Well, this would be the first narrowing of my broad definition, this from
Daniel Dennet off of his essay,
<A HREF="http://www.tufts.edu/as/cogstud/papers/memeimag.htm">Memes and the
Exploitation of Imagination</A> .
Daniel Dennet >>Intuitively these are more or less identifiable cultural
units, but we can say something more precise about how we draw the
boundaries--about why D-F#-A isn't a unit, and the theme from the slow
movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symnphony is: the units are the smallest
elements that replicate themselves with reliability and fecundity.<<
So whatever would be the smallest quantity of information that would replicate
with both fidelity and fecundity would be the best candidates to be treated as
memes. "Phfaskl" is not a meme. But "right angles" and its definition would
be meme material.
John Dale >> Second, since in biological systems information is dealt with in
a continuous way at least at some levels, how do discontinuous memes arise out
of a continuous stream?<<
I am not sure what you are asking. Certainly genes occur within a context,
but they can also be treated as individual pieces of information within a
biological context. I don't think that you can think of memes as being
separate (discontinuous?) from the context in which they occur, but within the
cultural context in which they occur they can be treated as individual pieces
of information. For instance we can have individual meme concepts such as
"faith is a virtue", but they occur within a cultural environment of other
memes such as "absolute certainty is necessary in important matters", "faith
is necessary for absolute certainty", "be childlike in your faith", "without
absolutes nothing is certain", "trust God like the perfect parent", "Don't be
an ungrateful child" etc. So while "faith is a virtue" can be analyzed as an
individual meme, it usually appears in the company of other memes.
John Dale>> Third, how, if at all, do we integrate the meme concept into other
information system concepts such as input, output, feedback, feedforward.<<
I am not certain how to proceed through these concepts. This vocabulary you
use here sounds familiar, but I generally don't use them. Maybe you can
provide more insight on that than I can.
John Dale>> Fourth, how is the concept of replication of information related
to the concept of the similarity of information? By replication of
information, are we talking about memory? Or are we talking about, by
analogy, two separate chemical reactions giving us a similar product? <<
I think that generally, though not always, memes usually arise when there are
convergences in information space. Either they are interesting functional
developments, or they may be forced moves. So memes are not strictly the
language used to convey them. For biological analogy: eyes have evolved on
numerous separate occasions across the biological spectrum so there is no one
necessary path to arrive at the eye. That would probably be more like a
forced move. There may also be interesting developments, like pouches on
marsupials, that persist because they are functionally useful but are by no
means a generally required or forced moves in genetic space.
In the world of memes it might work a little like this. The works of William
Shakespeare are very interesting and have useful functions in English culture,
but there was nothing to suggest that it was a required or inevitable move in
meme space. Newton's laws on the other hand are much more inevitable. If
Newton hadn't discovered them, someone else surely would have. But both of
these examples show that regardless of variations in the words, language,
style and presentation, there is a convergence or underlying meaning that is
arrived at time and time again.
John Dale >> Sorry for all the questions, but I would like to try to get a
handle on this stuff. It seems a little slippery, frankly.<<
It is VERY slippery, but I think there is really something there. The reason
it is slippery is that we more or less ARE our memes, and we in turn are
trying to study the very things that compose ourselves. Genes on the other
hand can be described and studied from a more objective viewpoint. I don't
know if there will ever be a "science" of memes like there is a science of
genes. I think the best we may be able to do is to see to what extent the
genetic analogies do and do not transfer into the realm of memes. This may
provide an indirect way to study memes, but memes as a direct study may remain
forever in the realm of Humanities and not science. This doesn't mean that
scientists shouldn't venture into it, however, or that this study is any less
important than "science". For once we have an area of study that truly
straddles the line. This may make it the most important study of all.
Jake