Memes and the Behavior of Beliefs

There's another kind of filtering that limits how much of the mind field we can perceive. This has to do with creating beliefs and then accepting them as real. A belief is an idea we hold on to. For example, if you believe that God is good, that women are mysterious, or that life is unfair, you have taken generations of shared experience and reduced it to one conclusion. The conclusion may be right or wrong; that's not important for the moment. Beliefs hold us together as a society. Such shared beliefs give us a clue about how mind might exist outside the body.

We all carry in our minds a large database of information that we consider fundamental. This database holds everything important that we believe about the world. It is our worldview. We depend upon it to survive for even a short time. Beliefs evolve over the centuries, and therefore some researchers look upon beliefs as being like "virtual genes," that become fixed characteristics of the brain. Theses mental genes were named "memes" by the British evolutionist Richard Dawkins, who founded a new field overnight that has proliferated considerably since then.

A meme is often compared to a virus that spreads from person to person until an entire society gets infected. It wouldn't be beneficial to our species to become infected by everything. If we were actually open to all new ideas, we would not be able to maintain a coherent view of the world. Imagine changing your view of the opposite sex, for example, every time you met a new person. In order to evolve, human beings had to make sure that they accepted only "good" memes--ideas that promoted a coherent, reliable worldview--and rejected "bad" memes, ideas that moved the mind in the opposite direction.

The basic fact that we can track the spread of beliefs the way we track the spread of avian flu provides us with another clue to the nature of the mind field: it is dynamic, shared, evolving, and powerful. It is capable of "infecting" us with good or bad beliefs without the individual actually going through any experience at all. Thus societies fight and die defending a God few have personally experienced. Nietzsche was foreshadowing memes when he said that a mistaken idea " grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be a part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence, and is effective as such."

~ Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
by Deepak Chopra