From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Thu 22 May 2003 - 02:11:30 GMT
> At 06:36 PM 21/05/03 -0400, Scott wrote:
>
> >>From: joedees@bellsouth.net
>
> snip
>
> >>Here Scott is wrong. Memetics has hopes of being a science.
> >>Correctness is indeed selected for in this field, by the
> >>Verification Principle and peer review.
> >Yet where's the your attempt at incorrectness of the field being
> >selected against via the Popperian falsification principle with its
> >associated process of conjecture and refutation? Sounds more like
> >people seeking to confirm their predisposed biases in favor of the
> >idea versus trying to approach it critically (philosophizing with a
> >hammer) and seeing what remains.
> >
> >Has the existence of memes been verified?
>
> I would say yes. *If* you define memes as replicating information,
> cultural information, *and* you consider a package of replicating
> information such as plate tectonics or the C/T disaster being due to
> collision with an extra terrestrial object to be typical memes in
> scientific culture, then you can observe in the historical record (by
> counts of science paper publications) the gradual replacement of
> previous memes by these memes.
>
> Science does work in fields such as geology and cosmology where
> knowledge is not experimental but historical and observational. (I
> have been around long enough to have seen both of those meme
> replacements. It was downright amazing to me to see a respected
> scientist--who was not even in geology--rant and rave about how stupid
> plate tectonics was after the issue was approaching consensus. For
> lack of logical thinking it put to shame any of the arguments on this
> list.)
>
> >You'll probably assert that somehow fMRI studies and other imaging
> >techniques verify memes, yet all you wind up doing is embedding your
> >cherished notion of the meme within the garb of legitimate
> >neuroscientific work.
>
> That work verifies that memory has location in the
> brain. Memes-in-the-brain are a class of memory. The point to that
> discussion was to make the case that memes (being pure information)
> have to be encoded in *something.*
>
Yep; information must be encoded in a physical substrate, whether it is
light waves, sound waves, the body as a whole, pen and ink, or a neural
net. But the substrate encodes the information; it is not identical with it;
thus, performances encode memes rather than being memes.
>
> Keith Henson
>
>
> ===============================================================
> 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
>
===============================================================
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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