From: Kate Distin (memes@distin.co.uk)
Date: Fri 03 Feb 2006 - 09:53:53 GMT
Derek Gatherer wrote:
>
> http://www.geocities.com/derek_gatherer/parallax_2006.pdf
>
> This was written for a continental-philosophy/lit-crit journal called
> Parallax,
> http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/(qj0qlqn0cjtomu45d2kvtn45
> )/app/home/journal.asp?referrer=parent&backto=browsepublicationsresults,952,1257;
>
>
> so the presentation is fairly elementary. The publisher's rule, by the
> way, is that once it has been downloaded 50 times, I have to take it
> offline.
Thanks for pointing us to this paper. It is the clearest and most
useful guide to the spectrum of views in the field that I've read.
Unsurprisingly perhaps I'm not so sure about the problems you raise for
memetics. You talk about the need to quantify meme frequencies in
populations, and say that's not possible if memes are ideas in heads,
because we can't see them. But surely we can detect them in other ways,
even though as you say we are a long way off detecting by physical
observation what's going in a brain. If I want to know whether someone
has a particular meme then I can ask them or, less directly, observe
their behaviour. Behavioural observation is as you say not ideal; but
if you include what they write/say as part of that behaviour then things
become more manageable.
I think the problem rests on a false dichotomy between memes-in-heads
and memes-in-artefacts. If memes are portions of cultural information
then they can be found both in heads and in *some* types of artefacts -
the artefacts that carry information (books, blueprints, scores; but not
wheels or tables). And we can quantify meme frequencies by looking for
the information: does this person remember X? Is X contained in this book?
The other problem as you point out with the idea of quantifying meme
frequencies in *populations* is the impermanence of the meme-individual
relationship, in contrast to the permanence of the gene-individual
relationship. But if we look at things the other way round then the
problem evaporates. Rather than assuming that what we should be doing
when studying memes is looking at frequencies in populations, and then
worrying because there is no ongoing on-to-one relationship between
memes and the individuals who make up populations, we should look first
at the nature of memes. Since they are not permanently attached to
individuals it would seem that it makes no sense to study them in the
same way that we would study genes. The reason why we study genes in the
way that we do is that they *are* tied down in individuals. But since
memes aren't, we need to widen the scope of our study and include all
the places that they are to be found - which will include books, etc.
And of course because the memetic picture shifts so much more quickly
than (on the whole) the genetic picture does, it will be harder to take
an accurate snapshot - and maybe this means that the whole concept of
frequencies in populations is too static as a means of studying memes,
and we need to find something more dynamic?
Kate
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