From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Mon 02 Jun 2003 - 02:14:41 GMT
At 05:29 PM 01/06/03 -0700, you wrote:
> > From: Gudmundur Ingi Markusson <gudmundurim@yahoo.com>
> >
> > As Boyer is very interested in the transmission of concepts, esp.
>religious concepts, his ideas are certainly relevant to memetics.
>Nevertheless, note how he introduces memes only to dismiss them shortly
>afterwards. He does that with reference to Dan Sperber, on not dissimilar
>grounds as Sperber himself does in "Darwinizing Culture" (Aunger ed. 2000);
>in brief, concepts are not replicated but recreated.
> >
> > gudmundur
>
>To understand a concept is indeed to recreate it in our minds. This is how
>ordinary discourse operates. You say something on your mind, and in the
>process of understanding it, I recreate the concept in my mind. Memetics is
>the study of those concepts (or behaviors, etc.) that *don't* depend on
>understanding to jump from mind to mind.
For the life of me can't see why you warp the extremely simple definition
of a meme (element of culture, replicating information) into such a twisted
shape.
I don't mind a bit if you want to split up memes into sub classes some of
which don't require understanding because that is certainly true. Take
Jabberwocky as an example. Lots and lots of people learn the poem without
having the slightest understanding of why they should shun The frumious
Bandersnatch.
http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/jabber/jabberwocky.html
Does that make Jaberwocky a meme where Sam Magee
http://members.aol.com/pokey271/camp/campfires/mcgee.html
is not? Neither one of them is plausible.
>If you're a Scientologist, you
>believe L. Ron Hubbard is a deity, not because it's reasonable and you've
>come to understand it, but because everyone you hang out with believes it,
>and you swallow the concept whole, so to speak, rather than breaking it down
>and reconstructing it according to reason.
>
>There is a place for replication, but it's limited. We cannot claim that
>all concepts are memes.
Certainly not. Just the ones that are copied from mind to
mind. Successful memes exist in a lot of minds.
To give another example, some people understand the rule for multiplying by
nine as multiplying by (10 - 1) Others just apply the rule of one less
than the number being multiplied by nine and the sum of the two digits
adding up to nine. Is this a meme in people who don't understand and not a
meme in people who do understand why it works? In a person who does not
understand the rule, and figures it out, is the method no longer a meme?
Keith Henson
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