Memes, Diamemes, and Trimemes

The introduction describes the logical form of "dialogical" patterns. The 2-dimensional form was called "dialogic" to denote a duality of theses, and to connote dialogue, which is a common situation where such patterns are discovered.

But 'form' is complementary to 'content' . Most of the dialogical examples shown here are quite ancient patterns of ideas that have persisted for centuries, emerging in different specialized fields with different terminology, but with the same underlying dialogical structure. Therefore, it seems appropriate to make a connection to Richard Dawkins' concept of the meme. As introduced in his book, The Selfish Gene (Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), Dawkins offered the following illustrations:

"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain."

In analogy with the concept of the meme, we propose its 2-dimensional extension, a diameme. Dialogic, as described in the introduction, explains the logical form, which is empty of content; a diameme (or, alternatively, dimeme) is a particular set of ideas that fit into this form. (For examples of these, return to the introduction and see the index). The observation is that diamemes, not only memes, have persisted in the pool of ideas for centuries, and often modern debates are nothing more than repetitions of the ancient diamemes in modern terms. If this is the case, then we suggest that even Medieval theology can be a rich resource of "highly-evolved" diamemes that have withstood the test of time and can be exploited and applied to all kinds of other fields. This is a suggestion also made by Torrance in regard to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

Some of the most profound theological doctrines cannot be reduced to a 2-dimensional structure; they appear to require a third dimension to elucidate the orthodox doctrine more completely. For these, such as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the doctrine of the sovereignty of God, and a few others, we propose the name trimeme. Due to the limitations of a 2-dimensional interface, these trimemes have here been "flattened" into three diamemes, but links in the form of arrows have been added to the sides to permit easy movement from one to another. This is a compromise, and some of the "exaggerations" will be seen to overlap from one dimeme to another. The actual structure is a 3-dimensional view of intersecting orthogonal axes, which form an octahedron (8 faces). The "3D Overviews" provide a description of each face of the octahedron in the form of a simple list. In the future, when VRML becomes more widely available, it may be possible to provide a better visual interface, but it is doubtful whether this will really help to visualize the concepts, because printed words themselves are 2-dimensional objects. The best way to grasp these ideas is always through interpersonal dialogue and debate.

 

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