491. Symbolic Patterns: Memes, Archetypes, Dragons, Genes | Dr. Richard Dawkins & Alex O’Connor

Note

Dr. Dawkins and Alex O’Connor discuss the importance of cultural symbols like the virgin birth from a metaphorical perspective, emphasizing the sacredness of certain cultural images. Jordan Peterson prioritizes scientific facts over myth, questioning the truth value of religious claims like the virgin birth and resurrection. The conversation delves into the relationship between memes, archetypes, and the evolution of religious stories, highlighting the complexity of interpreting religious texts and their underlying truths. The Baldwin effect suggests that certain learned behaviors or memes could be genetically assimilated over time, potentially impacting human evolution. The concept of archetypes, like those proposed by Jung, could potentially be genetically assimilated through the Baldwin effect, leading to the transmission of certain cultural ideas across generations. The spread of memes and the alteration of genetic processes, such as through sexual selection, could lead to rapid evolutionary changes, as seen in the Baldwin effect. The ability to sacrifice the present for the future, as dramatized in rituals like the potlatch phenomenon, may be linked to future success and could have implications for genetic assimilation through the Baldwin effect. Dr. Dawkins and Alex O’Connor discuss the Baldwin effect and its implications for genetic assimilation, suggesting a potential link to the transmission of cultural ideas across generations. The conversation touches on the differences in temperamental tacks between Dawkins and Peterson, highlighting varying interests in nonfiction and eternal truths. The preference for nonfiction and eternal truths is associated with a masculine proclivity towards things rather than people, according to the discussion between Dawkins, O’Connor, and Peterson.

Highlights

• 2024-10-26 21:25 But the idea that the archetype could be a reason why some memes spread, that seems to me to be plausible, if you believe in archetypes at all.

• 2024-10-26 21:26 Jordan B. Peterson: Spreadability, which is a salient point. And if chiming in with an archetype is a reason why they might spread, then I could go with that.

• 2024-10-26 21:27 There’s something in the structure that would make itself manifest as an archetype. There’s something that’s foundational and deep that wouldn’t change any faster, in a sense, than the species itself changes. But then there would be efflorescences of that idea that would be less permanent as they were more attuned to the specifics of the time. So, and that’s not saying anything different, really, than saying that there are ideas that make themselves manifest at different levels of depth, which is also a complex thing. It’s not that easy to specify what makes an idea deep, which makes it more archetypal, and what makes it transient and trivial. There’s a relationship between such ideas. There’s no idea so trivial that it doesn’t touch the depths, because no one would care about it.

• 2024-10-26 21:29 But archetypal ideas do have that capacity to spread virally and to rise and fall. You see that, I think you see that in the history of religious ideas, that religious ideas can be very catching, because otherwise they wouldn’t spread. Now, there’s variation in them like there is in languages, but there’s also something that’s core, that makes them identifiable, let’s say, as religious ideas, rather than as any other sort of idea.

• 2024-10-26 18:34 But there might be more room for suspicion about this concept of the archetype. I was wondering, Professor Dawkins, what you think about the concept of archetypes in general?

• 2024-10-26 21:28 Well, for example, if we take the idea of the gods competing with each other, that, I take it, is a proper archetype because it’s present in all cultures. I presume you mean, is something that’s built in genetically. Ultimately, I suppose, that something about our brains makes different cultures invent the same kinds of religious symbols and things like a battle between gods is one that’s one and there might be others. It’s not that convincing. I mean, it’s such an obvious thing because we have human battles, and therefore, an idea of battles between gods would not be that implausible. It doesn’t strike me as a very penetrating observation.

• 2024-10-26 18:57 Dr. Richard Dawkins & Alex O’Connor: Then on what grounds do we rank order the fiction in terms of quality? Like, Dostoevsky is a profound purveyor of fiction on the philosophical front, unbelievably deep and profound.

• 2024-10-26 19:24 And that makes us biologically unique too, because we can die in ideation and imagination instead of dying in actuality. Does that fundamentally redeem us?

