From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Wed 16 Oct 2002 - 19:07:08 GMT
>
> 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's striking a chord is its being internalized, hooking you beneath your
filters, although you may still filter it, depending upon the results of your
utility-contemplation. It is certainly present, or you could contemplate its
utility. People cannot contemplate the utility of nothing, or of nothing
specific.
>
> > 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.
>
Unless he had mentally figured it out beforehand, he never would have
possessed it to communicate it.
>
> > 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.
>
Behaviors are involved, but so is mentation. Insofar as a behavior is
meaningful, that is, specific and significant, it must be recognized as
such by the person choosing to accept or reject it; otherwise there is no
reason for any meme to be more, or less, replicable than any other.
They succeed or fail based upon their semantic content.
>
> > 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.)
>
This is the kind of extreme definition that asserts that we need a
different name for every individual tree. If the behavior is recognizeable
similar enough to indeed be recognized as a token of the type by an
observer, then a communication has occurred.
>
> 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.
>
But they influence them. After all, it was the environmental presence of
a simultaneous concert that caused our hypothetical churchgoer to
forego a Sunday service.
>
> - Wade
>
>
>
> ===============================================================
> 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
>
===============================================================
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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