From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Fri 28 Feb 2003 - 12:29:12 GMT
On Thursday, February 27, 2003, at 09:23 PM, memetics-digest wrote:
>>> Do you have any doubt that one of the things humans do is copy
>>> information?
>>
>> Yes.
>
> Between the dawn of writing and the invention of the printing press,
> how
> were books copied and who did it?
Producing copies of artifacts or imitating observed behavior in no way
guarantees that the 'information' the brains of the originator and the
imitator are using are identical, or even shared in any way.
There is _never_ a single, unique, set of data or methods that will
produce similar artifacts. There are dozens of ways of drawing a
straight line, and every line is a copy of the first. Is the
information of a ruler and the information of a snapstring the same
information? No, hardly.
And it don't matter a single squig who or what did it.
Indeed, there _were_ no, not a single, identical copy of a book until
the printing press. There were only imitations (beautiful ones,
enriched ones), in several and non-unique hands, using the labor of
individual humans doing painstaking tasks.
- Wade
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