From: Dace (edace@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon 09 Jun 2003 - 18:37:30 GMT
> From: "Richard Brodie" <richard@brodietech.com>
>
> Dace wrote:
>
> <<Memetics began as a way of avoiding social and cognitive psychology by
> simply reducing culture to its particulate elements-- memes. Cultural
> evolution, rather than being a product of human intelligence, results from
> the Darwinian competition of memes to replicate. The irony is that in
order
> to understand why some memes are selected and others are not, we must
study
> precisely the cognitive factors that Dawkins hoped to avoid. Of course,
> Polichak's critique is nearly five years old now, and the field may have
> matured in that time. Aunger appears to be interested in cognitive
factors,
> and I'm glad to hear that Boyer is as well.>>
>
> You are simply misinformed if you think any of the pioneers of memetics
> sought to avoid cognitive factors. Dawkins simply popularized the term to
> indicate the possibility of a non-genetic Darwinian process and has never
> been too interested in the details -- this from his own mouth. Dennett is
a
> cognitive scientist/philosopher who has written a prize-winning book on
> consciousness. I called evolutionary psychology one of the four
cornerstones
> of memetics and touched briefly on cognitive psychology.
Thanks for the correction. Nonetheless, memetics has itself become a
virulent meme according to which culture can be reduced to self-replicating
particles without regard to human agency. This is certainly the view
espoused by Blackmore, who refers to humans as nothing more than "meme
machines."
> However, as Keith said, much interesting understanding can come without
> knowing the details of the brain's workings.
>
> <<When it comes to standard discourse, it's humans
> beings, not the information they exchange, that have agency.>>
>
> Science is a cornucopia of models, each useful for some purposes and not
for
> others. We all know it's usually useful to look at human beings as having
> agency. The surprise is that it's sometimes useful to look at memes that
> way.
This is the real value of memetics.
Ted
>
> Richard Brodie
> www.memecentral.com
>
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