Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA17103 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 14 Mar 2001 14:27:16 GMT Subject: RE: Toggling nature's auto-erase Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 09:23:30 -0500 x-sender: wsmith1@camail2.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas Est Veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: "memetics list" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Message-ID: <20010314142332.AAA23172@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On 03/14/01 05:40, Vincent Campbell said this-
>From a memetics point of view, this whole area is very interesting. Do
>memes work because they are attuned to the range of sensory inputs that our
>filtering mechanisms allow into normal consciousness? Is that why when a
>colleague of mine kept singing a snippet of 'quando, quando, quando' , and I
>then had it banging around my head for days? (If you know it, apologies, as
>I bet it'll be going round your head later today.)
One has to know the tune, firstly, or hear it. "Quando, quando, quando"
is totally unreferenced in my head, and so, no, it entered and left with
dispatch. On the other hand, I've been carrying around, intentionally,
the little tune that Jan Hammer wrote for the humorous portions of the
Miami Vice episode called 'Phil the Shill', which was on TNN last night.
Before that, I was intentionally wandering around with Bill Frisell's
'What Do We Do' between my virtual ears.
Why? Because I like 'em.
Memes do seem to work as filters, and I'm beginning to see them as only
this- immediate indexers of perceptions. There is something about the
ideas of surrealism that have always attracted me in this regard -
"(Surrealism) declares that it is able, by its own means, to uproot
thought from an increasingly cruel state of thralldom, to steer it back
onto the path of total comprehension, return it to its original purity."
- Andre Breton
- to the point of which I have declared, manifesto-like, "To a life
without memes!" which, to me, is a utopian and ideal state, as I have
increasingly begun to see memetic processes as artificial and
manipulistic, as I have certainly seen the motivations of those who
profess to be 'memetic engineers' as faintly if at all divorced from
propagandists.
The idea needs to come first. If one puts spin on it and calls that spin
'memetic engineering', the idea is lost. It is up to religions and laws
to so something ethically useful with it at that point....
"Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful. Anything
marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful."
Andre Breton, 1924
If memetics has anything to do with distorting the beautiful, it is false.
- Wade
===============================================================
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 archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Mar 14 2001 - 14:29:36 GMT