From: Chris Taylor (christ@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Thu 29 Jan 2004 - 16:22:24 GMT
What I love about this list is the ability both to give, and to receive
a good cudgelling on a regular basis without resort to ad hominems (too
often anyway). I miss ted for that sort of thing -- he was so up for it!
:)
Keith Henson wrote:
> At 10:46 AM 29/01/04 +0000, Chris Taylor wrote:
>
> snip
>
>> [And now the irresistable opining...]
>> And btw memes don't 'move' -- a meme is an informational stucture
>> which is _copied_ across, imperfectly, at the equivalent of the
>> phenotypic level, followed by an attempt to fill in the encoding
>> post-hoc -- a process akin in many ways to reverse engineering.
>
>
> It is really nice to see someone else take up the "memes are
> information" cudgel. Without a doubt memes can be encoded in artifacts,
> stored in brains, and transferred by performances, but *memes are
> information.*
>
>> This explains why people find that they think about / 'understand'
>> the same thing in very different ways, especially when ideas are
>> broken down in argument (or whatever).
>
>
> Yep. And if you need high fidelity transfer, like game rules or
> multiplication tables, you use the standard methods of redundancy and
> error checking. That's what education is about, cramming information
> into brains that can absorb only a few bits per second.
>
>> Anyway social science has little to offer at the level of explanation,
>> what they do have is a wealth of extremely well-studied and classified
>> phenomena. For example I loved the idea of functionalism (in a
>> particular sense of the term) when I did some sociology -- a well
>> characterised phenomenon, but no bottom-up explanation as such. The
>> best sociology can hope for is to explain society the way old
>> physicists (Boyle or Rayleigh for example)explained the behaviour of
>> gases -- at the level of gross phenomena, with no recourse to molecules.
>
>
> I just posted from a 12 year old book on evolutionary psychology which
> said essentially the same thing. Social "science" is this isolated
> area, leaving a hole in science about ourselves and our culture.
>
> snip
>
> Much thanks.
>
> Keith Henson
>
>
>
> ===============================================================
> 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
>
>
-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Chris Taylor (christ@ebi.ac.uk) MIAPE Project -- psidev.sf.net ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ =============================================================== 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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