From: "Aaron Agassi" <agassi@erols.com>
To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: i-memes and m-memes
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 1999 08:59:20 -0400
In-Reply-To: <w8De4JA$42z3EwZP@faichney.demon.co.uk>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk [mailto:fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk]On Behalf
> Of Robin Faichney
> Sent: Friday, September 03, 1999 2:44 AM
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: i-memes and m-memes
>
>
> In message <000b01bef58a$87a23880$fdb606d1@sbosmr.ma.cable.rcn.com>,
> Aaron Agassi <agassi@erols.com> writes
> >> >What you are talking about is not identity but resemblance.
> >>
> >> In the case of information, these are the same thing.
> >
> >No. A hard drive can actually be copied on the same platform.
> but not cross
> >platform. In such case identity is impossible, only resemblance. Because
> >straight copying becomes impossible, only translation.
>
> The type of copying/translation depends on the level at which you are
> operating. At the content level, platform is irrelevant. The
> distinction between information, or form, and substance, is also a
> matter of levels. If two physical things are similar, they share some
> properties. Say they have only one similarity: they share that property
> -- *singular*! The similarity is form, or information, and despite
> there being two instances of it here, that item of information is, in
> itself, singular. For information, resemblance is identity.
The question remains whether content is ever truly and completely congruent.
Take for example the Bible. The Bible is partly universal, but mostly
context dependant. But the Bible has been stripped of context through it's
history. Much was deliberately obfuscated, rewritten, or censored, several
times over thousands of years. Each book had already undergone progressively
radical context bypass. Then the Bible was first canonized after Jerusalem
was sacked yet again, and the culture largely erased. Another radical loss
of context. Since then every culture, every reader (or illiterate listener),
brings their own context. It is the Bible's compact transparency to context,
together with it's universality, that has accounted for it's success. Only
within very stringent cults can there be an attempt to render Biblical
context uniform, artificially. The case of the Bible illustrates the
question of whether there really is any such thing as content identity. For
no two cultures, eras, or individuals can hold the same Bible, any more than
one can wade through the same river twice, or Krishna could ever hope to
repeat his advice to Arjuna in the same way ever again.
> --
> Robin Faichney
> Get Your FREE Information at
> http://www.conscious-machine.com
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
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===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit