), delivering a cumulative series of death-blows to some of the most basic "pillars" of our present human consensus reality. Beyond the walls those pillars supported lies real reality, where we are all interconnected and interdependent, and, in Casspriano's view, mutually destined for greatness, if we can just wake up and grab the reins of our runaway culture in time. This is not a book for spiritual "feel gooders" seeking soft assurances that they're perfect just they way they are and everything's going to be all right, no matter what. This is a wake up call, a tool kit and a concrete action plan for becoming individually enlightened and collectively saving the world, all rolled up into one. That, I think, is a cause well-worthy of exuberance. ... Read more

Product Description

From biology to culture to the new new economy, the buzzword on everyone's lips is "meme." How do animals learn things? How does human culture evolve? How does viral marketing work? The answer to these disparate questions and even to what is the nature of thought itself is, simply, the meme. For decades researchers have been convinced that memes were The Next Big Thing for the understanding of society and ourselves. But no one has so far been able to define what they are. Until now.

Here, for the first time, Robert Aunger outlines what a meme physically is, how memes originated, how they developed, and how they have made our brains into their survival systems. They are thoughts. They are parasites. They are in control. A meme is a distinct pattern of electrical charges in a node in our brains that reproduces a thousand times faster than a bacterium. Memes have found ways to leap from one brain to another. A number of them are being replicated in your brain as you read this paragraph.

In 1976 the biologist Richard Dawkins suggested that all animals -- including humans -- are puppets and that genes hold the strings. That is, we are robots serving as life support for the genes that control us. And all they want to do is replicate themselves. But then, we do lots of things that don't seem to help genes replicate. We decide not to have children, we waste our time doing dangerous things like mountain climbing, or boring things like reading, or stupid things like smoking that don't seem to help genes get copied into the next generation. We do all sorts of cultural things for reasons that don't seem to have anything to do with genes. Fashions in sports, books, clothes, ideas, politics, lifestyles come and go and give our lives meaning, so how can we be gene robots?

Dawkins recognized that something else was going on. We communicate with one another and we get ideas, and these ideas seem to have a life of their own. Maybe there was something called memes that were like thought genes. Maybe our bodies were gene robots and our minds were meme robots. That would mean that what we think is not the result of our own creativity, but rather the result of the evolutionary flow of memes as they wash through us.

What is the biological reality of an idea with a life of its own? What is a thought gene? It's a meme. And no one before Robert Aunger has established what it physically must be. This elegant, paradigm-shifting analysis identifies how memes replicate in our brains, how they evolved, and how they use artifacts like books and photographs and advertisements to get from one brain to another. Destined to inflame arguments about free will, open doors to new ways of sharing our thoughts, and provide a revolutionary explanation of consciousness, The Electric Meme will change the way each of us thinks about our minds, our cultures, and our daily choices. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

The Electric Meme
I picked up this book in hardcopy soon after it was published.I believe I discovered it through an Amazon recommendation, since at the time I had been reading some of Richard Dawkins' works.Dawkins had proposed the idea of memes as a complimentary speculation to his own work in biology and evolution.However, despite Dawkins expertise in biology, I had never been very impressed by the concept of memes, which seemed rather fuzzy to me.Nonetheless, I did buy Robert Aunger's book, but then left it on a shelf until recently.
Now that I have read the book there are several things that I wish to praise.First of all, Aunger has taken the fuzzy concept of memes and crafted it into a rational, scientific endeavour.He has done so by painstakingly analyzing the idea against the background of a wealth of scientific data as well as the history of various schools of thought regarding mental processes.Secondly, he has based his analysis firmly within evolutionary theory thus avoiding the pitfalls of Platonic forms.Aunger comes down firmly within the material camp of philosophy and yet manages to refute behaviourism.He also provides interesting parallel discussion on the subjects of prions and computer viruses and applies these to the quest for memes.
The Electric Meme is indeed an impressive work of philosophy.However, the reader should be forewarned on two points.First of all the book is written in a very rigorous style; it is a consummate philosophical work and not casual reading for laymen.Secondly, despite the progress the author has provided toward a rational concept of memes, he has not solved the riddle.His achievement has been to sketch a clear and reasonable way forward.

