From: Erik Aronesty (erik@zoneedit.com)
Date: Sat Nov 15 2003 - 10:49:08 MST
I agree, a meme is any idea that can be communicated, as opposed to those that can not.
When you create a new word, however, you must define it in terms of previous words. Howeve, most people will. Agree that the weritten definition of a word generally fails to capture its complete usage and meaning in society. People have written essays on the use and evolution of a single word.
Ultimately, the reason for this complexity is that there is a large amount of incommunicatable knowledge. Non-memetic.
Expressing this knowledge requires a heightened intentionality and rigor. It is the essence of "creativity" and is precisely the same skill across many pursuits - from dancing to engineering.
I would also say that mere words are a poor substitute for the range of expression available to us.
However, they are the best that we have... for now.
-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Henson <hkhenson@rogers.com>
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 12:30:38
To:virus@lucifer.com
Subject: Re: virus: Re: What does it mean to be me?
At 10:51 AM 14/11/03 -0500, you wrote:
>Keith Henson wrote:
>
> > The reason for adding this qualification was to distinguish memes from
> > ideas. If you can think of a better way to distinguish between these
> > two words, please let me know. (Tight definitions aren't really
> > needed if you have a deep understanding of the topic.)
>
>To answer that we will first have to clarify what is meant by idea.
Examples really help. To me ideas are the same kind of information sets
that make up memes. A monkey locked up in a cage gets the idea from
observation that keys unlock cages. Those that have this idea will use
keys they find to let themselves out. Apes have been taught that broken
rocks have sharp edges that can be used to cut down a reward. They have
also been taught to make sharp edges by breaking rock. (Though the ape
subject had an idea. He figured out he could just break the rocks by
throwing them hard on the concrete floor instead of banging one on another
which the experimenters wanted him to do.)
>Can all ideas be communicated, at least theoretically?
Probably. I can't think of an exception. No where near all are of course.
>Any idea that
>can be translated into language can be, but can all ideas be translated?
Probably so, but with extreme difficulty in some cases. Try explaining in
words how to tie a simple bowline knot. There was a Japanese experiment
where two groups of subjects were taught to chip rocks into spear points,
one with and one without verbal interaction. It turned out that rock
chipping is a difficult skill with a substantial number never getting very
good at it. But (if I remember correctly--been a while and I can't find
the paper) there was no difference in using or not using language in
teaching this skill.
>What about qualia? Are they a type of idea, or a separate class of
>mental phenomena?
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/
"Qualia: The Knowledge Argument
The knowledge argument aims to establish that conscious experience involves
non-physical properties."
If that is what you mean, I wouldn't go there. :-) I think it violates
some local rule.
>If not all ideas can be communicated, then the word meme would refer
>to that subclass of ideas that can (or more obviously, have been)
>communicated. If all ideas can be communicated, then my proposed
>definition of meme would include all ideas, but add the connotation
>of replicator, which alters the meaning enough to warrant a new term
>perhaps.
That's essentially the way I have argued for
years. http://cfpm.org/~majordom/memetics/2000/15897.html
and from Memes, MetaMemes and Politics, circa 1986,
" The new study is called memetics after "meme" (which rhymes with
cream). "Meme" is a coined word from a Greek root for memory, and
purposefully similar to "gene." Dawkins devoted the last chapter of his
earlier book, The Selfish Gene, to defining memes and discussing the
survival of these replicating information patterns within the meme-pool
(roughly culture). "Meme" is close to "idea," but not all ideas are
memes. An idea which fails to propagate beyond the person who first
thinks of it is not a meme. "Beliefs," especially organized and promoted
beliefs, are memes, or, depending on how you think about them,
cooperating groups of memes. I will use memes, ideas, replicating
information patterns, and beliefs as similar terms in this article.
" The study of memetics takes the old saw about ideas having a life of
their own seriously and applies what we know about ecosystems, evolution,
and epidemiology to study the spread and persistence of ideas in
cultures. If you come to understand memetics, I expect your view of
politics, religions, and related social movements to be changed in much
the same way the germ theory of disease changed the attitude of the
medical profession about epidemics. Memetics provides rational
explanations for a lot of seemingly irrational human behavior.
" A meme survives in the world because people pass it on to other
people, either vertically to the next generation, or horizontally to our
fellows. This process is analogous to the way willow genes cause willow
trees to spread them, or perhaps closer to the way cold viruses make us
sneeze and spread them.
" Collections of organisms make up ecosystems. Human culture is a vast
collection of memes, a memetic ecosystem. The diagram below is in terms
of increasing complexity. . . . "
> >> New genes are created through recombination and mutation.
> >
> > Recombination is part of the replication (and repair) process.
> > Mutation is sometimes an error in replication or damage and failure
> > to repair properly before the next replication. Typically there is
> > one or a small number of base pair substitutions. You can call this
> > a new gene if you like--sometimes a single base pair substitution
> > makes a life or death difference--but it is just as legitimate to
> > consider it the kind of variation one typo makes in a few paragraphs
> > when it is copied.
>
>I would call it a new gene when the change makes a sufficient difference.
That's ok with me, but the original discussion was about replication. The
"new" gene came about because of replication and mutation (errors in
replication).
>We have the same problem with memes. When a meme is replicated, it is
>unlikely to be a perfect copy because it is the phenotype of the
>meme that is copied, and has to be reverse engineered for each
>new system. In other words, it goes through a behavior-based channel,
>and the destination mind has to create a new internal pattern that
>will generate what (it perceives to be) the same behaviour. It would
>seem that this process would necessarily have less accuracy than
>the analagous genetic process.
