From: Richard Brodie (richard@brodietech.com)
Date: Wed 09 Jul 2003 - 22:46:32 GMT
Keith wrote:
<<The points where we differ. First I see memes-on-paper as being memes
and
second I am not much concerned about a meme influencing its own
replication.>>
I thought I understood your point of view, but now I'm more confused
than ever. Influencing its own replication is the definition of a
replicator, of which the meme is one. If you're not concerned with that
I don't know how you think a meme is different from any piece of
information.
<<Let me tackle the first part by analogy.
Consider the example of a listing on paper of the base pairs of a gene,
say
hemoglobin. Would the listing have an apologetic disclaimer on it that
this listing was only a *listing* of hemoglobin and not the real gene?
No
way! The list *is* the gene.
Why?
Because you can type in or scan the list and feed the information to a
gene
synthesizer, get the DNA out, stick it in a cell and away it goes making
the hemoglobin protein. I.e., a gene is a particular sequence of
information. Now to get the gene to make protein (or regulate another
gene
or some other function) it has to be encoded in DNA and inside a cell.
Same way with memes. A meme on paper just sits there, it has to be in a
mind (brain) to have effect--though it can be replicated. (I am
reminded
of the start of the next article at the end of O'Neill's space colony
article in Physics Today in 1974. It was often duplicated when the
O"Neill
article was copied. There were thousands upon thousands of copies made
for
no reason at all except nobody bothered to blank off the half page.)
Same thing with computer viruses. A virus on a disk or a listing of one
has no effect. It does when it is in a computer and has control of the
OS. But the information is the virus even if it is on paper.
Part of the point to defining memes this particular way is to regularize
the terminology for all three of these replicators. It is being
chauvinistic to consider our minds and their (memetic) contents in a way
inconsistent with the way we consider computers and cells.
Genetic information, computer virus information and memetic information
can
all be replicated outside of the locus in which they have effects. For
genes and viruses this is rather uncommon, but for memes, it is the main
(and explosive) way many of them replicate (i.e., print).>>
Got it. Yes, we are in severe disagreement about this point. I don't see
any reason to call artifacts memes, although I have said repeatedly that
some can be fruitfully viewed as replicators (the Eiffel Tower is the
standard example).
<<Consider what a different place the world would be if there had been
no
copies of the Qur'an printed in the last 500 years.>>
I would call that an artifact, not a meme. In this case I think it is
the entire religion Islam that is the obvious candidate for replicator,
although the book itself has self-replicating qualities.
<<On the second point, it's true that memes in some way influence their
replication.>>
That is pretty much the entire definition of meme, once you specify that
minds are involved.
<< In the pathological cult cases a *lot.* But for some memes
it is a complicated burden to see how a particular meme indirectly
influences a host to replicate it. Take the tables of integrals printed
in
a million copies in the CRC handbook. Each integral can reasonably be
called a meme. Hosts that use them seldom pass them on. (In fact, a
good
fraction of them were just wrong
http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/TechNotes/4196/GradshteynRyzhik.tx
t).>>
Yes, it's very, very complicated. Sometimes its better to look for
artifacts or cultural organisms as replicators than to look for
individual memes.
<<Computer viruses are by comparison obvious about how they get
computers to
replicate them. Cells replicate "junk" DNA probably because cells
don't
have a good way to get rid of it. Since tracing out the causal links
is
such a mess with some memes (and some of them may be like junk DNA and
not
really have links) I don't think it is useful to put this restriction on
memes.>>
In my view the word is meaningless without the constraint of
self-replication.
<<But I don't mind the restriction as long as people understand that
they may
not be able to show how some memes influencing their replication.>>
I'd really like to know what you think a meme is if it doesn't require
self-replication.
Richard Brodie
www.memecentral.com
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