David Hillstrom, author of The Bridge and The Story of Our People

The Edge of Creating a Culture of Peace
I struggled with portions of this book, but it is a righteous endeavor that takes Richard Dawkins and the quasi-discipline of memetics closer to where we need to be if we are to map cultures and languages and learn how to proliferate a culture of peace and prosperity.

This is a very important work, and while I might have given it a four for its somewhat dense presentation, the author is brilliant, the topic is important, and I do not agree with those who are overly critical of this work.It is a pioneering work, and should be read together with Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, which is an edited work with a number of great minds (mostly UK) coming together to both collaborate and collide.

I have three pages of notes that I will condense here.

+ Consciousness, Cognition, Culture are new terrain
+ Ideas have a life of their own
+ Culture is a form of grouip legacy mind, knowledge, wisdom
+ The table of contents of this book is extraordinary, worthy of closse reading all by itself
+ Cultural evolution appears to spiral with biological evolution
+ Social intercourse replicates (and I would add, mutates) information
+ Mind virus can be understood by looking at computer viruses
+ A "meme" is an infectuous idea
+ Roots in cognitive studies in 1960's, sociobiology (E. O. Wilson) in 1970's
+ Evolutionary psycholkogy flips sociobiology by claiming that it is not the behavior but the decision process leading to the behavior that must be studied
+ Human share 97.5% DNA with chimpanzees
+ Group IQ and the emerging studies of bacteria and baboons lends credence to this work.
+ I ask myself, "Why are languages and cultures dying?"We need to do for 183 languages and their cultures what we have been trying to do for the environment.I am finally ordering a book Paul Hawkins recommends, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, a book that talks about all the knowledge of earth stewardship that existed until Columbus brought European diseases and guns to the Americas.
+ Cultural ecology having trouble proving itself
+ Culture, not the environment, is our intellectual and emotional context
+ Epidemiology provides a model for studying viruses
+ Human behavior appears shaped by genes, memes, and the environment
+ Citing Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, a book I liked very much, the author suggests that social learning amplifies individual knowledge, and is vital in complex circumstances.I recommend Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration and Five Minds for the Future for further study.
+ Culture is a dynamic for information sharing
+ Citing Pinker (I like this author's meticulous respect for ideas from others properly cited), Information is the ultimate gift without a price tag
+ Pasge 140, "Why does information matter? Because the *structure* of the universe--that is, matter and energy==is a function of the distribution and quantity of information.
+ Author discusses E=mc2 and how the idea went from Einstein, to his parrot, to his parrot's new girlfriend, to a visitor who had been struggling for a decade with the question Einstein answered.From this I realize the equation that will govern the rest of my life:

P2 = M4IS x I5

Prosperity and Peace can be achieved by combining the Swedish concept of Multinattional Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing (M4IS) with Intelligence, Imagination, Intuition, Initiative, and Innovation (I5).We need to get away from the material world and explode the mental world by connection the five billion poor with cell phones and sharing knowledge with them one cell call at a time.

The author points out that most of what we know is not in our heads, but stored in artifacts (e.g. the human genome data no one mind could handle).

On page 327, some provoicativee statements about a new mental planet with its own ecology.

I am absolutely wowed by the author's conclusion:we only just begun to understand ourselves and the societies we inhabit.

Am beginning to think I am going to have to spend some time at Cambridge and Oxford as well as Harvard and Stanford and MIT as well as the foundations.As a result of reading this work, I have planned three edited works for 2009:

GIFT INTELLIGENCE: How individual and organizations can orchestrate and optimize giving

CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE: Nurturing the Five Minds Everywhere

ABNORMAL Intelligence: From Bacterial to Extra-Terrestial

Am shaking my head as I finish this up and move to review the other book.This is deep deep good stuff that could help us chart a course for growing a new generation that values peace and prosperity over war and cheating.

