Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id UAA28045 (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 20:37:40 +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 19:53:45 +0100 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.0.21] Content-Type: text/plain References: <391AB670.D876DDCE@mediaone.net> Message-Id: <0005111959440A.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:
>
>> On Thu, 11 May 2000, Chuck Palson wrote:
>>
>> >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.
>
>Well, it seems to me that only means that you haven't drilled down enough to the basic
>elements. There can't be any ambiguity on this basic question or no one would believe
>you had finally found it!:)
Memes, like all other aspects of culture**, are emergent phenomena. They are
items of information, and don't exist in unencoded form.
**I exclude artifacts, treating them for present purposes as the products of
culture, rather than aspects of it. Though it can also be argued that *all*
macroscopic objects are emergent, being due to the interactions between
subatomic entities.
-- 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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