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Colin Brooke wrote:
[Tim Perper] Is memetics simply a fashionable novelty that does
> little more than give a new name to old ideas? Thus we learn that
rhetoric
> cuts both ways.
This is precisely one of the thoughts that I've been having,
particularly
after reading Brodie's Virus of the Mind. His book didn't have a lot
of
appeal for me, most of it repeating what Aristotle wrote 2500 or so
years
earlier.
You'd be amazed at the number of letters I get from people very well
educated in X, where X is philosophy, psychology, anthropology, etc.,
who read Virus of the Mind and conclude (despite my warnings at the
beginning and end of the book about Kuhnian paradigm shifts) that
memetics is simply a mapping of what they already know onto some weird
new jargon. Without evaluating the thought process of any individuals
on this list, I would like to point out that this phenomenon seems to
be a common response people have just prior to "getting" a new paradigm
or model. Remember, the key thing about memetics is the thesis that the
future will be full of culture with "good memes" -- memes that
replicate successfully. I'm sure others on this list are far more
familiar with Aristotle than I, but I do not think Aristotle covered
self-replication of ideas in any of his treatises.
Richard
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