Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id VAA25547 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 16 Mar 2001 21:49:53 GMT From: <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 15:52:34 -0600 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Technology/culture/memetics Message-ID: <3AB236C2.17608.296C9E@localhost> In-reply-to: <20010316150013.AAA11020@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On 16 Mar 2001, at 10:00, Wade T.Smith wrote:
> On 03/16/01 08:33, Vincent Campbell said this-
>
> >Is the wheel, say, not a meme in some sense?
>
> "Oh, that's all well and good, Mr. Wise Guy, but what color should it
> be? Huh?"*
>
> No, IMHO, the wheel (and any simple machine which explores a facet of
> nature) is not a meme in any respect. And I will repeat, because it's
> as near as I've gotten to this -
>
> >Technology however, in some way I cannot comprehend, is not memetic.
> >I clutch at environmental, but that is not adequate either. The link
> >between technology and culture may actually be memetics.
>
> Technology, to paraphrase Robin, is not the problem.... It is a given,
> and it changes, and it needs to be dealt with and it deals, but it is
> more part of a memetic environment than part of a memetic process. I
> think....
>
> Creating a wheel is thus, in my muddled thinking, outside of culture.
> Putting the wheel on a wagon, though, is memetic. So is painting it
> red.
>
Remember that some cultures lacked wheels; the plains native
americans, for instance. There may also be multiple technological
solutions to the same societal problem, which are culture-specific
(one culture employs solution A, another employs solution B, and
so on). Only when the cultures interact does an efficiency
competition between the two solutions occur, in which the
efficiency loser is dropped completely and the winner is accepted
in its place. Of course, it is hard to comparatively test religions for
efficiency, unless it is efficiency of conversion and retention,
usually born of coercion and threats, either physical or
metaphysical, or both.
Actually, a wheel is a technological artifact, built according to a
guiding idea which it embodies. That guiding ideation is a meme; it
has widely replicated due to its utility. Notice that technology-
based memes must answer to the empirical constraints of
pragmatic functionality in a physical universe, just as the
experimental instantiations of the logical consequences of a
scientific theory force the theory to so answer. Religiously
spawned linguistic memes are under no such constraints, since
belief/faith is, by definition, untestable, or it would be provable to be
false, or experimentally corroborated as (provisionally) true, and
thus reside not within the realm of faith, but within the realm of
knowledge. Truth, or its the success of its concrete instantiation
(what works), is memetically important in science and technology,
but not so much in religion.
>
> - Wade
>
> *Spoken by the Marketing Director of the B Ark to Ford Prefect, after
> he burbled in frustration that the crashed crew had not, in many
> months, even started to use the wheel, from The Hitchhiker's Guide to
> the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
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>
>
===============================================================
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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