See also:
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world

A species should not define a kingdom
In the Electric Meme Robert Aungersuggests that neurophysiologists should be able to find physical evidence that certain electrical patterns generated by neural nets in the human brain, are capable of replicating themselves, either at the same spot or, significantly, at some other similar spot in the same or another brain, and that it is the pattern itself that is a significant reason for its replication, as opposed to the fact that the pattern is the inevitable consequence of some important object or process out in the world being surveyed by sensory mechanisms.Additionally, the pattern is not perfectly replicated, giving rise to various versions of it in a competitive environment, which are then subject to natural selection.It is a brilliant idea (if not an obvious one, once it has been pointed out) that struck me as being true the moment Dawkins first released it into the meme pool in a more general form in the Selfish Gene, especially in the later versions of that book.Aunger's attempt to define the beast a little more precisely in order to assist in its experimental capture is a nice direction as long as nobody takes it too seriously.The existence of memes is one of the most delicious ideas floating around right now, and with the singular exception of Dawkins and his forgiveable insistence that it must rhyme with "creams,"I'd be comfortable to see the notion be allowed to float around unhampered a bit longer.If a scientist of whatever stripe is fortunate enough to trap something specific, with a knowable, reproducible, structure, which looks like a meme, and walks like a meme, then I say call it a meme, but don't define the whole kingdom based on a single species.

And by the way, Mr. Aunger, ribosomes do not replicate DNA, and nitric oxide is not the same thing as nitrous oxide, and a lot of specific facts in your book, could have been repaired with a little Googling prior to publication, but thank you for a fine book.

Aunger gets ahead of himself
This is rigorous and well researched, but it gets ahead of itself. To say that memes (or meme components) correspond to some sort of pattern in human brains is saying more than we know now about the correspondence between brain states and our thoughts and experiences. If we don't know this for one brain, then certainly we don't know how these analogous states can be replicated across brains. Ambitious work, but too soon.

Memetic Determinism??
In this book Aunger tries to create a material, not metaphorical meme-an ELECTRIC MEME.His meme is a parasitic super replicator that uses the host brain to accomplish replication.He defines his meme as a millisecond neural tendency to spike across the brain's synaptic gaps.However it is well known that human consciousness requires hundreds of a second.This means that by the time one becomes aware of a meme's content it has already been replicated in one's brain.Before one becomes conscious of making a decision one's brain has already made it.Aunger suggests that free will can't survive the coming onslaught of neuroscientific advances-and if his idea holds water he might be right.

Aunger got as far as discussing neurotransmitters and nitrous oxide ions that produce neuron firing.But he has limits to how fast and how tiny he wants to go. He stopped short of including the internal quantum measurement required by cells to replicate (as articulated by McFadden in QUANTUM EVOLUTION).Although he finishes by saying he'll accept either finding of whether memes exist or not, he first leads one through 300 repetitive pages of caring a lot.He tries to piggyback his idea of the electric meme on prion and computer virus replicators.Strange that with all he had to say of comp-virus he never once used the common term cellular automata.If you can plow through this book your IQ will increase by 1%. ... Read more

Product Description
What if ideas evolved like animals? Which would be huge and dangerous, like dinosaurs? Which would be useful, like horses? And where would man fit in?

This book is about the past, present and future evolution of human ideas. Its primary emphasis is on parasitic ideologies. It examines where they come from, how they harm us and how we can remove them from our own minds and from the culture around us.

