From: Richard Brodie (richard@brodietech.com)
Date: Tue 20 May 2003 - 16:01:07 GMT
Bill Benzon wrote:
<<OK, so a meme is a mental replicator: Find one.>>
Any standardized test will reveal the existence of dozens of them. I
remember a billboard in Boston when I was a kid that stated, simply, "Calvin
Coolidge was our 30th President." It turned out a marketing firm was doing
research into the effectiveness of billboards. Well, that meme replicated
and still resides in my mind.
<< No one has actually found
mental entities within brains that replicate from one brain to another.
Richard Aunger has written an incoherent attempt to find such things in the
brain. I don't see any reason to believe that they will ever be found.>>
Do you think brains contain mental entities that DON'T replicate from one
brain to another, or do you think brains contain no mental entities at all?
If the former, how do you explain education?
<<These mentalist memes are purely hypothetical entities. Now, if these
hypothetical entities had given rise to a good research program with
substantial empirical results, that would be a different matter. But that
research program has not come into being. Memetics doesn't have a Gregor
Mendel.>>
I interpret this to mean you are unwilling to study memes as mental
replicators unless and until the workings of the brain are sufficiently
known. You want a codon x-ray to show some pattern in two brains and no
amount or inference from similar behaviors will satisfy you that two people
share similar thoughts.
Richard Brodie
www.memecentral.com
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