Re: electric meme bombs

From: Wade Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Date: Wed 16 Oct 2002 - 18:47:45 GMT

  • Next message: Wade Smith: "Re: electric meme bombs"

    On Wednesday, October 16, 2002, at 02:18 , joedees@bellsouth.net wrote:

    > Thus by your excision of internalization you have cut off the
    > possibility of memetic replication

    Not at all.

    The performance will strike a chord within me, and prompt me to replicate it, but I am not possessed of the meme at any point, and until I attempt to replicate it in behavior, I will only be contemplating its utility.

    > It'll do just fine, and always has, with mental workers, such as
    > mathematicians, who can evolve their innovations in spare moments.

    Perhaps one of these days, we will have purely mental work, and purely mental workers, but, until then, we need to _see_ E=mc^2, or we have no idea what Al was doing, or meant to be doing.

    > Since behaviorism failed
    > when applied to human action generally,

    Interesting use of the concept of failure.

    I am _not_ a behavioralist. Far from it.

    I am only saying that, units of culture, called memes, _are_ behaviors. They are not simply behavioristic, anymore than general human actions are.

    > there is no internal meme, so one could not have passed

    This is a correct reading of my stance, and I guess I'm standing alone. There is no passage of any meme, at any point. The meme is _observed_, not passed, and the attempt is either made, or not, to replicate it. If it is made, the meme is _reconstructed_ to the best ability of the performer. (The performer may be inadequate to the task, or superb, and these are all conditions upon which the continuation of the meme depends.)

    Your song, for instance, depends in some part upon the quality of your voice. Some songs require certain voices, some don't. Conditions, like environment, are not memes.

    - Wade

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