While responding to the charge that memetics is useless because ideas are Lamarkian while genetics are Darwinian, DD makes a particularly pompous and defensive --- and shallow -- response (he makes it 25 minutes into part 2 of the audio version). To show how off target the critics are, he points out that with ideas there is no distinction between the germ line and the somatic line; nor is there a distinction between genotype and phenotype. That's supposed to show that memetics is quite unlamarkian. But this reply seems embarrassingly counter-productive. For Larmarkians, who were taken seriously prior to Mendel's discoveries, were in no need of such distinctions. Theirs was a holistic account. And in that way, it actually seems all the more appropo to look at memetics under a Lamarkian lens. And it is all the more inappropriate to compare the transmission of ideas to neo-Darwinian genetics.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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