virus: Re: Rationality (meme make-up)

Dave Pape (davepape@dial.pipex.com)
Sat, 15 Mar 1997 21:53:02 GMT


At 15:56 14/03/97 +0000, Tony wrote:

> I have a feeling that the distinction between meme/meme-complex
>problem, or the atomic meme problem is of the same nature as for genes.
>Dawkins discusses the difficulty, is a codon too small to be a gene?
>etc.

Good point!

>It would be nice to share an agreed protocol to make our
>comunications more fluent. I perceive all memes as divisible (until we
>get into quantum memetics :)

Into ecologically-related components! The kick I got from James "Gaia"
Lovelock came from thinking about /myself/ as an ecology, and about all
genes as evolving do to arms-race & symbiotic pressures imposed on them by
other genes. Thus, every cell in your body's a bit like an ecosystem of
endosymbiotically gathered components, your body itself is a differentiated
colony of cells kind of like an ecology, and the biosphere is a massive
system of nested and interacting ecologies on all possible scales.

And so with memes. As with some of the arguments I was making to David
McFadzean recently, I reckon that trying to delimit and describe any single
idea AS a single idea is always going to be an oversimplification (but
probably a necessary one) because you're not taking the idea's full context
into account (ideas being defined by their context and all).

Trust me people, ecology's the key. My position is that (almost?) all memes
are in fact memecologies, all contributing to a overall global memecology
(which some people like to describe as an emergent Global Mind or whatever,
though I suspect this won't win them many friends down the Young
Reductionists' Social Club).

> Oh shit I am now more confused than I was when I first read Dave
>Papes question, Dave you have infected me with your fractally recursive
>wormhole.

Enjoy the disorientation. A fave memory of '93 was being in a barber's shop,
seeing this six-year-old waiting for her dad to have his hair cut. She was
climbing on a vacant barber's chair, and spinning it, and her dad told her
to stop. She shouted, "but I want to get dizzy!" and I thought about all the
slacker students and ravers I knew who also liked getting dizzy, and got a
buzz from knowing that lots of people enjoy being disoriented.

> Anyway Im posting this because it's got the lexicon definitions
>in it which you might find helpfull.

Peace! I'd tend to describe most "memes" as "meme-complexes", but then given
that people understand this to be my view, I'll happily slip back into using
the word "meme" again...

>deeply confused.

's good 'ere, innit?

Dave Pape
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