From: Scott Chase (ecphoric@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri 20 Jun 2003 - 01:42:27 GMT
>From: Keith Henson <hkhenson@rogers.com>
>Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>Subject: RE: Precision of replication
>Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 21:08:45 -0400
>
>At 09:30 AM 19/06/03 -0700, Richard wrote:
>>Lawry wrote:
>
>snip
>
>><<Richard, is it your thought that memeplexes and memes behave differently
>>when it comes to transmission and replication? I have looked at the case
>>in
>>which only a subset of the memes in a memeplex are transmitted, and what
>>effect that has, but short of this I have been proceeding on the
>>assumption
>>that a memeplex is essentially just a 'big meme' when it comes to
>>transmission.>>
>>
>>I think you've put your finger on it. It makes no sense to talk about a
>>meme
>>being transmitted with less than 100% fidelity unless you are talking
>>about
>>mutation. With a memeplex, you might be interested in less than
>>100%-fidelity transmission as long as the receiving mind exhibits similar
>>behavior as a result of sharing the memeplex.
>
>A bit of borrowed model and some examples might help here.
>
>Meme transmission between people is through a classic Shannon information
>transmission channel. That channel is severely limited as to bandwidth (a
>few bits per second) and noisy. As was mentioned on this thread, errors
>creep in at the transmit end, the channel, and the receive end.
>
>The way errors are corrected in electronic communications is through check
>sums and retransmission. I.e., you test that the information got through
>without error and send it again if it had errors.
>
>Something very much like this is done in teaching children where there is a
>cycle of feeding information to the children, testing and repeating until
>you verify that the information has made the jump to the child's mind. I
>suppose the way a word is spelled could be considered a minimal kind of
>meme--in which case children learn many thousands of them to a high degree
>of accuracy and are tested and corrected on spelling constantly (perhaps
>less today with the advent of spell checkers). [Spelling tends to be
>highly constrained by dictionaries, but even there you can see minor
>spelling drifts and divergences, night -> nite, plough -> plow, and color
>-> colour.]
>
>Now the fewer bits being transmitted the better the information fidelity.
>Thus short words are misspelled less frequently than longer ones and you
>have hundreds of millions of people who know "three strikes and four balls"
>meme that is part of the "memeplex" of baseball but far fewer of them know
>the fine points of a catcher dropping the ball on the third strike. [I
>don't feel the need for the term but I recognize that some feel they need
>for a name for complexes of memes. If I felt the need, I would favor
>Hofstedter's term, "a scheme of memes." :-) ]
>
>Thus meme transmission is *never* free of errors. But with lots of error
>checking and retransmission, the errors can be reduced to arbitrarily small
>differences.
>
>I might add that DNA replication is *also* subjected to error checking and
>correction by a collection of molecular machines.
>
>Most of the time memes get replicated "good enough." Long as you
>understand what is going on it is not something to fuss over.
>
Many of my posts are good examples of how speeling errors get transmitted
but the receiver hopefully relizes which words were intended. Perhap this is
a post-transmission error correction mechanism. I blame my keyboard for the
pre-transmission stuff.
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