X-Message-Number: 4948
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 1995 21:37:02 -0700
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS Memes

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In  #4944 Peter Merel <> On Fri, 6 Oct 1995 Wrote:



                >It seems plain that the meaning of any information     
                >depends upon the context within which it is considered.  
        

That is certainly true for information, but less important when you  
talk about knowledge, and not important at all when dealing  with wisdom.
               
               
                >Memes, therefore, can not be held to exist consistently
                >across their hosts. 

Memes are not completely consistent. So what? Partial consistency 
is good  enough, absolute consistency can be found only in 
the realm of pure   mathematics and there is some doubt
even about that. Also we are not talking about any conceivable
host but only a tiny subset of that, human minds. People are
not identical but they undoubtedly have much in common. Memes
that  exploit  those similarities are successful, that is they
are duplicated in  other minds. Memes that are highly
individualistic, that can work only in  one particular mind,
that have meaning only to one  person are unsuccessful  because
they die with the person. Some  mystical ideas may be of that sort.


                > one host's internal representation of a meme need not 
                >coincide in any particular with the internal representation  
                >of that  meme in another host.

But the two hosts are able to communicate so the internal
representation could not be too dissimilar, besides, the
difference between one host and another is  because of different
genes and different memes and both are pure information.


                >there is no absolute context within which meaning can  
                >be determined                 

And there is no absolute meaning of meaning that is not
circular. A successful meme has nothing to do with  "ultimate
truth", justice, or the American way, it just found a more  fruitful 
way to reproduce itself before it's host died  than the competition.


                >Memes, therefore, can not be demonstrated to exist     
                >except within the mind of a memeticist. 

I'm afraid I don't get your point. It's certainly true that
memes are  exclusively a phenomena of the mind, and it's also
true that it matters not  a bit if that mind believes in the
theory of memes or not. 
                                           

                >Memetics might then be viewed with the same distaste
                >that we apply to racism. [memetics] is quite ugly and
                >derogatory. The memeticist dismisses  people of differing
                >cultures, religions and politics as "bots" or "oids" or 
                >"infected" or one of a dozen other disdainful eptithets.
                >[...] similar to the terms favoured by cults 

As I understand your argument, memetics is untrue because
anything that  engages in gratuitous, emotion charged insults
must be false. I seem to have  detected a contradiction, but
don't let that bother you, as I said before, it  happens to the
best of us from time to time and doesn't necessarily mean that
the idea is totally worthless. It is bad public relations however.

                >Memetics treats competing  philosophies in obstructionist 
                >terms 

That's not very surprising, all memes are engaged in a struggle
for existence,  fighting over finite resources, brain power.


                                         John K Clark        

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