Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 19:38:21 +1000
From: John Wilkins <wilkins@wehi.EDU.AU>
Subject: Re: Memes are Interactors
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
In-Reply-To: <199804100147.CAA15866@alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk>
On Fri, 10 Apr 1998 02:47:38 +0100 fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk wrote:
>>No I think this Wilkin's definition is closer to your position than
>you
>>think because a meme, in his view is NOT "passive", but "active"
>because he
>>claims it has the capacity for "endogenous" change.
>
>If he does, he is as guilty of fallacious concretization as anyone who
>attributes mental characteristics to indivisible particles (like
>Theillard
>used to do). Memes can only get changed in the process of their
>replication. They can't change "by themselves", since they don't even
>*exist*. (They're just abstractions, invented for our convenience.)
He does not. Endogenous change is a property of information storage
systems. The physical systems in which information is stored degrades as
a function of thermodynamic entropy. Each transmission of a degraded
message is the replication of a changed meme.
I make a lot of the distinction between the genotype-analogue, the meme,
and the phenotype-analogue of behaviour or interpretation, unlike some,
like Dennett, who think of memes as "barely naked replicators". But I
think the error I do not commit is the sin I first read in Marcuse -
reificationism. Memes are, as genes were for Williams, cybernetic
abstractions; the bookkeeping of cultural evolution.
John Wilkins from home
<mailto:wilkins@wehi.edu.au>
Not at all. I delight in all manifestations of the terpsichorean Muse.
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