Finally, it tells us the amazing things that will become possible for humanity when they are gone. Not only religions, but also nation states, racial groups, corporations and other collectives are targeted for clear minded observation and criticism.
(350 Pages)

CONTENTS

AUTHOR INTRODUCTIONS
SEAN'S INTRODUCTION – JUDGING BY THE COVER
PAUL'S INTRODUCTION – OWNING YOUR MIND
0 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
0.1 FAITH
0.2 HIGHER POWERS
0.3 SELF SACRIFICE
0.4 PICKING ON GOD
0.5 GOD WANTS YOU DEAD
1EVOLUTION OF HIGHER POWERS
1.1 BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION 25
1.2 IDEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION
1.3 IDENTITIES AND ICONS
1.4 THE HIGHER POWERS
1.5 TAKE A BREATH
2 A BRIEF HISTORY OF CRIME
2.1 DOWN FROM THE TREES
2.2 HUNTER GATHERERS
2.3 FARMERS, WARRIORS, AND GOD KINGS
2.4 DEMOCRACY AND EMPIRE
2.5 CHURCH AND STATE
2.6 EXIT FROM DARKNESS
2.7 INTERESTING TIMES
3 YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE
3.1 KILLING THE GOOSE
3.2 CONTROLLING THE MARKET
3.3 GOOD ENOUGH FOR GOVERNMENT WORK
3.4 HOW BAD LAWS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE
3.5 PRAXEOLOGY AND OTHER BIG WORDS
4 FINDING YOURSELF
4.1 GENETIC AND MEMETIC
4.2 THE ULTIMATE QUESTION
4.3 THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY
4.4 YOUR IDEAL SELF
5 THE ART OF THOUGHT
5.1 FREE YOUR MIND
5.2 CLEANING HOUSE
5.3 LOGICAL THOUGHT
5.4 FALLACIES
5.5 BIAS OF OUR CULTURE
6 BEHEADING LEVIATHAN
6.1 WHO SHOULD I VOTE FOR?
6.2 FIGHTING FOR A FREE MARKET
6.3 ENGINEERING FREEDOM
6.4 ROLLING BACK
6.5 NEW FRONTIERS
7 PLAYING GOD
7.1 SUSPENDED ANIMATION
7.2 NANOTECHNOLOGY
7.3 AUGMENTED OR ARTIFICIAL?
7.4 LIFE EXTENSION
7.5 WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR?
8 FINAL THOUGHTS
8.1 THE LAST GENERATION
8.2 RETHINKING ATHEISM AND ANARCHY
8.3 SPREADING THE WORD
8.4 THE HERO/COWARD CHOICE
CREDITS
CONTRIBUTORS
PICTURES
READING LIST ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

worst ever written
one of the worst self help books I ever read. Don't waste your money or your time.

Great Eye Opener
This book is a shock and awe book. It will shake and rattle your core beliefs and for sure will make a better individual. I did enjoy the book lack of adornments but it is in need of footnoting and a bibliography. Why? These two elements will give the book authority.

Not everyone who will read this book will have enough scope in history, religion, politics, psychology and anthropology to really accept the contents of the book.

re-engineer your memes
This is an excellent cultural philosophy and memetic re-engineering book, chock full of ways individuals and the idealogical constructs they blindly follow assault you every hour. It will help you break out of sheeple mode if you are brave enough to try. ... Read more

Product Description
Spiral Dynamics introduces a new model for plotting the enormous economic and commercial shifts that are making contemporary business practice so complex and apparently fragmented. Focusing on cutting-edge leadership, management systems, processes, procedures, and techniques, the authors synthesize changes such as:

• Increasing cultural diversity.
  
• Powerful new social responsibility initiatives.
  
• The arrival of a truly global marketplace.

This is an inspiring book for managers, consultants, strategists, and leaders planning for success in the business world in the 21st century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (30)

spiral dynamics
I eagerly awaited this book.It came highly recommended and as I wade through the pages I am glad I bought it.It will serve as relaxation for me for a long time

You must read this!
I'll put it simply: If everyone in the world who was literate and of above average intelligence read this book it would dramatically change the world for the better. Ken Wilber refers to this book frequently, but although Wilber has a much broader scope (or maybe because he covers so much), Spiral Dynamics actually explains human psychology much more simply and to the point than Wilber does. I've read a great deal about personality types and psychological development, etc. and yet the irrationality of my family and humanity still frustrated the heck out of me. This analysis of world views and the value system of each finally brought me some mental peace. I wish I had read this when I was 20. Like Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (which introduced the concept of paradigm), this is a milestone of progress is how to think about almost everything.

