From: Philip Jonkers (philosophimur@dygo.com)
Date: Thu 15 May 2003 - 12:44:57 GMT
Wade:
>> But- in the case of the performance model, memes are not only
>> evidential and non-abstract, but absolute and defined with certain
>> rigidity. They are not assumptions about the way a mind, or minds,
>> work, but a working theory about the process of cultural evolution, at
>> the level of quantum units.
Even in the performance-only model of memetics, performance IS abstract.
As long as humans function as meme-hosts one cannot avoid the inherently abstract notion of memes. Namely, by virtue of the human
imperfection in meme-transmission (even for the clearly observable phenomena of performances) one has to
neglect a certain amount of detail in the definition of the meme. This
is because every execution of whatever performance differs slightly from the next. The meme attributable to a certain performance has many
versions all which may deviate slightly from eachother. Assuming a
continuance to include all versions of a meme is impractical as you
want to avoid giving names to every occurrence of the meme. Hence
discretization of the meme follows logically but discretization (or
quantization as you call it) implies the use of an abstraction.
(e.g. when memeA is executed for transmission N times this forms
the set: memeA1, memeA2, memeA3, ..., memeAN. Each member being
more or less different from the others. Provided that the members of the set are sufficiently alike you'd do humanity a big favor to
refer to the meme by a single name: memeA).
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