From: Richard Brodie (richard@brodietech.com)
Date: Sun 15 Jun 2003 - 22:56:58 GMT
Hey, a memetics discussion!
[RB]
>"Meme" was proposed by Dawkins as a name for a cultural replicator
analogous
>to the gene, and later refined by him and Dennett to be a mental
replicator.
>As I pointed out in my 1995 book, meme is not the only cultural replicator
>nor THE unit of cultural evolution. Artifacts and subcultures can also
>fruitfully be looked on as replicators.
Keith wrote:
<<I would like to suggest you consider a simplification consistent with
Darkins and Dennett, namely memes as pure information, independent of media.
So the meme of chipped arrowheads would amount to the information about how
to make and use them. Taking only the making part, the information could
exist in a human mind, on paper (though for sure it would be tough to
successfully describe how to chip rocks in text alone), in a video of
someone chipping out an arrowhead, or to some extent in the object of an
arrowhead itself if a person who knew rock chipping but not arrowheads
could duplicate one from a sample.>>
The crux of the matter is that the information must be in a mind in order
for replication to occur. Sometimes the meme goes out in the world encoded
in a straightforward, one-to-one way into a vehicle, like the method for
making arrowheads being made into an instructional video. Other times a meme
can replicate through a much more complex, probabilistic series of events in
which encoding may not be the best model to represent the replication. For
instance, suppose I am learning to play poker tournaments without the use of
a book. I start off really bad, but through practice I start to come up with
some strategies in my mind, ones I think the better players use to gain an
advantage. Sometimes I will be mostly correct and their strategy-memes get
replicated in my mind. Is it useful to say those memes are encoded in the
poker game? Possibly, but it's a stretch compared with the book on poker or
the instructional video. I may misconstrue the play and invent my own
strategy, a different one from what I think my opponent is using. I may then
use that strategy and a third player may infer the original strategy-meme my
opponent was using in the first place, misconstruing mine. I'm not sure
encoding is the best metaphor here.
How about a child whose mother is a strict disciplinarian? The child blames
the strictness for her woes and makes a decision to be lenient with her own
child, who comes to the opposite conclusion and once again adopts the
strictness meme. Where is that generation-skipping meme encoded?
So as you see, I don't consider it a simplification to say that memes are
pure information regardless of medium. Some information is not fruitfully
viewed as a meme, such as molecular structures and DNA strings (when people
aren't studying them of course). Some memes, such as poker strategies and
parenting styles, are sometimes replicated probabilistically, without an
obvious paper trail. Other times they are encoded in instruction books.
<<A subculture is just a collection of memes. The fact that a whole bunch
of
them are bound up in a mutually supporting package is not unlike Dawkins
pointing out that genes are bound together in much the same way in a
genome.>>
It's a collection of memes, artifacts, and people, less like a genome and
more like an organism. However, a cultural organism is not subject to the
biological constraint that modifications can only come through changes in
the seed, so it has some characteristics of a genome and some of an
organism. It also doesn't really have defined generations. But it can, I
think, fruitfully be studied as a replicator in its own right: its
existence, given the right environment, causes more of it to exist in the
future.
As I agree with almost everything you've ever written on memetics, I view
this particular quibble as very minor. But if you keep criticizing me I may
threaten to go over to the "performance model." ;)
Richard Brodie
www.memecentral.com
===============================================================
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