Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id SAA28974 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 18 Jan 2001 18:08:38 GMT Message-Id: <200101181806.NAA09718@mail0.lig.bellsouth.net> From: "Joe E. Dees" <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 12:11:48 -0600 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: RE: DNA Culture .... Trivia? In-reply-to: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745BE3@inchna.stir.ac.uk> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.01b) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk>
To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: DNA Culture .... Trivia?
Date sent: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 12:18:04 -0000
Send reply to: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>
> <...There can be no such thing as an
> > absolutely isolated meaning.>
> >
> Sorry to strip out your other comments (which I take on board and
> concur with). I see there are also quite a lot of posts so I don't want to
> say too much in case I reproduce someone else's comments.
>
> I guess maybe I'm taking a pedantic line, since this I absolutely
> agree with the sentence above, but what I was questioning whether you could
> call something 'information', without a context to give it meaning. It was
> in that sense that I felt talking about meaningful information might be
> tautological.
>
Actually, umm, yes, you can. The context is what relates the
information to other things (such as that referent which it
represents or symbolizes, or its identicality, opposition and
similarity/difference dialectic with other terms)and this relationality
bestows meaning upon it; a nonrelational meaning is a
contradiction in terms, since meanings are what they are rather
than meaning something else due to the web of similarities and
differences with other meanings which they manifest. Information
that possesses no context by means of which we can relate it to
anything else within our experience is meaningless to us, but it is
still information in the technical sense that it is compressible.
>
> <Actually, the fact that memes must both reside in minds and pass
> > between them stands whether or not you accept the definition of
> > meaningful information, although it is hard to see how
> > meaninglessness could propagate.>
> >
> The effects of memes must include effects on people's minds, but
> that doesn't mean they reside/inhabit people's minds. The question of
> meaningless propagation is interesting because, of course, from certain
> perspectives meaningless things do propagate e.g. wearing baseball caps back
> to front. Also the issue of signification rises in such cases- for those
> people who started wearing their baseball hats back to front, what triggered
> it? and what caused others to follow whoever initiated it?
>
I'm quite sure some people had to do things that required their
faces closer to what they were doing than the bill would allow,
while needing the hat in place for sun protection for a bald head, or
to hold unruly hair.
>
> So, the question is, signification, or meaningfulness is fine, but
> what shapes the things that become meaningful at any given time, or in other
> words, what turns an idea or piece of information into a 'meme'?
>
I think that in a sense, all meaningfuil information is potentially
memetic, in that it has the capacity to be absorbed in yet another
mind; the contagion rates, however, vary widely. the Shaker
religion turned out to be not as memetically contagious as
"Whassssuuuuuupppppp!" (tongue disgustingly extended while
smiling).
> Vincent
>
> ===============================================================
> 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
>
>
===============================================================
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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