RE: Toggling nature's auto-erase

From: Wade T.Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 15 2001 - 12:58:59 GMT

  • Next message: Vincent Campbell: "RE: Toggling nature's auto-erase"

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    Subject: RE: Toggling nature's auto-erase
    Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 07:58:59 -0500
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    From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu>
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    Hi Vincent Campbell -

    >do people really mean they want to be meme-free, or only
    >free of those memes they don't like?

    Point on....

    >If being
    >part of a social system means being subject to memes then I'd rather have
    >that.

    Well, of course it does, and of course you, and we, must have it, all of
    it, at all times. Ideal states are just that, unrealizable.

    I would argue that Breton says something real here- "(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."

    It is this purity of interaction with nature that I seek.

    But meme reduction, while seemingly a good thing- how is it possible?

    And this is where I turn to the rational and the skeptical, and to
    Occam's razor, because, like you say "memes are [not] universally
    malevolent", but, science doesn't have any.

    - Wade

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