
The Meme Machine
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Narrated by:
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Esther Wane
About this listen
First coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation: stories, fashions, inventions, recipes, songs, ways of plowing a field or throwing a baseball or making a sculpture.
Susan Blackmore shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began, a survival of the fittest amongst competing ideas and behaviors. Ideas and behaviors that proved most adaptive-making tools, for example, or using language - survived and flourished, replicating themselves in as many minds as possible. These memes then passed themselves on from generation to generation by helping to ensure that the genes of those who acquired them also survived and reproduced.
Applying this theory to many aspects of human life, Blackmore offers brilliant explanations for why we live in cities, why we talk so much, why we can't stop thinking, why we behave altruistically, how we choose our mates, and much more. With controversial implications for our religious beliefs, our free will, our very sense of "self", The Meme Machine offers a provocative theory everyone will soon be talking about.
©1999 Susan Blackmore; foreword copyright 1999 by Richard Dawkins (P)2019 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Performance
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-
-
Better than print!
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-
Consciousness, 2nd Edition
- A Very Short Introduction
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- Narrated by: Zehra Jane Naqvi
- Length: 4 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
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Story
Exciting new developments in brain science are continuing the debates on these issues, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This controversial book clarifies the potentially confusing arguments, and the major theories, while also outlining the amazing pace of discoveries in neuroscience. Covering areas such as the construction of self in the brain, mechanisms of attention, the neural correlates of consciousness, and the physiology of altered states of consciousness, Susan Blackmore highlights our latest findings.
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- By: Richard Brodie
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- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Virus of the Mind is the first popular work devoted to the science of memetics, a controversial new field that transcends psychology, biology, anthropology, and cognitive science. Memetics is the science of memes, the invisible but very real DNA of human society. Here, the author carefully builds on the work of scientists Richard Dawkins, Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, and others who have become fascinated with memes and their potential impact on our lives.
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- Narrated by: Karen Saltus
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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A Thousand Brains
- A New Theory of Intelligence
- By: Jeff Hawkins, Richard Dawkins - foreword
- Narrated by: Jamie Renell, Richard Dawkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence? Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses map-like structures to build a model of the world - not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought.
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Starts out good, ends up a train wreck
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By: Jeff Hawkins, and others
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- By: Richard Dawkins
- Narrated by: Richard Dawkins
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 12 fiercely funny, mind-expanding chapters, Dawkins explains how the natural world arose without a designer - the improbability and beauty of the "bottom-up programming" that engineers an embryo or a flock of starlings - and challenges head-on some of the most basic assumptions made by the world’s religions: Do you believe in God? Which one? Is the Bible a "Good Book"? Is adhering to a religion necessary, or even likely, to make people good to one another? Outgrowing God is a concise, provocative guide to thinking for yourself.
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What listeners say about The Meme Machine
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- J. C. Weaver
- 03-13-24
Rigorously thought out and argued
Her conclusions really seem unarguable, and the implications could not be more profound. Presented with kindness and sympathy for the resistance one might feel towards her ideas. Ends up being quite comforting really.
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- NJB13
- 02-06-20
Essential reading on Evolution
An essential read for anyone interested in evolution. My question to Susan would be - "Was it necessary to inject your destroy-the-self-meme meme at the end?"
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- ade adetayo
- 10-21-21
simultaneously illuminating as well as confusing
close to Richard Dawkins style of thinking and writing.
takes some of his ideas further.
loved it.
Not sure how much I agree with. But it does make I think about what really goes on inside.
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- Kindle Customer
- 01-07-20
British accent of narrator may not appeal
I normally like listening to books where narrators have British accents.
This book is an exception.
It reached a point that I shuddered every time I heard the word EEEEE-volution.
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- J Garner
- 08-07-21
Deep and well argued
This is a deep and well argued conceptualization of memes. It is a great starting point for further thought.
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- Hans Thieme
- 02-14-22
memes are gut bacteria, not godlike puppet masters
there are a few things that really bug me about this book. but i suppose they are all just intellectual disagreements. we do see imitation in other animals, such as chimpanzees bashing nuts with stones. this meager start of "imitation" does not then give way to a new all powerful replicator that brings the species into dominance, it is a meme, but it is stagnant.
i suspect the root issue is that me and the author disagree about the primary selection pressures on humans. to me, memes in humans have become a dominant force because we are a very rare large eusocial species. eusociality causes communication to become much more complex and abstract. it is when memes are added to this situation, with the addition of large brain size and selection for constant "memetic warfare", that human memes evolve.
additionally, humans do have another brand of replicator, they are the bacteria in the gut. but these bacteria do not control us like a dog on a leash, the only reason they are allowed to exist is because our body has figured out how to regulate them so that on average they benefit our fitness. the exact same almost certainly takes place in our brains. we should be studying the brains immune defenses from memes, rather than a complete subservience as implied by this book.
finally for such a speculative field, i feel more attention should have been placed on real examples. the evolution of science, religions, cultures, computer science. (online dna can be translated into a virus, so you can "catch" diseases over the internet. and memes can be turned into viruses as well, showing these are one and the same).
but i suppose strong disagreement on the fundamentals is still to be expected at this point
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- Dakota limberhand
- 05-31-21
I'm a mf meme machine
I have never felt more up-to-date on meme then I am right now. praise the meme!
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- Gavin R.
- 12-25-23
Voice
Narrator is too British and Woman. British woman. She's bri'ish innit? The british are notoriously the narration of all time.
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- João pedro
- 12-25-21
Narrator kinda killed the book
Never has this been an issue for me in any of the audiobooks i own. I always thought of it as a petty critique that many point out in otherwise great books. This one is unbearable though. Apologies to the narrator but honestly it feels Luke it's being read by a text to speech software. completely monotonical throughout the entire listen. Will trade for another after 30mins in. Writing it to save others from the hassle.
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- Michael
- 06-13-20
Insightful but incomplete
This had some interesting thoughts, but I felt like Blackmore never quite defined what a meme was in her usage, and her apology for not quite defining it was not quite satisfactory. She also didn't clearly show how memes are truly independent of genes, because I don't think they are, and a lot of what she ascribed to memes could just be complex neurology and biology dependent on genes. If memes are a new separate replicator, how are they different from, say, human bodies, which also replicate? Biologists would say that genes make human bodies in order to make more genes, but Blackmore didn't clearly demonstrate why memes aren't also the creation of genes for making more genes.
I appreciated her discussion at the end about Self. It's an important discussion, and I think she's on the right track. I'm not sure I love her conclusion about how to live in light of the absence of self, but she's probably logically consistent there. If there's no self and no suffering, there's no enjoying. Ergo, nihilism. Food for thought.
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