From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Tue 25 Mar 2003 - 16:18:44 GMT
On Tuesday, March 25, 2003, at 08:42 AM, memetics-digest wrote:
> The development of memetics provides improved mental tools (models)
> for thinking about the influences, be they benign, silly, or fatal,
> that
> replicating information patterns have on all of us.
This sort of statement has always impressed me just about as much as a
press release from a PR firm, which is what it really is, ain't it?
Making claims in any inflated fashion about memetics is a favorite
pastime of the popularizers of it (especially those using the phrase
'memetic engineering'), and those carpetbagging it, true. And yet, the
basic premise is false- there is no (intentional or otherwise)
information replicated or transmitted by cultural performance- all
meaning and information is semantically constructed (albeit upon some
pre-conditioning foundations, none of which should be called memes and
all of which can be ascribed to normal perceptual cognition and
socialization) by the culture's participants during and after the
performance- and there is no replication of any mental entity (that
concept itself is absurdity)- there is only patterning and mutating
reproduction, in performance, within a culture, by individuals, of
sensorially perceived and erratically or conditionally stored stimuli,
_all_ of which _may_ or _may not_ be similar, and thus (if similar)
observed and analyzed as patterns and models. Culture is (far from
merely!) only one of several maintainers of similarity of human
behaviors while it is the primary maintainer of the semantic patterns
that surround and enforce them. Meaning and intent, so gleefully
propounded by the memeinthemind theorists, implies design, and, I'm not
actually very sorry, but ID is out of the question in darwinian
analysis, and it should be totally out of the question in memetics. And
yet, this motive to 'memetically engineer' persists. Perhaps it is, in
some root, fascistic? I personally think so. I personally reject it,
precisely so. It is also rejectable because, outside of culture,
meaning and intent and even method all vanish, as I so perfectly
observed with the Tlingit tribal elders, and as thousands if not
millions of extinctions of cultures over time and history attest.
We have many influences upon our behavior. Memetics may utilize those
discovered by biology, or by cognitive neuroscience, or even by
psycho-social mechanics, but its main usefulness is the analyzation of
cultural patterns, in consilience with these other disciplines, not in
some overseeing paradigm of influencing techniques and the inaccurate
judgments made by utilizing them, all of which are quite well known,
and quite unnecessary (if not antagonistic) to memetics in toto.
- Wade
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