One might regard the reduction of the highly complex nature of ideas
(such as religion, politics, war, justice, and science itself) to a
one-dimensional series of memes as an abstraction and, as such, a
process which does not increase one’s understanding. The highly
interconnected, multi-layering of such ideas resists memetic
simplification to an atomic or molecular form; as does the fact that
each of our lives remains fully enmeshed and involved in such “memes”.
One cannot view memes through a microscope in the way one can detect
genes — rather individuals battle and rage with their memetic heritage
every day. The levelling-off of all such interesting “memes” down to
some neutralized molecular “substance” such as “meme-substance” would
introduce a bias toward scientism and abandon the very thing that makes
ideas interesting, richly available, and worth studying.
To see such an argument for holism as against the kind of atomic
reductionism implied by memetics, see Quine's “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
This central problem with the possibility of memes has an
illustration in the inability of such a meme-reductionist proposal to
afford an explanation of how memetics itself qualifies as a meme, or,
further, how one could describe biological genetics as a rather
successful meme current in 20th-century science. Either way memes fail.
Providing such an explanation would remove the ground from which the
idea of memes themselves arose and so empty memes of all meaning.
Without such an explanation memes find themselves without reason,
limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.
Another philosophical criticism sees memetics as re-introducing, or
re-inforcing, the classic pre-20th-century form of Cartesian dualism,
that of mind versus body. Memetics seeks to include in the overall
science of evolution such a dualism in the form of meme/gene. This
dualism remains tenable, but many prominent philosophers have
criticised it widely and historians of philosophy often consider it on
the wane. Wittgenstein, in his critique of Cartesian dualism,
Philosophical Investigations, argued for the absurdity of positing two
parallel worlds, one of “body stuff”, the other of “mind stuff” whose
interaction one does not (and perhaps can not ) know. (See also
Wittgenstein's private language argument).
However, in response to such criticism one might add that
memeticists have started to see memes not as atomic but as complex
interactors in an environment of other memes and physical entities, a
development pre-figured perhaps in the theory of the association of
ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, such a
response would require memetics to prove it had some value to add to
such complexity in order to prevent it falling into the same disuse as
the theory of association of ideas.
Memetics might counter the charge of dualism by noting Leibniz's
monadology. This provided a direct response to Cartesian dualism based
on an indivisible unit, the monad. Memes resemble monads in that they
lack physicality (not having shape, size, mass, charge or energy) and
yet as a totality they account for reality. Taken together they form
the sum of all experience at any given time. But this argument
essentially becomes a solipsistic exercise.
Against the charge of dualism, memeticists might counter that memes
in fact supersede genetics, science itself then becoming just another
meme that aims, not at the “Truth”, as such, but at the useful.
However, memetics would then have undermined its own truth and the
history of its own arrival on the scene, thus becoming yet another
ontotheology.
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