From: Dace (edace@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed 28 May 2003 - 02:12:14 GMT
> From: Keith Henson <hkhenson@rogers.com>
>
> At 03:06 PM 26/05/03 -0700, Dace wrote:
> > > From: "rhiggins7" <rhiggins7@cox.net>
>
> snip
>
> > > the disitinction here seems extremely arbitrary and
> > > contrived to propogatte an "Us vs Them" belief structure within the
> > > community.
> >
> >It's not the least bit arbitrary. Not all information flows memetically.
> >Much of it flows according to standard models of information transfer,
> >developed and refined over many years by social scientists. To claim
that
> >all shared ideas are memes is to defy conventional science.
>
> Let me help you with an example. "Objects fall when released" is
certainly
> a shared idea, but in most cases not a meme since it is learned by any
> small child playing with blocks. I.e., you don't have to teach this fact
> of life to each new generation because they learn it by experience.
"Shared" is too broad a term. I meant ideas or information transmitted from
one person to another. Not all of these are memes.
> >This is why
> >memetics is often rejected or simply ignored. To avoid confrontation
with
> >the well-established science of information transfer, we must define
exactly
> >which ideas are memetic and which are not, i.e. which ideas actively
> >replicate and which ones are passively replicated through standard means.
>
> "Culturgen" is a term predating "meme" which means the same thing. A
> culturgen is an element of culture that is passed on, like patterns of
> decoration on pottery or the means of making pots, chipping rocks to make
> tools or ways to make shoes. These culturgens or memes are no real
problem
> to explain because they are useful to learn, but they do require being
> passed down as elements of culture. That makes them memes.
>
> "Bleeding" as a medical practice was harmful in virtually all cases, but
it
> too was a meme that was passed down from generation to generation. As a
> meme it did not induce behavior to teach others to bleed people.
>
> Now suicide cults memes are *clearly* harmful and they induce those who
> hold them to actively try to infect others. I think your claim is that
the
> only memes are those in this class, or others that induced behavior to
> spread the meme. There certainly is a difference between such classes of
> memes. There are genes known as segregation distorters that result in an
> all male population of mice that have similar effects. But they are still
> *genes.*
I don't mean to claim that all memes are pathological. But memetics is no
different than any other field. You learn a lot from pathological examples.
Yes, culture is by and large not pathological. Otherwise, it would be cult.
> I think the case is much stronger to consider all replicating information
> patterns in culture to be memes and *then* start fixing them along a
> helpful symbiote to nasty parasite spectrum.
Let's say someone asks you the time. You consult your watch and say, "Half
past five." While information has passed from one mind to another, no meme
is involved. The meme is the habit of wearing watches, and this habit is
successful because it exploits our need, in the context of modern, urban
society, to know what time it is. A pathological meme might be a
fashionable new habit of wearing a broken watch that's always set at half
past five. This meme, which would succeed by exploiting our need to be
trendy, might hurt someone under its influence because he forgets his watch
is dead and thinks it really is half past five, causing him to miss an
important meeting. So memes can be accidentally beneficial, but there's
always the potential for harm. Memes are essentially parasitical. Some
parasites, like mitochondria, turn out to be beneficial and symbiotic.
Others are pathological. The point is that with memes, human consciousness
is in the back seat.
Only the most sickly culture is completely shut off to human perception and
intelligence, bound to its memes with no possibility of reflecting on them.
And even here the memes were once normal ideas or behaviors that made sense
at one time but picked up their own momentum and became ingrained and then
harmful.
When an idea is exchanged purely through reasoned discussion, it's made new
in each mind. It's like a collection of beads that all look roughly alike.
When an idea travels memetically, however, it's more like beads on a string.
They don't just look alike. They represent a single thread of causation
that replicates the pattern from mind to mind. You don't have to think
about wearing a dead watch set at 5:30. You just do it. You do it because
all your friends are doing it. So you never intervene, laying claim to your
power of self-determination and reason. You just follow along, another bead
added to the necklace. It's this connection from parent to offspring that
marks the meme from the simple idea and memetics from conventional social
and cognitive science.
> There certainly is another spectrum you could rate them on. For example,
a
> really good joke would be more likely to induce people to spread it than a
> poor one.
A joke is an interesting type of meme because it requires reason but in a
form that's been perverted in some way. Though jokes are unreasonable, you
can't understand them without having a capacity for reason. They succeed by
exploiting our need for play, and the more playful, the more successful.
> How would you rate the method of multiplying numbers under nine by
> nine? It is so useful that parents are induced to teach it to their kids
> even if the schools don't.
Culture evolves through human intelligence as much as memetic competition.
A cultural form that's fallen out of favor can be revived through human
agency, after which, once it takes hold again, may proceed memetically.
Ted
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