From: Wade Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Date: Fri 01 Nov 2002 - 20:13:46 GMT
On Friday, November 1, 2002, at 11:32 , Van oost Kenneth wrote:
> everytime it has to be built from the ground up
Gack, I can't see how I proposed that. It is constantly changing, yes,
in the way a river changes, but not renewing from the ground up.
Like the frames in an animated movie, there are fields of similarities
in every moment, and these things have the capacity for continuance-
genetically this is determined by genes, but memetically, I say it is
determined by bemes, which themselves are also like frames from an
animated movie- with fields of similarities, and culture can be
continued through their creation/performance and
apprehension/reperformance- something each individual does, yes, every
time newly, as each beme exists only for that time it is in performance,
just like a symphony, which, in actuation, only exists while it is being
played. We have artifacts which can be used to reconstruct a performance
of Dvorak's Eighth Symphony, but performance1 will never be
performance2, and the bemetic model demands both performance and
observer as required operating parameters (loci? vectors?) of cultural
transmission.
The fact that every performance is a unique event in spacetime is the
single source from which all my thinking along bemetic lines has
followed. It is not, to me, simply an axiom, but a physical fact of the
universe. So, I had to think of a memetic hypothesis that demanded the
inclusion of this fact of performance, and I decided the only way out
was to remove the unit of cultural transmission, the meme, from the
mind totally- and place it in performance. I got all kinds of flak about
keeping the meme name, so I coined 'beme', somewhat standing for
'behavior-meme', but, now, after all the flak I've gotten about
behavioralism (which is not at all the core of my cultural model), I
might just up and coin 'Peme', for 'performance-meme'.
Okay, I just did.
Change is constant.
Pemetic model.
See, I'm mutable.
- Wade
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