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LenKen
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Virian versus Virion
« on: 2004-06-08 01:34:49 » |
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Virian versus Virion
I’ve noticed that the Lexicon that’s linked to the Church of Virus home page distinguishes Virian from Virion as follows: Virian is the adjective and denotes something that’s of or related to the Church of Virus (Virian virtues, for example)—whereas Virion is the noun and denotes a carrier of the Virus memeplex (me, for example).
But the Lexicon that’s linked to the Wiki homepage provides no such distinction: Virian is both the noun form and the adjectival form.
Why do I even bring up the question? Because I’m a pedantic bastard, that’s why. And also because, although it’s a subtle distinction, it’s significant, nonetheless. Unless, of course, there is no distinction and the word Virian does double duty as both the noun and the adjective.
My guess would be that Virion is an older variant of the noun, but—whether accidentally or intentionally—someone started using Virian as a noun, and the Virion-as-noun / Virian-as-adjective meme mutated into the Virian-as-both-noun-and-adjective meme, if only because one spelling is easier to remember than two.
Well, anyway, that’s my hypothesis. But, regardless of the etymology and evolution of the neologism, I guess all we Virians (Virions?) really need to know is what the consensus is. Virian-as-both-noun-and-adjective seems to be the preferred usage—and is, perhaps, the most elegant solution . . . and it’s certainly the easiest to remember. . . .
Help a cracker out. 
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David Lucifer
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #2 on: 2004-06-09 22:51:57 » |
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Quote from: LenKen on 2004-06-08 01:34:49
My guess would be that Virion is an older variant of the noun, but—whether accidentally or intentionally—someone started using Virian as a noun, and the Virion-as-noun / Virian-as-adjective meme mutated into the Virian-as-both-noun-and-adjective meme, if only because one spelling is easier to remember than two. |
Good guess. I tried to maintain the distinction, but decided to go with the flow in the end.
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LenKen
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #3 on: 2004-06-09 23:51:20 » |
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Those memes seem to have a mind of their own. Not to anthropomorphize the little critters, but it’s hard to tell when we’re controlling the memes and when the memes are controlling us.
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David Lucifer
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #4 on: 2004-06-10 14:35:27 » |
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Quote from: LenKen on 2004-06-09 23:51:20
Those memes seem to have a mind of their own. Not to anthropomorphize the little critters, but it’s hard to tell when we’re controlling the memes and when the memes are controlling us.
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Perhaps it is not a matter of figuring out who controls who, but rather realizing that we are our memes. If your memes control you that means you control yourself.
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LenKen
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #5 on: 2004-06-10 15:16:48 » |
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Quote:| Perhaps it is not a matter of figuring out who controls who, but rather realizing that we are our memes. If your memes control you that means you control yourself. |
I think that’s a good way of looking at it. After all, the self is the ultimate memeplex, as Susan Blackmore asserts in The Meme Machine. (And I think it was The New York Review of Books that said, “Goddamn, this is a sweet-ass book. Call in sick for work today, go buy her book, and read the fucker right now. Seriously.”)
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rhinoceros
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #6 on: 2004-06-11 11:51:42 » |
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I think that saying that we are our memes does not quite cut it, if it is to be taken as anything else than a loose metaphor.
First, we would have to pinpoint a definition for "meme". According to Dawkins's orthodox definitions, also adopted by Susan Blackmore, the meme is a transmission unit -- it includes information patterns passed around, but it does not include ideas, skills and midsets obtained through action, experience, emotions, or our genetic make up. So, the assertion that we are our memes seems to leave out much.
This difficulty with Blackmore's approach to "what is self" was discussed here a couple of years ago:
http://forum.javien.com/XMLmessage.php?id=id::BVA6aAQX-Qmwd-JDkm-Bwdp-Bxh2P0cSaT5L
<Susan Blackmore on what is and what is not a meme>
Another problem is thinking that everything is a meme and therefore the whole idea is vacuous. This is easily avoided by relying on the simplest definition of a meme - 'that which is imitated' . Innate abilities and emotions are not memes, nor are those learned by classical or operant conditioning which almost all animals have. So if you learned something for yourself, by yourself, then it is not a meme. If you copied it from someone else then it is. Clearly not everything is a meme.
<end quote>
Reading through that thread, it seems that everyone saw Blackmore's approach to "the self" as a problematic one at that time. I would be happy to see any new arguments thrown in.
I feel more comfortable with using more unambiguous terminology for approaching the question.of "the self", because this is safer -- the danger is covering controversial subtleties under a word.
A better claim would be "We are our neural patterns" (either genetic, or products of neural rewiring due to experience, or due to knowledge imprinting).
But even this seems inadequate. Our perception of our physical presence and our social status may be included in the above, but these factors largely depend on our actual physical make up and social status (e.g. having to work 12 hours a day in low-paying unskilled jobs).
Also, there is the issue of how others perceive our physical or online presence and status, which reflects back to us. I wouldn't exclude that factor out of hand from the definition of "the self".
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David Lucifer
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #7 on: 2004-06-12 13:11:59 » |
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Quote from: rhinoceros on 2004-06-11 11:51:42
I think that saying that we are our memes does not quite cut it, if it is to be taken as anything else than a loose metaphor.
First, we would have to pinpoint a definition for "meme". According to Dawkins's orthodox definitions, also adopted by Susan Blackmore, the meme is a transmission unit -- it includes information patterns passed around, but it does not include ideas, skills and midsets obtained through action, experience, emotions, or our genetic make up. So, the assertion that we are our memes seems to leave out much. |
Good point. Memes are a subset of a larger class of mind programs. Saying that we are the sum total of our mind programs in one definition of self (equivalen to saying that I identify with my mind), but that are equally valid definitions that would include the body (for example).
