Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id CAA06628 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 16 Feb 2000 02:38:13 GMT Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 18:37:07 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time) From: TJ Olney <market@cc.wwu.edu> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: What are memes made of? In-Reply-To: <200002160047.TAA24380@mail1.lig.bellsouth.net> Message-ID: <Pine.WNT.4.21.0002151805330.-334975@Starship051.cbe.wwu.edu> X-X-Sender: market@voyager.cbe.wwu.edu Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Woe is me! Hold up here! I think I see a black cloud of miasma on the
horizon! No! It's Shiva wielding Occam's razor!
I hate to break it to so erudite a correspondent (especially since he has
graciously shared with me privately his own memesets about language, tools
and conciousness), but a "genuine memetic ontology" will itself be a
memeset and there is no way around that one. We'll just have to deal with
it the best we can.
On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Joe E. Dees wrote:
> Religious or ideological considerations, whether eastern, weastern,
> or whatever, are memesets themselves and can have no place in
> any serious endeavor to construct a genuine memetic ontology.
And then in another message, and after some excellent material, slipped
this in:
>The evolution of self-conscious awareness is a necessary a priori
>and a sine qua non for memes to exist.
Indicating that there is still no agreement about the nature of memes or
that the famous songbirds are self-concious.
I for one believe that a better grounding for the concept is that of
"self-replicating patterned data," a grounding that requires no
self-conciousness, only some agent that will replicate the pattern of
data.
Regards,
TJ Olney
-- TJ Olney Western Washington University - Not all those who wander are lost.
For the musical version of this thought: http://mp3.musicmatch.com/artists/artists.cgi?id=113&display=1
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