Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id TAA25182 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 17 Jan 2001 19:54:35 GMT Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 19:47:49 +0000 To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: DNA Culture .... Trivia? Message-ID: <20010117194749.A432@reborntechnology.co.uk> References: <200101171351.IAA01093@mail2.lig.bellsouth.net>; <20010117152329.A11194@reborntechnology.co.uk> <200101171601.LAA13193@mail5.lig.bellsouth.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.12i In-Reply-To: <200101171601.LAA13193@mail5.lig.bellsouth.net>; from joedees@bellsouth.net on Wed, Jan 17, 2001 at 10:06:49AM -0600 From: Robin Faichney <robin@reborntechnology.co.uk> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On Wed, Jan 17, 2001 at 10:06:49AM -0600, Joe E. Dees wrote:
> We have points of agreement, and points of disagreement, like any
> other two people who are not cognitive clones. Information, per se,
> is not necessarily meaningful, and meaningless information, and
> meaningful information some meaning of which cannot be grasped
> by the potential recipient, are in my view, poor candidates for
> memetic propagation.
You accept that information is not necessarily meaningful, and that may
be enough. Our previous argument as to whether memes are meaningful was
really about the use of the word "meme", ie semantics. My quest is for
an understanding of how meaning arises out of the universe's inherent
meaninglessness, and how memes can be carried by or encoded in matter.
How can the structure of matter be meaningful? Accept, just for the sake
of this argument, that it could be useful to view material structure
as information. It has no inherent meaning, unless that structure
in itself is all you're interested in. But we now have information:
how can it be imbued with meaning? How can the squiggles on a piece
of paper refer to things, people, events, relationships, "out there"?
And don't tell me to read some book to answer that question. I know that
many, many people have written about such stuff. I also know, with as
much certainty as is possible in such things, that noone has taken my
approach to it, noone has answered precisely the questions I'm asking,
which (obviously) require more than one paragraph to fully describe.
That's a start (if it's anything). Is it worth going on? Even if
so, there are many possible directions to take, and it might well be
impossible to get anywhere, along any of them, within the space of one
email. But specific questions, if any, I'll try to answer. (But I do
mean _specific_ questions, not vague ones, because they're too difficult,
unless you have the time and energy to woffle, which I don't.)
-- Robin Faichney robin@reborntechnology.co.uk=============================================================== 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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