From: Chris Taylor (Christopher.Taylor@man.ac.uk)
Date: Thu 17 Oct 2002 - 12:01:31 GMT
> If you're applying meme to mean any meaningful thing that a brain
> does, then I don't see any value in this. Decisions about church attendance
> or concert-going, are just that decisions. They're not memes unless carried
> out, or articulated in some kind of way. If someone owns up to the priest
> as to why they missed a service, then you, possibly, have the transmission
> of a meme.
Yeah - this is like confusing species and ecologies - they sort of
overlap - my gut bacteria, while part of me, have an ecology, for
example - and all multicellular orgs are rather fascistic ecologies of
single cells (cells are even ecologies of organelles I suppose) but not
really - certainly not the way that was meant.
Actual realised behaviour (and even idealised imagined behaviour) is the
product of meme interactions. Behaviours can themselves become memes,
but I think they differ from real behaviour the way a picture differs
from its subject. Oversimplifying a little, one could say that memes are
not ephemeral, but behaviour is.
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Chris Taylor (chris@bioinf.man.ac.uk)
http://bioinf.man.ac.uk/ »people»chris
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