Re: meme as catalytic indexical

From: M Lissack (lissacktravel@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue 20 Jan 2004 - 19:15:42 GMT

  • Next message: Keith Henson: "Re: meme as catalytic indexical"

    Keith:
      At no point do I ever suggest doing away with the word 'meme'
      I am suggesting that giving memes the quality of being replicators and a teleos of "desiring" to multiply is incorrect and the source of many of the problems standing in the way of the advance of memetics.
      Reasoning by analogy must be done carefully. If you only focus on the similarities you forget that analogies by definition also contain variances which must also be addressed.
      Meme=gene was brilliant but too simple. The baggage from replication properties is more than 'memes' can cope with.
      Meme remains the preferred word but the status of memes as replicators is challenged.

    Keith Henson <hkhenson@rogers.com> wrote: At 04:48 PM 19/01/04 -0300, you wrote:
    >I like to read this abstract. The paper must be fine.

    snip

    >Bruce Edmonds wrote:
    >>The Redefinition of Memes: Ascribing Meaning to an Empty Cliché
    >>by Michael R. Lissack

    snip

    A pointer to the paper was posted here in early December and there was a thread that mostly was the author and me. It ended Dec 10 2003 here:

    http://cfpm.org/~majordom/memetics/2000/16267.html

    snip

    "Your essay at http://emergence.org/redefinition.pdf from which you quoted a bit on this mailing list sounds like it was written for a philosophy journal, which I suppose it was. After wading through the prose, I still disagree with your proposal to redefine memes and memetics.

    "Memes/memetics is a very simple concept, that Darwinian evolution applies to elements of culture. It so simple it is verified a thousand times over just from common knowledge and trivial thought experiments. There is no need to make it more complicated, not even much need to test it. You just apply it as a tool to help understand the part of the world where memetics applies."

    snip

    Keith Henson

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    =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit

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