From: Ray Recchia (rrecchia@frontiernet.net)
Date: Wed 25 May 2005 - 12:48:48 GMT
A review in parts
(I haven't posted in over a year, so for those of you who don't know me,
I'm an attorney living in the rural northeastern United States. I have an
undergraduate degree in biochemistry, and I have been subscribed to this
mailing list for over six years)
Distin does a good job of skewering critics of memetics, pointing out
misconceptions and logical errors on their part. I was also pleased to see
her attack Dawkin's characterization of religion as a parasite. Memetics
should ultimately be about the properties and characteristics of ideas and
their transmission, not about the truth or accuracy of a particular set of
beliefs. I would say that "The Selfish Meme" is probably closer to my own
thinking than prior works about memetics. Distin starts and keeps her
focus on mental processes, a welcome relief from the half decade
distraction following Susan Blackmore's effort in "The Meme Machine" to
make memetics a behavior only field. As I've discussed previously, a
purely behavior focused memetics leaves us unable to examine the
transmission of abstract ideas unassociated with any particular type of
behavior.
Abstract ideas and abstractions in general are the central focus of
Distin's book. Distin refers to them as
"meta-representations". "Representations", according to Distin are our
mental concepts of specific items. So for example, I might have
representation of a a stick. A meta-representation is an awareness of a
property about the stick that can be applied to a variety of situations and
sticks. So for example, recognizing that the stick can be used as a
lever, and that levers can be used in a variety of situations. Another
example of a meta-representation might be the notion of "color" or
"quantity", specific abstracted qualities of the stick or sticks that can
be applied to any number of different objects.
Memes in Distin's theory are meta-representations that are replicated
between humans. Humans use representation systems to replicate memes
(meta-representations). Language is representation system that humans are
naturally pre-disposed towards, but we are also capable of other developing
other representation systems, such as mathematics and musical notation,
that are distinct from language but are somehow offshoots.
I like the notion of meta-representations, and I think that she is correct
in characterizing representation systems as the major way in which
meta-represenations are replicated. Overall, I think her book is an
important one that refocuses memetics on thought processes.
Ray Recchia
(more in part II and possible III whenever I get around to it.)
===============================================================
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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