From: William Benzon (bbenzon@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri 14 Mar 2003 - 16:47:38 GMT
on 3/14/03 7:45 AM, Wade T. Smith at wade.t.smith@verizon.net wrote:
> Dennett has a wonderful little talk at
> http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/printer_friendly.php?num=13 about,
> mainly, the criticism of science.
>
> In it, he defines 'meme' as 'a replicating idea', taking the popular
> side of that term's charming half-life. And if we want to define a meme
> as a replicating idea, which seems, to me, to be fine, then can we
> reduce memetics to be merely a job of discerning propagation patterns?
> What about defining 'idea', and even, in this light, 'replication'?
>
> I like, in a way, the simple, MTV model of meme- hey, dude, spread that
> meme. It seems somehow right to relegate that word to slang.
>
> - Wade
As far as I know, that's always been Dennett's view about memes. I doubt
that he's ever seriously considered another view.
A memetics that went to work gathering empirical evidence about propagation
patterns would be a worthwhile endeavor. Given that the work has been well
done, the results can be used by anyone regardless of what they might
believe about the nature of memes.
Bill B
-- William L. Benzon 708 Jersey Avenue, Apt. 2A Jersey City, NJ 07302 201 217-1010 "You won't get a wild heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds."--George Ives =============================================================== 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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