[extropy-chat] Martine Rothblatt and "bemes"

[Robert Bradbury]

On 11/8/06, pjmanney <pj at pj-manney.com> wrote:
> Hey, was anyone going to answer my question about Martine Rothblatt's
> concept of "bemes" as a valid concept of future identity?

I've only granted the presentation [1] a small time allotment [2] but I
believe I would tend to agree with others that these are splitting hair
arguments.  Many of the slides I saw seemed to rest on a focus on
"transhumanisn" on a narrow definition of "human" and then using
"transbemanism" to differentiate positions ("be"-ingness vs. "human"-ness).
I instead would choose to focus the emphasis on "trans" (or "post") and I
think many on this list with long experience (witness all of the "trans-" vs
"post-" discussions) might agree with that.

There appear to be two aspects of this -- "beme" which seems to be poorly
defined and "transbeman(ism)" (which seems to be focused on ethical
treatment of anything of human or greater "intelligence").

Classical "memes" are thought patterns (ideas) that can be communicated
between two entities in such a way that the "essence" is recreated (you
*aren't* creating an exact duplicate) [3].  From that point they can mutate
and selected for (like genes) [4].  I think she may be trying to apply
aspects of "being" (such as identity, consciousness, freedom, etc.) in a
similar way but it isn't clear that they can actually be separated from
their instantiations.

The problem may involve the effort to distill things into labels we can talk
about and communicate.  Lets consider one person is 80% long term memories
(typically a Luddite) and 20% short term "beingness" (their jokes, their
priorities, their stories).  On the other hand another person is 80% their
short term memories (a Zen monk [though this is iffy because you've got long
traditions of beliefs] or maybe an actor).  Then there is a classical
transhumanist who is 80% the ideas within their head about what the future
will be like.  How can one apply simplifying labels (small words [5]) to
recipes which are this different?

But having not seen the talk (or the entire conference environment) I could
be missing quite a bit.

> >Robert writes
> >
> >> On 10/31/06, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> > But what happened to *me* in there? I'm more than my memes, pal.
> >> > Don't forget my memories.

Well *I* can forget them because I don't have my hands on them. :-)  But
your point is taken.  *But* what about of those neuroscience disease puzzles
involve illnesses like when you can "be" (retain and manipulate) short term
memories but not long term and vice versa (I don't know the technical terms,
perhaps someone could go dig in Wikipedia).  Is a person who lacks one of
those capabilities less "human" than Lee?

> >
> >> Well memories are memes and at least some of them are essential
> >> components of the survival and reproduction processes.
> >
> >Memories are memes??? That does violence to the concept so far
> >as I understand it. Memories are more like raw data; for one thing,
> >they're very seldom contagious. Beliefs are something else, and
> >are indeed memetic.

Short term memories and conscious thoughts are IMO "memes", See William
Calvin's explanation for this.  Long term memories are contagious aren't
"contagious" at the thought level but they are at the story level.  (Doesn't
have to involve "beliefs" -- think good jokes or "can you believe that"
stories.)

> >> > That's me, maybe. I don't want to "become", especially if the end
> >> > product is not me. I would rather "are". As you put it.

Can you be without becoming?  Is everything not change?

Robert


1. http://www.imminst.org/conference/M<http://www.imminst.org/conference/Martine.ppt>
artine.ppt <http://www.imminst.org/conference/Martine.ppt>
2. Observation: if you are going to introduce a new term to the complex set
this list already has you may wish to define *your* impression of it.  For
the people who don't have office or equivalent installed pointing them at
such may not be the best way to get "mind-time". (Presentation (an
openoffice component) does appear to open the document but I can't review it
as fast as I could if I were still using Powerpoint).  A Wikipedia URL might
have been better but I doubt you could get "beme" or "transbemanism" into it
as an accepted (academic) term.
3. One has to be careful to differentiate between internal memes and
external (societal) memes, neural pattern (memes), verbal memes and written
memes.  They cannot be treated the same way without a lot of abstraction.
4.  It might be interesting to discuss the error rate in the copying of
genes (which is generally very low) and the error rate in the copying of
ideas (which can be quite high).  Thus endless debates on the list about
*what* did they really mean by that...
5. We have a hard time about standard definitions for *old* words like
consciousness or identity -- how can we agree on new ones like "bemes"?
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