From: William Benzon (bbenzon@mindspring.com)
Date: Wed 21 May 2003 - 15:54:45 GMT
on 5/21/03 9:07 AM, Keith Henson at hkhenson@rogers.com wrote:
[snip]
>
> Memes are in competition for a limited resource, human brains. This is the
> main factor that makes memetics so interesting since memes can induce
> behavior that affects how many are carrying them. "Convert or die, infidel!"
This makes no sense. Sooner or later mentalist memetics gets around to
talking about memes as though they were living beings flitting about from
mind to mind.
People compete with one another for all sorts of reasons, individually and
in groups. People say do things like: "Convert or die, infidel!" Arguing
that what's really going on is that memes are manipulating people for their
own replicating ends is just silly. It was a bad idea when Dawkins advanced
it, and it hasn't improved any for all the elaboration and repetition it has
received by others.
-- 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 Mind-Culture Coevolution: http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/ =============================================================== 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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