From: Wade Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Date: Fri 01 Nov 2002 - 20:33:53 GMT
On Friday, November 1, 2002, at 11:43 , Grant Callaghan wrote:
> When I pass a meme to the meme pool, I usually visualize the idea and
> then try to find the right words to create a similar picture in the
> minds of the people I'm sending it to.
Try, yes. Attempt, yes. Finding the right words, placing the right feet
in the right place, the fingers in the correct alignment, all attempts.
There is no direct connection between the action and the mind. Joe can
giveThere is a plethora of sensations and activities between the cup and
the lip, regardless of how badly you want to drink.
'Passing the meme', to the pemetic model, and to me, personally, is a
meaningless statement.
Attempting to perform it, yes.
If you do it well, I can attempt to perform it again, using my own skill
set. If our skill sets are matched, it could well be undistinguishable
from your performance, with the one difference being that someone else
did it.
With pemetic (yeah, I bellied over and flipped that letter) performances
of simple actions with unsophisticated skill sets, the chances of
indistinguishability are very large. Speech is such a thing in
performance, or folk dances, or childhood songs, (although, as we know,
memory has problems with sounds...), and they can easily be archived as
printed artifacts called words, so that anyone with the skill set of
reading can perform them in separation from the actual memory of them.
This is a simple explanation of how cultures continue through artifacts,
although there are many other continuation forces at work and a
compounding of them over time.
But, this model really does insist that each performance is unique, and
that there is no meme (although there is memory, even, yes, Joe's
meme-ory, aka the self) in the mind. Certainly nothing getting 'passed'.
And, while I do object to the scatological connotations to that word, I
have other, more dire, objections to the concept of the memeinthemind
model.
- Wade
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