“Meme” is a word that was coined by Richard Dawkins in
his book The Selfish Gene. It has been discussed a lot,
and it has itself become a meme. When reading Susan
Blackmore’s The Meme Machine, I realized that even
in treatises specifically devoted to the meme concept,
the fundamentals are not explained very well. This is partly
natural since the concept itself is vague and changing.
But I decided to write this introduction to memes as
an attempted clarification. I am fairly sure that people
who talk about memes mean rather different ideas by that word,
and saying things as explicitly and simply as possible should
help in seeing what those different ideas are and in discussing
them. So this is my view on memes, or the particular mutant of
the meme concept in my mind. I will try to explain the idea
without any reference to genes, or to biology in general. My point
is that such a presentation should be possible if Dawkins and
Blackmore are right.

A meme is an idea, any idea. It is something in human mind.
It could be the idea (the essential content) of a joke, or
a scientific hypothesis, or the idea that we shouldn’t eat meat.
The human mind is full of ideas, some of which live a very short
lives whereas others might have been adopted in early childhood
and kept through the individual’s whole life. Some ideas have
the property of being either true or false, or perhaps being
partly true and partly false, on the basis of their correspondence
with the reality outside the human mind. Or perhaps you have
a different truth theory. The point, anyway, is that some ideas
are propositions in the logical sense; a scientific hypothesis,
is a typical example. But most ideas aren’t propositions;
a joke is just a story, and whether it is based on actual events
is irrelevant. The principle “eating meat is wrong”, or any
moral principle, might be regarded as a proposition by
some philosophers. And an idea that merely consists of, say,
giving preference to Dom Perignon over other brands of champagne
surely isn’t a proposition. (It still need not be just a matter
of taste; it might be an idea adopted from literature and films,
even before tasting any champagne.)

Although animals and extraterrestrial beings and man-made
systems might conceivably have something that can be called
a mind, and thus memes, I’ll discuss ideas in human mind only,
since we know for sure that there is such a thing as human mind
and we live with it. Whether we really know what the human mind
is and how it works is a different issue.

Several treatises on the meme concept do not make it clear whether
a written, drawn or otherwise recorded idea is a meme, too. The
terminology isn’t that relevant. The relevant thing is to distinguish&#