RE: The Demise of a Meme

From: Vincent Campbell (v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Mar 28 2001 - 16:53:57 BST

  • Next message: Vincent Campbell: "RE: The Demise of a Meme"

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    From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk>
    To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
    Subject: RE: The Demise of a Meme
    Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 16:53:57 +0100
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            <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...>
    >
            I've probably mentioned this before, but my Tai Chi has said on more
    than one occasion that the only problem with Yoga is that you don't learn
    what to do of someone comes and tries to push off your cushion :-)

            I do get a bit red and tooth and claw over religion, but I'm a nice
    bloke really! Honest!

            <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!>
    >
            I think that is a line some would hold.

            <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.>
    >
            Yep.

            <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 have had the misfortune in the last couple of years to attend
    funerals of immediate family, and felt very guilty about not trying to tell
    people there's no God, but you're right that I didn't do it, despite the
    fact that death is a time when religious sentiment can flip-flop
    dramatically so people are ripe for conversion (either way). The worst
    situation was when my sister died a couple of years ago from a brain tumour
    at the age of 30. My mother felt her faith was a help, my sister converted
    to catholicism just before her death, whilst my father essentially abandoned
    his beliefs as a result (at least that's what he told my Mum- he's never
    been very vocal about his beliefs in that way). I've been ardently
    atheistic since I was very young. For me, the biggest problem was my niece,
    who at a little over 3 1/2 years old was being told by my parents that her
    Mum would be going up to heaven in the sky, and be watching from the stars
    by night, and from clouds by day. I really felt this was lying to the kid
    but I couldn't bring myself to challenge this, even when my niece asked me
    about it (although I didn't say she was in heaven, just in the stars). It
    was a simple explanation, a way to deal with what happens after you die- a
    natural question, and she knew her mum had died- and one that appeared to
    satisfy a young mind. But, boy did I feel wretched about it.

            <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.>
    >
            I see what you mean.

            Vincent

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