It was less than a month ago that I accidentally found "Virus of the
Mind" at the local library and chose to read it. All of this is quite new
to me, and I have difficulty in trying to understand what it is really
about. Although there was a chapter in the book about removing viruses
from one's mind, it was vague. The only concrete advise that I could find
in it was to take up Zen- and that suggestion was only implicit and
quickly retracted. What I wanted to know was why the whole book had not
centered around becoming free from unwanted memes.
When I finished reading the book, it was not clear to me what a meme was.
It seemed to me that it was just some sort of idea that tended to get
passed along. Much like Christianity, which seems to me to be only
interested in spreading the "good news" about Jesus Christ. It also
seemed to me to be saying that because of the way we evolved genetically,
certain categories and subcategories of memes tended to be automatically
favored. It also sounded like the book was advising using memetics to
become free from these categories of memes first, so that we can use our
minds for more useful things.
It was even more recently that I signed up for the listserv. And by
comparison, the book was much easier to understand and its purposes more
clear. Perhaps that is because it had hundreds of pages to work with.
I've noticed that you only have a couple of pages at most, but that you
manage to fill them with enough to make a decent book. When you wrote the
clarification that I asked you for, there were points as I continued to
re-read it when I thought I was beginning to see what you were writing
about. But that did not last long enough to read the next sentence and
skipping back to re-read just the most recent portion failed to produce
the same effect.
Actually, the only thing I've found to be of interest and not just funny
was the arguing about what a meme is. It would be nice to have a way to
express it as clearly as a gene can be explained. Perhaps those odd terms
like "hook" and "bait" and "threat" are like the few chemicals which make
up DNA and RNA. Base pairs. And a virus seems to me a good example of how
DNA really doesn't directly make copies of itself. It relies on
mechanisms created by cells. Those mechanisms involve enzymes which
initiate and regulate the process of reproducing genetic material. But we
can say that DNA reproduces itself because it created the cell with its
enzymes. Admittedly, a virus can only borrow these things.
You have been asked to specicfy a mechanism by which a self-ordering meme
could order itself and replicate. Just as a vial of virus material can't
continue to make copies of itself it the vial by itself, why should a
meme be asked to so much as order itself? If a meme is truly as effective
as it can get, then variations will not be passed on as well and will not
be able to last as well. If a variation is more effective, then it will
be the one that maintains its own order. And this will not happen because
it tried to maintain its order. It only looks that way.
But my point in writing this was to say that I still do not understand
what you are saying or where you are going with it. I'm guessing that
maybe you try to fit too much into a couple of pages. In any case, it
becomes far easier to flame than to re-read enough to get the full
meaning. I'll admit now that I have not managed the latter. I do not mean
this in a negative way: if you could express your ideas in a simpler way,
perhaps this apparent isolation might not last. You would not have to be
talking about sides of a fence. Not that you would have to be kissing
anyone's body parts, but because you are now isolating yourself and
because you can choose to stop doing so. I really do want to understand
what it is that you are saying.
Tom