>>Mind you, what's this word "reject"? I'd argue that when you "reject" an
>>argument, the memes coding for that argument are still in your
>>mind/memory... they're just outcompeted by encumbent memes in your memecology.
>
>Maybe in the sense of having its potential to bring action diminish
>rapidly with time.
I agree. It's not that you fail to encode the information in some capacity,
but that the information doesn't get to code for control of your behaviour.
>>>However, if somebody can accept a partial linking, say he can
>>>enable his set to fuse with fmeme1, then if he doesn't know
>>>about fmeme2 and fmeme3, there is no cylic path in his meme set,
>>>the fmeme is rejected.
>>
>>This is... suspension of disbelief? I can see this working... your memes
>>don't go into savage conflict with new sub-meme arrivals... and thus the way
>>is paved for the metameme coded for by interactions of the new submemes.
>
>Or just belief in the ulterior or other-location utility of a meme.
>
>>Well... I'd rather rephrase this in less on/off, black&white terms... I'd
>>say that your memes not immediately and heavily inhibiting new memetic
>>arrivals would increase the chances that combinations of those new arrivals
>>(metamemes) get a foothold in your memetic ecology...
>
>Yep, it you want real analogy, it's like culture when a stranger or group
>of strangers come to a land. there's an exchange of memes, and hence
>a new, vaster culture emerges. Memesets are like memes.
Ha: and memes like memesets. This is my memetics argument for "be tolerant
and nice towards people of other cultures" views... that declining to put
people down because of their geogrphical point of origin leads to more
parallelism in terms of global memetic processing, which leads to a more
"imaginative" species.
>>Evolution isn't perfectly gradual and cock-up-free. It chases down blind
>>alleys, there's mass extinctions and so on... maybe you can view paradigm
>
>The mass extinction is probably to be viewer thus :
>
>the environment is not stable, the population settling in this environment
>hasn't be able to 1. find this out 2. act on their immediate surroundings
>to reduce the environmental disaster
>
>And hence the sytem made up of this localised to-be-perturbed environment
>and its population will be extinct, that is selected against.
>
>Another population might have succeed in predicting the coming upheaval and
>hence
>would have prepared in such a way as to prevent it or migrate away.
>This type of population would be "selected".
>
>Better spatio-temporal stability.
...But the mass extinction still happened. The big cataclism still occured,
which is what I was referring to regarding the discussion about paradigm
shifts. I think (sorry if I'm misled here) you were saying that scientific
memetic development would benefit fromm looking more like genetic evolution.
The implication I took from this was that scientists' memes dug in and all
got overrun in the shock of a paradigm shift, whereas evolution was gradual.
My feeling is that memetic development already DOES follow an evolutionary
path, and that the "sudden" paradigm shifts are like mass extinctions of
memes. Hey, but I'm not sure I'm reading you right still, and what you say
about memetic generalists/specialists has validity in that, on a one-person
level, digging your memetic heels in will tend to make you back into a
corner more, from which it's harder work to get back out of...
Dave Pape
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