Is Critical Thinking a Meme to Counter Memes? #CritLit2010

It was a great disappointment whilst an honors student at the Australian National University, to bump up against the culture of academia, even in the art school unwilling to absorb and imbibe spiritual values in the name of ‘critical thinking’.

As Marshall McLuhan noted if you swim in it you just don’t notice it, this is the function of culture.

“Cultural Cognition is the theory that we shape our opinions to conform to the views of the groups with which we most strongly identify” (David Ropeik, 2010). With the awareness that I inherited the ideology of the sixties counter culture from my mother, I write this self defining literary piece for my peers in the #CritLit2010 course (my personal learning network, itself an academic culture).

“An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you.” Morris Berman

For this particular post I am in part inspired by fellow course participant Michael Morgan’s playful etymology and of course Stephen Downes who I have been privileged to study with through the CritLit2010 course these past weeks . I had fun with this piece.

Please note update October-The Flash movie has gone AWOL so you need the link to preview it.

Memetics attempts to account for the viral symbiotic transference of culture via cults, ideologies or marketing. Drawing from a Memetic Lexicon I use the metaphor of memes to respond to the video “Here Be Dragons” by Brian Dunning also producer of the Skeptoid Podcast.

“You should be aware, for instance, that you have just been exposed to the Meta-meme, the meme about memes…” (Glenn Grant)

Dunning  uses critical thinking as a counter-meme to promote a skeptic view of dreams, psi and natural therapies equating them with 9/11 conspiracy theories. It struck me that conspiracy theories might be Dunning’s own ‘meme-allergy’ as evidenced by his illusory correlation between alternative medicines and conspiracy theories, an obscure causal connection revealing an underlying confirmation bias, by cognitive inference?  Isn’t this what David Hume describes as a perception based on habit rather than observation?

On that note New York Times journalist Steven Kinzer wrote All the Shah’s Men, which directly linked the CIA (the US administration) to the destruction of the World Trade Centre. Kinzer reminded readers that in 1953 the CIA overthrew a democratically elected Iranian government with a torture regime. “When you terrorize other people, eventually they are going to terrorize you.” (Rev. Jeremiah Wright, 2008.)

Back to the meme theme-in the name of assisting consumers to discern pseudo scientific claims the video’s presenter, Brian Dunning commences his ‘meme infection strategy’ by deflecting any counter thinking as medievil. This is akin to British scholar John Gray’s description of Enlightenment Utopianism  ”whereby true knowledge will defeat ignorance (evil).” Mr Dunning believes it his redemptive responsibility to “inform as many people as possible”.  For skeptics like Dunning this is the “Second Coming, the defeat of ignorance and evil (= sin) by means of reliable knowledge, science and technology in particular.” (Berman 2009)

Mr Dunning employs critical thinking as his memetic ‘hook‘ in a doctrine of secular salvation, ‘baited’ by the ‘co-meme’ of scientific research underpinned by the meme of materialism. I dont doubt that he truly believes he is serving people and I respect his desire to inform. In my mind his adherence to the argument that science opposes energetic medicine is equivalent to a zealous ‘membot‘ where our meme host (Mr Dunning) through deployment of this video seeks out converts as meme ‘replicators’ to tweet, blog, Diigo and Delicious.

The ideology of scientific research itself a meme, holds to a previously held now outdated materialistic and mechanistic world view in imminent fear of having its paradigm overturned. David Bohm observed that the scientific community has reduced Quantum theory to a set of formulae (in principle to calculate anything) as a way to predict and control nature, without understanding its meaning.

Quantum physicists theorise the fundamental nature of matter as subtle, perhaps according to David Bohm even more subtle than current evidence suggests. In quantum mechanics the movements in human consciousness and physics are analogous. Particles jump from one state to another without passing through anything in between, like thoughts jump from one to the other without passing thoughts between. Consciousness studies which are at the frontier and still very open are one of the least fixed areas of science and Rupert Sheldrake asserts we don’t yet have good theories of consciousness. Is it fair to define this still open subtle matter subject matter by a mechanistic model and is that called open investigation and are the big questions being investigated?

A Skeptico podcast held between Richard Wiseman and Rupert Sheldrake debates the validity of psi (parapsychology) phenomena. Sheldrake mentions one of the challenges that paranormal researchers find is that research funding that might open up the field is withheld because of uninvestigated foregone conclusions by the scientific community. (At the end of the podcast Sheldrake and other researchers agreed to collaborate with Wiseman, however in the postscript Wiseman had yet to take them up.)

There is no evidence in the video that Dunning has ever considered the possibility that people actually experience subtle psychic or vibrational phenomena, such as telepathy or vibrational healing (examples given were craniosacral therapy and homeopathy). This equates to a type of solipsisism where Dunning is intolerant of another’s conscious experience.  Just because vibrational medicine is out of Dunning’s range does not condemn it to the Dark Ages (I am not alone in asserting that our over reliance on materialism is proof we are living one).

Dunning’s ‘naturally selected’ sampling of interviewees did not include Professors Bruce Lipton, Rupert Sheldrake, Dean Radin and the IONS Institute, The Global Consciousness Project or the late David Bohm.  The law of large numbers I notice was absent from his interviewee sampling, unlike Sheldrake’s testing of 1000 people for telephone telepathy. “By chance, if telepathy played no part, the success rate would be about 1 in 4, or 25%. In fact in a total of more than 850 trials involving 65 participants, the average success rate was 42% (p= 1×10-26) (Sheldrake, 2003)”.  Sheldrake investigates telephone telepathy because quantitative data sets show it is the most likely medium through which people experience psi phenomena while experimental conditions for his telephone research are easily replicated by other labs.

What Brian Dunning himself proves is that his handful of interviewees do not have the linguistic or logical mathematical facility to describe their healing in terms of science, which is unsurprising as a) both medicine and science are renown for  their deliberate “jargon-obfuscation” ( Csikszentmihaly, 1997) and b) Newtonian scientists themselves don’t grasp quantum theory as it applies to life and consciousness.

Dunning’s reference to the New Age completes his ‘meme-complex‘ where critical thinking, secularist and scientific evidence form a chain of immunity, a ‘vaccime’ to vaccinate against any rival memes. (I have my own aversion to New Ageisms overused by unscrupulous publisher marketers).

And what will counter the critical thinking meme?