Must read for Ken Wilber fans
The material in Spiral Dynamics is essential for anyone who wants to understand the positive and negative patterns of groups of people. This book explains why people are the way they are, and has helped me to pinpoint where I need to change, as well as to value my current understanding, my perspective, of the world. Because of it, I can easily let go of puzzling over the invincibly ignorant.

This book is clunky in much of its writing, and much of it is not polished. However, the information is liberating, and the last few chapters describing each meme in detail are well done.

I have read many of Ken Wilber's books and find Spiral Dynamics to be a necessary complement to his works.

Loved it, changed the world for me.
I could go on and on about the insight I gained reading this book. Beck gets a bit heady at times and I got lost, but for 80% of the book I was tuned in and learning.He uses loads of examples to illustrate his ideas and this held my attention.

This book is not so much a philosophy, but a human management book. The management of change he details can be applied to one person, a family, a church, businesses large and small, governments, unions etc. I can now look at the media in the US and see right into values of the talking heads. It makes ideology transparent, and helps explain motivations for behaviors and beliefs that seem irrational.

If your interested in understanding what all the change is about in our post modern world, this book will help.

Quite a tool to use for the future.
Spiral Dynamics has proven to be used by our church members as the future is contemplated and planning for the future. ... Read more

Product Description
This collection of essays on cognition, which involves continental as much as analytical approaches, attempts to observe cognitive processes in three areas: in culture, in nature, and in an area that can â at least from some point of view â be perceived as an âin-between❠of culture and nature: memes. All authors introduce a certain dynamic input in cognitive theory, as they negotiate between the empirical and the conceptual, or between epistemology and the study of culture. In all chapters, culture, nature, and memes turn out to be dynamic in the sense of being non-essentialist, their significations and modulating functions always being multi-dimensional. The chapters shed new light on classical themes of cognitive theory as: âproblems of creation, generation and emergence,â âanimalsâ thoughts and beliefs,â âminds and computing,â âknowledge and its social dimension,ââthoughts and emotions,â âthe innate state of lexical conceptsâ and âmemetics and stylistics.â ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

From Branddenotes.blogspot.com
Perhaps my way of thinking on memes is too ossified, but I didn't find much of value in this volume.A lot of the arguments regarding memetics were ones I had read before, or were terribly petty and pedantic critiques of Susan Blackmore's far-reaching (overreaching?) theory.And the most promising approach, Gil-White's, seemed too close to Robert Aunger's "Electric Meme" to be of much interest.

But the $60 was worth it for learning this top one-liner: "This is an empirical question, and it may be true for some domains and not for others.But we will not find the answer under the armchair."So Francisco Gil-White's piece wasn't a waste of time after all...

Axel Gelfert makes an interesting suggestion for the natural espistemic stance of human beings.It arises from the following evolutionary pressure, perhaps: "we are all in the same epistemic predicament of sometimes giving and sometimes receiving testimony.Hence, if we desire to be believed by other people - as we all, typically, do - we ought to also believe the word of others."

"Does this mean that, in spite of the warning calls of local reductionists, we are forced to adopt a default stance of uncritical gullibility?One possible way of avoiding this conclusion, I want to suggest, is to make room for a stance of *deliberate trust*.The kind of attitude I have in mind is not one of *blind trust*, in that it would not be wholly independent of such factors as content, speaker, and context, but it would neither demand that we 'monitor' *every* speaker in *every* situation.Rather, it would be the outcome of a *decision to trust*, that is: to believe, in the absence of defeating evidence, what one is told, without engaging in further inquiry." ... Read more

