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the researchers in A-Life has said, "We would like to build models that
are so lifelike that they cease to become models of life and become
examples of life themselves."
And finally, one other example of how these metaphors of our under–
standing of things are shifting, one of the more suggestive ideas about
how ideas actually work in recent years, has been the idea of a "meme."
The concept was first proposed by the evolutionary biologist Richard
Dawkins in his
1976
book
The Selfish Gene.
What makes humans
unique, Dawkins proposed, is that we are the only animals with culture.
But culture, he argued, is as Darwinian as other aspects of biological
success. Ideas, styles, and beliefs are passed on from person
to
person,
from generation to generation. Sometimes these ideas compete and are
transformed; sometimes they die out; sometimes they sweep a commu–
nity with feverish intensity. Such ideas can be tunes, phrases, ideologies,
styles. And Dawkins calls them "memes" (which rhymes with
"schemes") to create a parallel with the idea of "gene." In Dawkins's
view, just as genes cause human actions that would serve the propaga–
tion of the gene, memes act in human culture in such a way as to repli–
cate themselves. They can infect their human hosts, leap from brain
to
brain, cause mass suicides and organize mass political movements.
There is now a field known as "memetics" that studies the idea of the
meme. Basically the idea is to study ideas and their propagation, not by
examining their content, not by determining whether something is right
or wrong or whether it's justified or unjustified, but simply by asking
whether or not an idea has survival value, whether it can successfully
replicate itself in its human hosts.
In all of these varied respects, as organic metaphors replace mechan–
ical ones, it might seem that mechanics become less important and life
itself becomes more important. But there is also a cautionary note to be
sounded. Often the reverse happens. Ethics and politics become irrele–
vant. Life actually ends up seeming more machine-like. Is A-Life a ver–
sion of life or is life a version of A-Life? Are we really forms of
"wetware" (as organic life forms are sometimes called), coded with our
own forms of software? So there are dangers, even in Ray's vision of
spiritual machines, of life becoming more diminished in importance as
its boundaries become less and less clear. Yet these ideas are also con–
nected with the greatest advances in technology that have ever been
. known. Where this will lead-whether to spiritual machines or mecha–
nized spirits-we will, in time, find out.
