[extropy-chat] Just curious, it's not natural! (2)

[Lee Corbin]

Keith writes

> At 10:18 PM 10/31/2006 -0800, Lee wrote:
>>Memories are memes???  That does violence to the concept so far
>>as I understand it.
> 
> The essence of a meme is can the information be transferred.  So a meme 
> about how to tie shoes in a person's brain is a memory and a meme because 
> the information can be transferred.  But the other way around does not work 
> because I cannot transfer my memory of looking out over the Grand Canyon to 
> anyone else.

Sorry I missed this post earlier---it was not in a thread I was attending to.You are
saying that any information that can be transferred qualifies as a meme. This would
include vast amounts of electronic data, the output of random number generators,
and so forth.

My usual belief is that this would be too broad. And according to Blackmore
(The Meme Machine, p.6) Dawkins wrote

   "We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea
   of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of *imitation*."

Blackmore goes on to write

   As examples, he [Dawkins] suggested 'tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes
   fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches'.

This would seem to be a narrower definition than yours (i.e. "any information
that can be transferred"). Blackmore unfortunately fails to provide any
definition.

She also writes

   Dawkins said that memes jump from 'brain to brain via a process which,
   in the broad sense, can be called imitation'. [Blackmore gives an illustration
   where you pass on the gist of a story you heard.] This is the 'broad sense'
   in which we must understand teh term 'imitation'. If in doubt, remember that
   something must have been copied.

As an aside, this is still looking bad, IMO, for memories qualifying as memes.

   Everything that is passed from person to person in this way is a meme.
   This includes all the words in your vocabulary, [stories], [skills], [games],
   [songs]... Each of these memes has evolved in its own unique way with
   its own history, but each of them is using your behavior to get itself
   copied.

This would argue, IMO, for a narrower view of what a meme is.
Let's see what wikipedia says:

         The term "meme", coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, refers
         to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to
         another. Dawkins said, Examples of memes are tunes, catch-
         phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building
         arches. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution
         and diffusion - analogous in many ways to the behavior of the
         gene (the unit of genetic information). Often memes propagate
         as more-or-less integrated cooperative sets or groups, referred
         to as memeplexes or meme-complexes.

The article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme goes on to admit that there is
a lot of controversy surrounding the concept, but it doesn't seem to mention
that there is controversy surrounding the definition, or meaning of the term

Lee