Re: Meme bonding

From: Francesca S. Alcorn (unicorn@greenepa.net)
Date: Mon Jan 28 2002 - 04:54:09 GMT

  • Next message: Joe Dees: "Re: Meme bonding"

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    Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2002 23:54:09 -0500
    To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    From: "Francesca S. Alcorn" <unicorn@greenepa.net>
    Subject: Re: Meme bonding
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    >Frankie:
    >> Has anyone written about "meme" bonding? That is: what causes memes
    >> to join together to form larger memeplexes? Why don't we just have
    >> billions of separate memes floating around in our brains?

    Philip:

    >Memes clutter together as most memes have parental memes. Coherence of
    >memes like social being often enhances survival rate compared to the loner
    >meme.
    >Thus generations of related memes tend to cling together. Examples:
    >computers and their parts, other inventions such as the airplane with
    >jet-engine, flight-computers, your own manifestation of your self is a huge
    >collection of related memes, religious memes taint your whole worldview thus
    >determining which
    >further memes should be adopted which always have to be compatible with
    >already
    >adopted religious memes, same goes for scientifically oriented minds. The
    >observation that memes are related to other memes, e.g. by composition, is
    >incorporated in my recursive definition of the meme. The use of memes acting
    >together is analogous to that of genes: take one gene and you have nothing
    >except
    >for perhaps the production of one type of protein, take 33,000 genes and you
    >may
    >build a human being.

    Yes, but what I am thinking about is something like gravity. Is
    there something like meme-gravity, that pulls them together? I know
    this sounds ridiculous, but I do have a serious question here. Do
    some memes have a greater powers of attraction than other memes? If
    we say that memes are like single cell ideas, then why do they get
    together to make an organism (memeplex) (why did single cells get
    together to form organisms)? Is it a result of our neural structures
    somehow - the combining of memes? I keep thinking that neural
    networks ought to fit in here somehow, but don't know enough about
    them to lay it all out. It is just a hunch. I understand that
    coherence of memes would enhance our survival rate, but what are the
    mechanisms of that coherence? There, that sounds like what I am
    trying to ask: what is the mechanism of meme coherence?

    frankie

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