Memes and Tropes
Recently I went to watch "Paddington goes to Peru". I saw the short about Paddington visiting the Queen and was delighted. I hadn't been to a movie in 10 or 15 years and was curious about the state of the art. I figured that a new movie about Paddington Bear couldn't be THAT intense.
WRONG.
The fast action of the movie made my vertigo worse. I could hardly get out of the theatre. I needed to hold chair backs and railings all the way out. In fact there were lots of scenes that seemed designed to trigger vertigo.
But it was PG stuff for kids - lots of threats but no actual gore.
Denise, the old friend who accompanied me to the movie, is reading The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore - one of my favorite books. We talked a bit about Paddington in terms of memes. Of course a movie like that has so many memes that it's hard to tease them apart.
I think that a meme is basically an imitated behavior. Memes evolve in the Darwinian sense. We have a replicator (imitated behavior) and variation (because the imitation can be imperfect) and a selection pressure (ie which copy works better). The replicant who is better than others at meeting that pressure leaves more replicant than they do. This means that in the future the replicants will get better and better at meeting that selection pressure.
Things that fulfill those criteria will evolve - that is - they will get better and better at meeting whatever the selection pressure is.
I've seen this happen in movies. There is the overarching meme of "movie" but within that meme there are lots of other memes. From the mists of time we get the meme of a hero running a narrow passage with a huge boulder on his heels. A similar boulder chases Paddington. It's thrilling because the meme doesn't let him get squished.
When I first came to SL I didn't really know what the word 'trope' meant. I came to think of a trope as being a meme like 'evil stepsister', but it's a distinct type of meme - instead of evolving rapidly it tends to stay the same. Rather than the meme adapting to the selection pressure it seems that the selection pressure adapts to the meme.
Once assumed that there were an infinite number of stories told among people and was surprised to find that all stories could be placed into a fairly small number of categories. I'm guessing that tropes are our way of thinking about those categories.
I think that the process whereby our brains extract information from sensory data involves neural structures that we experience a thing that is meaningful within a narrative.
Tropes seem to be an artifact of stories or narratives. A trope is not like gravity though it can have a causal influence on people.
Perhaps then I was mistaken to think that a trope is like a meme. We learn memes but tropes seem somehow to be forced on our understanding without imitation.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.