Editing Memetics (section)

===Internalists and externalists===
The memetics movement split almost immediately into two. The first group were those who wanted to stick to Dawkins' definition of a meme as "a unit of [[cultural transmission]]". Gibron Burchett, a memeticist responsible for helping to research and co-coin the term [[memetic engineering]], along with Leveious Rolando and Larry Lottman, has stated that a meme can be defined, more precisely, as "a unit of [[cultural]] [[information]] that can be copied, located in the brain". This thinking is more in line with Dawkins' second definition of the meme in his book ''[[The Extended Phenotype]]''. The second group wants to redefine memes as observable [[cultural artifact]]s and behaviors. However, in contrast to those two positions, the article "Consciousness in meme machines" by Susan Blackmore rejects neither movement.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Blackmore|first=Susan|author-link=Susan Blackmore |date=2003|title=Consciousness in meme machines|journal=Journal of Consciousness Studies|publisher=Imprint Academic}}</ref> Andrej Drapal<ref>MEMETICS, Truth and Freedom as Ontological, Phenomenological, and Epistemological Concepts Elucidated by Memetics</ref> tried to bridge the gap with his differentiation of memes as quantum entities existing per se in quantum superposition and collapsing when detected by brains from cultural artifacts. Memes are to artifacts as genotypes are to phenotypes.

These two schools became known as the "internalists" and the "externalists." Prominent internalists included both Lynch and Brodie; the most vocal externalists included Derek Gatherer, a geneticist from [[Liverpool John Moores University]], and William Benzon, a writer on cultural evolution and music. The main rationale for externalism was that internal brain entities are not observable, and memetics cannot advance as a science, especially a [[quantitative research|quantitative]] science, unless it moves its emphasis onto the directly quantifiable aspects of culture. Internalists countered with various arguments: that brain states will eventually be directly observable with advanced technology, that most cultural anthropologists agree that culture is about [[belief]]s and not artifacts, or that artifacts cannot be replicators in the same sense as mental entities (or DNA) are replicators. The debate became so heated that a 1998 Symposium on Memetics, organised as part of the 15th International Conference on [[Cybernetics]], passed a motion calling for an end to definitional debates. McNamara demonstrated in 2011 that functional connectivity profiling using neuroimaging tools enables the observation of the processing of internal memes, "i-memes", in response to external "e-memes".<ref>{{cite journal|last1=McNamara|first1=Adam|title=Can we Measure Memes?|journal=Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience|date=2011|doi=10.3389/fnevo.2011.00001|pmc=3118481|pmid=21720531|volume=3|page=1|doi-access=free}}</ref>
This was developed further in a paper "Memetics and Neural Models of Conspiracy Theories" by Duch, where a model of memes as a quasi-stable neural associative memory [[attractor network]] is proposed, and a formation of [[Memeplex]] leading to conspiracy theories illustrated with the simulation of a self-organizing network.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Duch|first1=Włodzisław|title=Memetics and Neural Models of Conspiracy Theories|journal=Patterns|date=2021|doi=10.1016/j.patter.2021.100353|pmc=8600249|pmid=34820645|volume=2|issue=11|page=100353|doi-access=free}}</ref>

An advanced statement of the internalist school came in 2002 with the publication of ''The Electric Meme'', by Robert Aunger, an anthropologist from the [[University of Cambridge]]. Aunger also organised a conference in Cambridge in 1999, at which prominent sociologists and anthropologists were able to give their assessment of the progress made in memetics to that date. This resulted in the publication of ''Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science'', edited by Aunger and with a foreword by Dennett, in 2001.<ref>Aunger, Robert. "Darwinizing culture: The status of memetics as a science." (2001).</ref>