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robin said:
You're doing a PhD on memetics? That's terrific! I think
you should tell us more about it.
OK. It's in philosophy and it's an attempt in basic terms to
establish whether memetics is a worthwhile pursuit. That is
whether anyone else doing work on explaining human culture
really needs to pay attention to memetics. Memetics has its
luminaries in Philosophy, Sociology, Biology, Anthropology
and Psychology, but:
(1) it's not really a SUBJECT.
(2) Beyond the rudimentaries of Dennett and Dawkins, it
doesn't have a universally approved approach to explaining
human culture - i.e. definitions of a meme and the areas it
covers, what it purports to explain and how.
(3) the above luminaries are in the minority in all their
fields.
My aim is to show primarily that Darwin's Dangerous Idea (by
Dennett) is the best attempt yet to pin down memetics and
make it into an actual theory, and to show that much of the
criticisms of memetics from outside (e.g Gould) are
unfounded, and in fact there is a version of memetics that
is internally consistent and has explanatory efficacy.
That's why I can be a bit negative on this list sometimes.
I'm trying to show that the ontological work on memetics
hasn't been done yet (my conflab with Robin proves this - I
can only cite DDI as my "proof" - if there were a memetics
bible that said that memetics was all about meaning (i.e.
defined it as such) things would be different).
Since the ontological work hasn't been done, we
can't start running before we can walk. I'm sorry to be
obtuse, by how can you define whether birds opening bottles
is memetic, when you haven't even defined what memetic IS
yet? (You can do what Blackmore does, which is discount it
because it isn't human, and it's humans she wants to talk
about.)
If we could agree on what was memetic, there would
be very little discussion as to whether birdsong, milkbottle
opening, babboon-stone-throwing was memetic or not, because
we'd have intrinsic knowledge of the criteria for whether
something is memetic or not.
sorry, I've rambled yet again. If anyone wants to look at my
thesis proposal (or any of my chapters (!)) e-mail me
personally.
alex
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