Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id RAA12226 (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 17:49:43 +0100 Message-ID: <3AC21572.7462F3FC@bioinf.man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 17:46:42 +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: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745D2D@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
OK I'll admit the face thing has a big dollop of hardwired visual stuff
going on, but I shouldn't have said that the phenomenon was totally
memetic (which means I did shit at trying to make my point) just that it
reinforces the concept of resident prejudice surviving in the face of
contradictory evidence.
As for religion (thankyou Vincent, please accept my sincere sympathy for
what must have been an unbearable time for you and yours), I used to be
a hardcore antireligious person, but now I'm not. I'm not religious, but
I do see that it's a lot easier to use religion to indoctrinate kids
with morality (memetic engineering ain't just an ad thing) before they
know enough to resist (and then they spend the rest of their lives
justifying what they already think, as do we all) than it is to try to
teach the golden rule and Kant. The kids will often abandon religion
(like I did with Catholicism) but the fundamental behavioural prejudices
it has scored in there will remain, with 'resident's advantage'.
Example: I am a full-on moral relativist in theory (paint yourself blue
and stand on your head till you get an embolism and I couldn't care less
- it's just as valid as the life of Mother Theresa or Michael Schumacher
or Pol Pot), but in practice I'm not. That's partly empathy (the little
model of the other person in my head leaks its pain into me), but it's
partly a totally irrational prejudice, which I have sought to reinforce
(self-analysts'r'us...).
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Chris Taylor (chris@bioinf.man.ac.uk)
http://bioinf.man.ac.uk/ »people»chris
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