Product Description
In this book J. M. Balkin offers a strikingly original theory of cultural evolution, a theory that explains shared understandings, disagreement, and diversity within cultures.Drawing on many fields of study - including anthropology, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, linguistics, sociology, political theory, philosophy, social psychology, and law - the author explores how cultures grow and spread, how shared understandings arise, and how people of different cultures can understand and evaluate each other's views.Cultural evolution occurs through the transmission of cultural information and know-how-"cultural software"-in human minds, Balkin says.Individuals embody cultural software and spread it to others through communication and social learning.Ideology, the author contends, is neither a special nor a pathological form of thought but an ordinary product of the evolution of cultural software.Because cultural understanding is a patchwork of older imperfect tools that are continually adapted to solve new problems, human understanding is partly adequate and party inadequate to the pursuit of justice.Balkin presents numerous examples that illuminate the sources of ideological effects and their contributions to injustice.He also enters the current debate over multiculturalism, applying his theory to problems of mutual understanding between people who hold different worldviews.He argues that cultural understanding presupposes transcendent ideals and shows how both ideological analysis of others and ideological self-criticism are possible. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

application of technological terms to the body, mind and human relationships, or, we become the tool
The eastern churches, for example, banned musical instruments because they were believed to diminish the spirit. No one in the eastern church ever refers to him or her self as "an instrument of god."

When one picks up a tool, one both limits oneself while extending one's abilities.

People talk about interfacing with each other now. An interface is something between two computers.

As you have probably surmised, my argument is only with Belkin's terminology. I believe it dooms his book.

I could never call anything brilliant that suggests 'human software.' The conceit dissappoints.

I gave a star only because the amazon commenting program requires a star rating. It is intended to mean nothing. I am critiquing only the terminology here.

A wise and erudite analysis of cultural understanding
This is a wonderfully wise, erudite, and well-written book. Don't let the title fool you. The book is not about forms of software designed to promote culture. The book is about cultural understanding, and culture software isan apt metaphor, helping Balkin to explain his position. As Balkindemonstrates in a wide variety of contexts, our tools of culturalunderstanding are a double-edged sword leading us to progress on the onehand and substantial injustice on the other. The book features anenormously valuable guide to and critique of the literature on ideology, apersuasive account of the pragmatic necessity of making transcendent claimsabout truth and justice, and extremely rich discussions of the ways wethink about the world, including, e.g., narration, metaphor, and pairedoppositions. Particularly impressive is Balkin's ability to crisply,accessibly, and fairly treat a wide variety of important thinkers from manydifferent disciples. This book should appeal to all who try to thinkbroadly whether their primary intellectual allegiance is to Anthropology,History, Law, Philosophy (analytic or continental), Political Science,Psychology, or Sociology.

Steven Shiffrin, Cornell University

A profound and sophisticated theory
I highly recommend this book, especially for scholars in law, philosophy,and political theory.It is one of the most insightful and wide-rangingbooks I have read.Balkin develops a profound and sophisticated theory ofcultural understanding - the ways in which individuals think, form theirbeliefs, values, and identities, and evaluate each other's ideas.Balkinexplains cultural understanding by using the very appropriate metaphor of"cultural software."With this metaphor, he crafts a theory ofcultural understanding that accounts for the effects of historical changeon shared belief systems as well as variation and disagreement amongindividuals in the same culture.Balkin's topic is one that is bothincredibly complex yet essential to many fields: conceptions of culturalunderstanding underpin much of the scholarly discourse in philosophy,sociology, political theory, and law.Although his project is quiteambitious, he engages it with remarkable clarity, depth, andsophistication.The book is unusual in that it masterfully synthesizesnumerous diverse fields, including philosophy, law, psychology, biology,and sociology.Balkin is at home in each of these fields, displayingcommand over the thought of such diverse thinkers such as Plato, Geertz,Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Gadamer, Goffman, and Mannheim.

Balkin is afantastic writer, able to explain his concepts very clearly withoutresorting to excessive jargon and without sacrificing complexity or nuance. The richness of his thoughtis manifested when he applies his theories toconcrete issues in law and politics, such as his powerful analysis ofracism toward the end of the book.The book is also worth reading forBalkin's absolutely superb discussion of narratives, one of the mostilluminating I have read.In sum, this book is definitely worth reading;Balkin has set forth a serious and convincing theory to be reckoned with. ... Read more