Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id TAA13140 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 10 Oct 2001 19:27:48 +0100 From: <dgatherer@talk21.com> X-Mailer: talk21 v1.21 - http://talk21.btopenworld.com To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk X-Talk21Ref: none Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 19:17:06 BST Subject: Re: What/who selects memes? Message-Id: <20011010181755.DZDY16962.t21mta02-app.talk21.com@t21mtaV-lrs> Sender: fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Philip:
This makes identification of the
meme virtually impossible on a neural level....
Derek:
And exactly how difficult is something I tried to describe in a longish post I made back in September 1998. The URL to the old archive is http://aldebaran.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk/~majordom/memetics/old/1542.html
The title 'doing the neural walk' was a reference to something that was said by somebody on the list that memeticists 'talk the neural talk but also need to walk the neural walk'. I wanted to show how difficult the 'neural walk' really is.
Philip:
......in this case the
written sentence `God is dead' really is the only entity that retains
its form in transmission. When you pronounce the sentence in your head
without actually saying it, isn't that also a robust representation of
the meme. I mean, shouldn't this representation be more or less the same
in each person that imaginatively pronounces it.
Derek:
to repeat something else I said ages ago (and the subscribers of those long ago days are largely gone now, so please forgive my repetitiousness), because we can in theory enunciate, either in our heads or out loud, an infinite variety of sentences (Chomsky's 'house that Jack built' thought experiment), if one believes that enunciation of a sentence implies an internal meme corresponding to that sentence, one then has to postulate an infinite internal storage space for those memes. Since that is impossible, there must be something wrong with the idea of internal storage of sentences.
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