From: "Paul Marsden" <PaulMarsden@email.msn.com>
To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: Internal/External Dichotomy
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1998 17:49:03 +0100
Derek said
>a) Yes, 'most' memeticists do think that the meme is internal to the
>mind in some way, and that the things we can see are 'phemotype' or
>'meme products', but.....
>
>b) this is a serious mistake, as I try to explain in my latest JoM
>article.
>
I completely agree with point b) but I cannot believe that most memeticists
would want agree with a), since this would involve binning the official OED
definition of the meme (a unit of imitation) or at least rendering it
empirically redundant. Besides the fact that accepting a) renders memetics
unfalsifiable and based on unobservable phenomena (or do all memeticists
have to have a pocket PET scanner), the possibility of establishing memetics
as a legitimate social science and obtaining academic and commercial funding
will mean using the memetic stance to address real external behaviour in the
real world. Memetics is a stance, where the unit is the locus of the point
of research - and that, for it to be useful must be observable in some way.
Perhaps I am wrong but I don't think many of us on this list mistake
heuristics for ontology.
Paul Marsden
Graduate Research Centre in the Social Sciences
University of Sussex
e-mail PaulMarsden@msn.com
tel/fax (44) (0) 117 974 1279
>From: BMSDGATH <BMSDGATH@livjm.ac.uk>
>Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 08:58:39 -0400 (EDT)
>Subject: Re: Emotional memes?
>
>> "... Since the most of us have concluded that the meme in
>> transmission is not the
>> same as the meme within the organism...",
>>
>> which is something I understand and endorse, but then later
>>
>> "...Again, most of us have come to the general conclusion that the meme
does not
>> exist out side of the mind for obvious reasons that have been discussed
>> previously..."
>
>I don't know where these quotes are from, but I can say that:
>
>a) Yes, 'most' memeticists do think that the meme is internal to the
>mind in some way, and that the things we can see are 'phemotype' or
>'meme products', but.....
>
>b) this is a serious mistake, as I try to explain in my latest JoM
>article.
>
>Exactly what the 'obvious reasons' are, I have no idea. It seems to me
>that whether you are studying behavioural contagions (at the
>micro-level) or cultural evolution (at the macro-level), the units of
>analysis are the behaviours or the cultural manifestations.
>
>As far as I can see there are no 'obvious reasons' for
>postulating replicating internal neural/mental structures/entities,
>simply that around 1982, Dawkins made a decision to 'refine' his
>original meme definition and situate memes in the head, rather than
>out here in the visible world.
>
>Of course, if it could be demonstrated, via PET scanning or some other
>brain imaging technique, that there _are_ replicating or apparently
>transmissible brain patterns of some kind, then I'll concede the point.
>But I rather doubt such things will ever be found. Even if they are
>found, they are unlikely to map onto behaviour with anything like the
>one (internal)meme-one behaviour that memetics seems to require.
>
>One gene-one enzyme, as Beadle and Tatum said, but one (internal)
>meme-one behaviour, probably not.
>
>In the meantime it doesn't matter, we can still study memes as
>behaviours, artefacts etc etc. There's no loss of explanatory power.
>
>Derek
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