Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id QAA27072 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 11 May 2000 16:55:00 +0100 From: Robin Faichney <robin@faichney.demon.co.uk> Organization: Reborn Technology To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: Fwd: Did language drive society or vice versa? Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 16:33:46 +0100 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.0.21] Content-Type: text/plain References: <391A7EFE.D8AB8E87@mediaone.net> Message-Id: <00051116502907.00619@faichney> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On Thu, 11 May 2000, Chuck Palson wrote:
>Robin Faichney wrote:
>>
>> I think Sherlock is better described as a great meme, than a great memeticist.
>> But in any case, the improbability alluded to there is surely subjective.
>>
>I can see where this kind of reasoning is going, and it could get to the atomic
>level and merge memetics with physics. Think of it: Is Sherlock a memeticist or a
>meme himself? Well, it's hard to say, but the prevailing theory is that all
>memeticists are really just a general form of meme creating other memes. Are there
>memes within memes within memes.. etc etc. etc.? The inevitable answer will be
>always, Yes, Yes, Yes! And THEN, at a deep atomic level, memetics will indeed be a
>science of sciences that provides the unified field theory for all existence.
Uh huh. Well, I believe I have already worked out the relationship between
memetics and physics, and I posted a series of messages to this list about it a
while back. I don't feel like getting into it again now -- I'm more interested
in working on a book-length treatment -- but you could probably find them in
the archive if you wanted to. The title was "What are memes made of?".
>We will at that point figure out the most urgent of all questions facing
>memetics: how many memes fit on the head of a pin!
The straight answer, despite the levity of the question, is: depends how
they're encoded.
>Actually, from a statistical point of view, you can't say that one event has X
>probability of happening because you couldn't no the characteristics of the
>relevant universe.
So how can you claim that human evolution was improbable?? :-)
-- Robin Faichney===============================This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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