I think it would help understanding and communication somewhat if there was a nice word like meme for mind programs. Any suggestions?
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LenKen
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #8 on: 2004-06-12 16:15:30 » |
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Quote:| [Rhinoceros] Reading through that thread, it seems that everyone saw Blackmore’s approach to “the self” as a problematic one at that time. |
I must defend milady’s honor. Whereas it’s true that Susan Blackmore tends to overstate her case sometimes, I think she’s right that we are predominantly an agglomeration of memes—but, of course, our genes determine to some degree how we’re influenced by our environment (our environment being not only the memosphere but also all of our classical conditioning [Pavlov], operant conditioning [Skinner], etc.) . . . our genetic endowment gives us certain predispositions and proclivities.
I think a big part of the problem that people have with Ms. Blackmore’s de-deification of the self is that they want to cling to the outdated notion of free will. It often amazes me that even someone as intellectually gifted as Daniel Dennett does his damnedest to try to reconcile free will with determinism. Though I haven’t read his new book Freedom Evolves, I did read his 1984 book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting a few years ago—and, if I remember correctly, the type of “free will” he tried to defend was neither free nor will.
But what exactly would it mean for us to have free will, anyway? Is there some little homunculus in the driver’s seat. I know Dennett explicitly rejected that notion in his book Consciousness Explained. (Francis Crick theorizes that the source of our feelings of free will is located in the anterior cingulate sulcus. But he concludes—rightly, I think—that the mind is a mere epiphenomenon of the brain, that it’s simply what the brain does.)
Perhaps the simplest way to explain my position is that we merely follow our strongest motivation. But, in a sense, we’re free to the degree that we know why we do what we do: The better we understand what influences our behavior, the better we can choose rational and pragmatic behavior—and to live by our reason is to live free.
I think that most people refuse to admit to themselves that they lack free will because it offends their vanity. At least, I know that’s why it took me so long to realize that the truth, in fact, won’t set us free.
This is an extremely interesting and important topic, with many real-life implications, and I wish I could spend more time on it now, but I gotta get ready for a little party (hopefully not too little) tonight. So pardon me while I go wax my bikini line.
P.S. The quote I gave earlier from a review of Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine wasn’t actually from The New York Review of Books. It was from The New York Times Book Review. 
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LenKen
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #9 on: 2004-06-14 22:59:06 » |
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Quote:[David Lucifer] I think it would help understanding and communication somewhat if there was a nice word like meme for mind programs. Any suggestions?
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I know it doesn’t necessarily have to rhyme with gene and meme, but how about neureme? That has kind of a ring to it. 
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David Lucifer
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #10 on: 2004-06-15 17:04:58 » |
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Quote from: LenKen on 2004-06-14 22:59:06
I know it doesn’t necessarily have to rhyme with gene and meme, but how about neureme? That has kind of a ring to it.
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Not bad, but the association with "neural" may place some unneccessary constraints on implementation in the audience.
Try this: "The mind is made of ____, some of which are memes." If there is already a word for this in cognitive science or psychology we should use it. I don't know if there is, but wouldn't it be surprising if there aren't any?
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rhinoceros
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #11 on: 2004-06-16 13:06:58 » |
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Neureme might be ok. Can't we say that "neural" covers all kinds of wetware pattern encoding, either genetic, or a product of conditioning/"rewiring", or any kind of imprinting including memes? What does it possibly leave out?
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LenKen
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #12 on: 2004-06-17 20:15:27 » |
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We may not need a neologism like neureme after all. The theoretical neurophysiologist William H. Calvin’s concept of a cerebral code may just do the trick. On page 107 of his book How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now, he says: “Some spatiotemporal patterns in the brain probably qualify for the name cerebral code. . . . A cerebral code is probably the spatiotemporal activity pattern in the brain which represents an object, an action, or an abstraction such as an idea—just as bar codes on product packages serve to represent without resembling.” And on page 133, he refers to the cerebral code as “the smallest such pattern that [doesn’t] omit anything important.” If you don’t have the book, you can check it out on William Calvin’s website here:
http://williamcalvin.com/bk8/index.htm
The most thorough explication of his theory of the mind as a Darwin Machine is in his far more technical book The Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind. This book is emphatically not written for the lay reader. (Just slogging through the first couple of chapters has been a very humbling experience for me. I don’t think I’ll be writing “The Cerebral Code in a Nutshell” any time soon.) But despite the difficulty, it’s highly rewarding. And you can check it out here:
http://williamcalvin.com/bk9/
And his article “The Six Essentials? Minimal Requirements for the Darwinian Bootstrapping of Quality” from the Journal of Memetics is also essential reading (assuming you haven’t read it already):
http://williamcalvin.com/1990s/1997JMemetics.htm
I have to admit that it sounds a bit awkward to talk of a cerebral code for something, the way we speak of a meme for something—it just doesn’t seem general enough. But, although I swear there has to be some general word in cognitive neuroscience that denotes a neural pattern, everything I’ve ever read about the subject—as far as I can remember—just referred to them as neural patterns. I hope the problem is with my memory and not with the literature of cognitive neuroscience.
And now I think I’ll try to trudge through another chapter of The Cerebral Code. At this rate, I should have it done by Thanksgiving.
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David Lucifer
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #13 on: 2004-06-18 22:57:43 » |
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The "cerebral code" is an interesting suggestion, though technically not a word. But from the description it looks like it describes a pattern in the brain rather than the mind. Would you say that two people infected with the same meme (e.g. baseball) have the same cerebral code for baseball or different codes?
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Walter Watts
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #14 on: 2004-06-18 23:53:08 » |
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My CoV jail term has forced me to look at the old magazines in my cell.
I like this LenKen person. Very funny.
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