• 2024-10-26 21:27 I talked to Camille Pellia about this. She studied the work of a man named Eric Neumann. Neumann wrote a book called the origins and history of consciousness, which is a work of genius, and also another book called the great Mother, which is study of the symbolism of the feminine. It’s a great book. Palea told me that she believed that if the academy would have turned to Eric Neumann, who’s a student of Jung, although the greatest student of Jung, and maybe one who surpassed him, that the entire culture war that’s torn the universities apart wouldn’t have happened. People don’t know this literature, and it’s. Let me give you an example. This. You tell me what you think about this. Okay, so I spent a fair bit of time studying the psychophysiology of the hypothalamus.

• 2024-10-26 19:35 Okay, so is there a worse predator than serpentine flying, fire breathing reptile? Is that not the imagistic equivalent of predator?

• 2024-10-26 21:27 So a dragon is a pictorial representation of the abstracted concept of a predator. Yes, as you say, we already have the term predator. And so it might be useful in art, in narrative, to, I mean, you can’t paint an abstraction.

• 2024-10-26 21:25 We abstracted it so that we could figure out how to deal not with a predator, but with the class of all possible predators. Right, exactly. And the appropriate way to deal with the class of all possible predators is something like a meta ethic. It’s a stance that. Let me give you an example of this.

• 2024-10-26 21:25 We actually know something about this psychophysiologically, and you can look at it spiritually or physically, and it doesn’t matter. So, for example, if you take people in psychotherapy and they’re accidentally exposed to something they’re afraid of, they have a stress response that’s damaging if it’s sustained and they become more frightened. But if you expose them to exactly the same stressor and they do it voluntarily, they manifest an entirely different pattern of psychophysiological activation.

• 2024-10-26 19:48 They adapt themselves to the structure of human memory, and they make the foundation for our most fundamental narratives. Look, you know the reference I made to Harry Potter?

• 2024-10-27 07:07 we spend most of our computational high end, computational power generating fictional worlds where we can portray meme battles so that everyone can observe.

• 2024-10-27 07:10 The best I can say is this is what I’ve learned from studying those stories. But I would also say, because I’ve studied your work, I do believe that that idea that you formulated of meme is exactly the same thing that Murcia Elliott is detailing out in his work. And I think the reason that he’s not attended to by the universities, because he’s passe in the history of religious ideas is because everything he says demolishes the postmodern Marxists, demolishes them, which is something that seriously needs to be done. And so I keep think.

• 2024-10-27 07:14 As a darwinian, I’m interested in the process of natural selection. Natural selection is the differential survival of replicating entities. DNA is a very excellent replicating entity whose replication and selection has given rise to the whole of life on Earth. I wanted to make the point that DNA is not the only possible replicator you could imagine. There might be on other, and there probably is on other planets, a different kind of replicator, not DNA. And then I thought, maybe we don’t have to go to other planets. Maybe there’s another replicator staring us in the face. The virus of the mind, something that spreads, not by DNA replication, but by imitation, from mind to mind. So it could be a fashion in clothes, it could be a musical style, it could be an accent, a speech accent. It could be a children’s game that spreads through school.

• 2024-10-27 07:18 know that women are hypergamous. They, like men, cross culturally, about four years older than they are. The most fundamental female pornographic fantasy involves vampires, werewolves, pirates, surgeons and billionaires. Dominant men who are capable of standing up to predators, who can be brought into an individual relationship. Okay, so that’s the fundamental reproductive story meme that seems to drive women. It’s allied with the hero myth. They’re the different variants of the same story, the different sexual variants of the same story. And it seems to me it’s not unreasonable to note that that’s the fundamental story of humanity. And so I don’t understand why you’re not impressed.

• 2024-10-27 07:21 I’ve even suggested, actually slightly way out suggestion that the human habit of standing on our hind legs might have been sexually selected and then genetically assimilated via the Baldwin effect. Chimpanzees do sometimes walk on their hind legs. Now if for mimetic reasons, that was sexually attractive in our ancestors, displaced as an epidemic of sexual display, then natural selection could have favored those individuals who were best at standing on their hind legs, genetically speaking, and then it would become genetically assimilated. This sexually selected memetic effect could have been genetically assimilated and given rise to the genetic tendency to walk on our hind legs.