That's not necessarily true. The genetic process has a bunch of error
checking and repair mechanisms. Memes are often subject to the same kind
of error checking. We do this in school all the time with testing people
to see that they have learned the material correctly. The same thing
happens with games, the rules of baseball are passed from generation to
generation with very high fidelity. (What error rate would you expect to
find if you asked the question of how many strikes it takes for a batter to
be "out"?) Memes that have been written down are subject to much less
drift than ones passed on verbally. For over a million years the "hand ax"
was produced out of local rocks all over the world with no variation. This
was probably because the hand ax "design" was tightly constrained by
physics. Memes that have been written down are subject to much less drift
than ones passed on verbally.
> >> The analogy with genetics will be more intuitive and useful if
> >> we keep the models as similar as possible. Genes don't become
> >> genes only when they are replicated.
> >
> > No, but with the exception of a small amount of human made DNA, all
> > strings of DNA base pairs come from a very long line of replication.
> > That includes the well over 90% of our genome that is just junk and
> > is never transcribed. Is this stuff that is getting a free ride
> > (since we lack a methods to get rid of it) genes? If you require a
> > gene to be transcribed, no. So what do you call it?
>
>Good question. Maybe some Virians with more biology knowledge
>can comment?
>
> > To have real world effects a meme has to be in a human brain/mind, a
> > computer virus in the right kind of computer. But I doubt this
> > distinction is going to survived more than a few decades. When you
> > get human minds mapped into computers, the computer minds (if they
> > are accurate maps of the original humans) are going to be just as
> > subject to being infected by memes as the humans were in biological
> > minds.
>
>I suspect the same will be true for artificial minds. In fact I am
>hoping that AI will shed some much need light on memetics by providing
>a relative simple and accessible computational laboratory for
>studying meme trasmission. I think Liane Gabora has already done
>some exploratory work in this area. If a computational agent is
>able to learn a new behaviour by observing the behaviour of a
>similar agent, would you call that a meme?
Probably. Birds did it opening milk bottles. Parrots learned to eat the
kidneys out of live sheep in New Zealand by observation. But I think
computer viruses are already providing an example of computers and replicators.
> >> Memes are also created
> >> through recombination and mutation. Isn't that simpler and more
> >> powerful?
> >
> > While these are the only way to get changes in genes, I am not sure
> > "recombination and mutation" are that important in memes. I don't
> > believe that any amount of recombination and mutation could have
> > generated the world shaking technological memes that have so strongly
> > shaped our world. You might differ in this assessment, but to think
> > about some examples, consider Watt's "separate condenser" meme,
> > Pasteur's germ theory meme and Darwin's evolution meme. Insight
> > seems to me to have played a larger role.
>
>Insight surely played a large role, but that would in no way show
>that recombination and mutation of memes didn't take place in the
>mind of the originator of the new meme. The theories you mention
>certainly were composed of memes that were already in existence
>put together in a new configuration (recombination) with some
>changes or additions (mutation).
We could argue the relative contribution of insight and
recombination/mutation till the sun goes dark over just these few
memes. Point I was making was that (until human started messing with
genes) nothing equivalent to insight affected genes, it was mutation and
recombination (and lots of selection) all the way. At least on this point
the analogy between genes and memes is not exact. (And I think Dawkins
recognized this from the very start.)
> >> The "I" meme is the meme associated with the word "I". Animals don't
> >> have it because they don't have any words for "I". People with the
> >> "I" meme reveal themselves by using the word "I" correctly in
> >> context. Independent observers can make judgments in good agreement
> >> that the usage of the word is correct and the users understand the
> >> meaning of the word.
> >
> > "The "the" meme is the meme associated with the word "the". Animals
> > don't have it
> > because they don't have any words for "the". People with the "the"
> > meme reveal themselves by using the word "the" correctly in context.
> > Independent observers can make judgments in good agreement that the
> > usage of the word is correct and the users understand the meaning of
> > the word."
> >
> > Considering every word to be a meme might be true, but it is not a
> > very interesting use of the term, especially when common words are
> > learned very early and there is little variation over the population.
>
>I don't find the concept of words as memes nearly as uninteresting
>as you do, they may be the simplest of memes and the building blocks
>of more complex memes.
And phonemes are the building blocks of words. Chemical elements are the
building blocks of the 4 nucleic acids. At some point you go below the
level where the emergent properties of interest for the current topic
lie. Considering that elements of culture (termiting in chimps for
example) occur in non verbal animals, and that elements human culture
*probably* proceeded verbal ability, I consider language to be more a tool
that facilitates memes rather than words *being* memes. But it's not clear
enough for me to hold this dogmatically. Perhaps languages should be
considered large memes.
>Do you agree that some memes are composed
>of simpler memes?
Oh, certainly. My wife and I differ on this point of terminology. I
consider memes (that replicate as a unit) to be of arbitrary size, like
"string" is of arbitrary length. She thinks that complex aggregations of
memes such religions should be called "schemes of memes." (As in Schemes of
Memes are conspiring to enslave your mind!)
>Anyway I will concede your point in this case and try a different tack
>for the "I" meme. The interpretation I mentioned before was that the
>"I" meme refers to the stream of consciousness. Since it requires
>language by definition,
Why? Near as I can see it, *cats* have a stream of consciousness.
Keith
>it can not be innate (though the capacity
>to learn it is certainly innate, like the capacity to learn language).
>Is it possible that stream of consciousness is learned by mimicing
>the speech acts of others and internalizing it? Would that make it
>a meme, the "I" meme?
>
>David
>
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