Memetic Account of Personality

Memeticists often define an individual's mind as a “playground for
memes” or as an “ecology of memes”, where the different memes that have
colonized that mind at different times interact with each other. For
example, when a mind successfully infected by the memeplex for religion
X becomes exposed to the memeplex for religion Y, memeplex X may
repulse memeplex Y: X can block Y from infecting the mind (for instance
through use of such memetic components as the meme that “all other
religions besides X are evil”).

In a person’s history, language provides the first and most
important memetic infection. Indeed, memeticians generally regard
language as a memetically evolved phenomenon. For example, even at the
level of animals, many species have evolved particular cries to convey
different meanings, such as “danger”, “hungry”, “aroused”, “go away” or
“come here”. Experiments can verify the memetic nature of the cries of
these species, showing for example that the cries do not arise when
humans raise the animals concerned: they do not generate the cries by
instinct, but learn them from other animals. Human language, as a
memetically evolved tool, can serve not only to communicate concepts
between humans, but also to combine low-abstraction concepts into
higher-abstraction ones. This combination/abstraction process, seen
memetically, constitutes creative breeding of memes, where the
interaction of several memes results in the birth of a new, combined
meme. For example, the mind of Richard Dawkins saw the creative
breeding of its memes for “replicator”, “culture”, and “mind”, and this
breeding gave birth to the new meme of “meme”.

After humans become infected with the memeplex for language —
generally during babyhood — they get infected with a series of
higher-abstraction memes, and especially values memes. Depending on the
education received by the person, the lessons drawn from experience,
and the surrounding cultural materials (tales, songs, books, etc), a
certain ecology and history of meme infection and interaction builds up
within that person’s mind. Memes generate behaviors in their host —
either spoken or acted behaviors. Because each person has an individual
memetic infection and interaction history, there emerge singular
behavior patterns. We conventionally refer to these meme-generated
patterns of behavior as a person's personality.