Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id CAA06964 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 21 Mar 2001 02:04:04 GMT From: <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 20:06:49 -0600 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: The Demise of a Meme Message-ID: <3AB7B859.23096.11240A6@localhost> In-reply-to: <20010321012545.AAA28591@camailp.harvard.edu@[205.240.180.85]> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On 20 Mar 2001, at 20:25, Wade T.Smith wrote:
> Hi Joe E. Dees -
>
> >Science is the prime example of a discipline that, as far as its
> >content goes, not only explicitly embraces selection, but also has
> >enshrined verisimilitude, or correspondence with observed reality, as
> >the prime determinant of fitness.
>
> And if I contend that science is not a discipline (although it's a
> good thing to be disciplined..., and helps the cause immensely), but a
> natural result of observation, in a brain evolved to the point it is
> on this planet, and that science is, at its root, totally
> non-cultural?
>
The verification principle is itself not only an idea, but a meme, and
the reason it has propagated widely is because it works; i.e. it is a
successful heuristic (rule of thumb) for scientific discovery - the
wringing, by means of observation and experimentation, of
knowledge from the heretofore unknown. Since it is a process,
that is, a formula or recipe for exploration, rather than an assertion,
one cannot really ask whether or not the principle itself is true,
even though utility and veracity perpetually prove themselves
contiguous in the intersubjectively experienced world. It is
certainly true that it works. provisionally, it is the right way to go
about investigation our environing world; we have yet to find one
better. Is science cultural? It has been, and there once were as
many (pseudo)scientific explanations for phenomena as there were
culturally distinct societies (remember phlogiston for fire, and the
doctrine of signatures for plant properties, and astrological
personality templates?), but through the darwinian winnowing that
has occurred with the comparisons and contrasts between
competing technologies and the subsequent clarifications and
corrections which have taken place in their respective groundings
as a result, science has achieved integration and supraculturality
to an immense degree, as have our technologies. Our main
remaining barriers are linguistic, both spoken and written.
Although more slowly (taking perhaps hundreds of years), I expect
language to follow suit, under the pressures of precision, concision,
comprehensiveness, flexibility and ease of palate expression and
typing/writing. The two main contenders in this arena are english
and chinese; others besides english are not doing so well on the
internet. The only reason chinese will hang around for a long while
is the inertial momentum contributed by such a massive and
monolithic population. Since the language itself is still
iconic/imagistic rather than purely symbolic (that is, it has failed to
inculcate the phonetic principle of text, which allows us to
construct an unlimited number of distinct words from just 26
letters) and requires hundreds of thousands of discrete characters
with which to communicate, it is eminently unsuitable for a
computer keyboard (job from hell - a chinese typesetter!). Thus I
predict that it, too, will be left behind, at least by the
cyberliterati/cognoscenti, and will survive only as a common form of
heathen (for those 'out in the sticks') conversation vehicle used by
the great chinese unwired.
>
> - 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 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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