From: Kate Distin (memes@distin.co.uk)
Date: Mon 21 Mar 2005 - 10:49:45 GMT
Bill Spight wrote:
> How do you deal with the fact that a spoked wheel, say, for a
> horse-drawn cart circa 1500, was sufficiently simple and manifest to
> serve as a blueprint?
>
> Best,
>
> Bill
By "serve as a blueprint", presumably you mean that someone could make a
copy of it without the benefit of any written instructions?
This is certainly true, but not - on my account - because the wheel is a
meme. I'd say that the wheel itself does not contain any information
about which of its characteristics is significant - information that
would be contained in an actual blueprint. If someone who knows about
wheels, or at least about how to build other things from the materials
involved, brings his existing memes to the situation, then he could use
them to construct a new representation of that wheel, with information
about the wheel's materials, construction, size, etc. But that
information is not intrinsic to the wheel. I could look at it and see,
for instance, that the wood's grain runs parallel to the spokes, but
have no idea whether that fact is structurally significant. It could be
coincidence. If a row of screwheads, say in the hinges of a door, are
lined up neatly with each other, does this matter or was it just
something that mattered to the very neat person who hung the door?
You've no way of telling, just by looking at the artefact. You need to
have existing knowledge and understanding in order to work it out.
On this basis I'd say that a wheelwright who represented the wheel and
thus copied it would not have simultaneously *copied* the meme of which
that wheel was an effect in the first place. Rather, he'd have
constructed his own novel meme (which may or may not exactly correspond
to the original) with the help of his existing memes. Was the "parallel
grain" bit of information in the original meme? He'll never know. But
of course history matters to memes as much as to genes, and even if he's
managed to construct an identical meme to the original this doesn't
count as copying if, historically, it originated in his mind not in the
original meme.
Kate
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