Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA11328 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 28 Mar 2001 14:33:06 +0100 Message-ID: <3AC1E758.4DB5AC34@bioinf.man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 14:30:00 +0100 From: Chris Taylor <Christopher.Taylor@man.ac.uk> Organization: University of Manchester X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U) X-Accept-Language: en To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: The Demise of a Meme References: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745D2B@inchna.stir.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
My surmise of Robin's Buddhism is that it is more like yoga than
anything else - a manual for self control which happens to have a lot of
baggage with it about the originators of this particular route to
(temporary) self-ablation, therefore I can see why he would assert that
it wasn't a 'religious' thing. OK tear me to bits now...
Change of thread...
> I've said on the list already that my initial attraction to memetics
> was because it appeared to offer a reason for widespread religious beliefs,
> but I've long since acknowledged the problem of seeing beliefs as memetic.
You need to go the whole hog to explain the persistence of falsifiable
(or pathetic) beliefs - if we are *nothing* but memes, then fitness is
determined solely by the degree to which a meme is compatible with
resident memes (your 'mind'). Dead easy! Most of these memes get in
early, and therefore define the selective environment for later
arrivals. This gives us our tendency to try to support what we already
think. From the outside this looks like cherry picking to reinforce a
point of view, but I think it's a deeper process than that. You usually
have to undermine the hardcore residents to get them out - for example,
dicrediting a leading proponent of an idea to remove the foundation for
it. This can be a bad thing though (none of us goes around funerals
telling the relatives that there's no god); fundamental shifts can feed
through a mind undermining all sorts of stuff, including personality
fundamentals, through all sorts of weird and wonderful
interdependencies.
I heard about an interesting illusion on the radio last night -
apparently if you look at the back side of a mask, then pull back far
enough (a few metres) the concave often pops out to look convex, because
(according to the guy) our [memetic] predisposition to see faces
(uniformly convex) overules the (slightly less detailed) sensory
evidence. This is sort of a microcosm of what I was on about in the last
paragraph.
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Chris Taylor (chris@bioinf.man.ac.uk)
http://bioinf.man.ac.uk/ »people»chris
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