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

[Keith Henson]

At 03:34 PM 11/11/2006 -0800, you wrote:
>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.

Snip

No, it is a *restriction*.  The original question was about memories being 
memes, and *some* memories, for example how to chip a hand ax, or put a 
person on cardiac bypass are memes in that people can learn them from 
another person.

Memes, genes and computer viruses are the more general class of 
"replicators."  At the root of it, all of them are information, and you can 
measure the lot of them in bits.  They differ in where they have to be to 
have real world effects (brains, cells, computers).

Memes *are* information, when you speak of the baseball meme, the only 
thing that is common among the hundreds of millions of places the baseball 
meme can be found (in brains, on paper and other media) is the information.

And there are vast numbers of ways to define memes, elements of culture 
being one, replicating information patterns (hosted in brains implied), 
beliefs, ideas.  It is worth considering when an idea is *not* a meme.  If 
you have an idea and are immediately struck by lightening and killed, 
whatever you had was an idea, but at best only a potential meme since it 
never was transferred, and that's the defining quality of memes, replication.

Arguing over a tight definition is a waste of electrons.  Over the years 
there have been several thousand posting on the subject.  Aaron Lynch and I 
went at this on alt.memetics years ago and there is much about it on the 
memetics mailing list.

Keith Henson