I think that Polichak's article has some merit ... especially given the
impulse to regulate meme space by curtailing access to the media. The best
arguement against trying to control the propagation of memes I've seen is in
the liner notes to the Trainspotting soundtrack:
"Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a
big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and
electrical tin openers. Choose sitting on the couch watching mindnumbing,
spirit-crushing game shows.
"People think its all about misery and desperation and all that shit which
is not to be ignored, but what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise
we wouldn't do it. After all, we're not fucking stupid."
The crux of this arguement is [obviously] free will...and was amplified I
suppose in 1984. Certainly society ... from the microcosm of a cult to the
macrocosm of the govt.'s War On Drugs ... can control our access to other
individual's conclusions about objective reality. But the noone can control
an individual's ability to reason from first principals ... or the
conclusions that individual draws <although society can certainly keep an
individual from sharing those conclusions>. Meme's <imho> provide a
template ... or stylesheet if you will ... for building interpretations of
objective reality. I believe they are
artifacts of conciousness rather than its basis.
My definition avoids most of Mr. Polichak's arguements, but also denies the
objective existance of a meme...or at least makes the concept of meme
tautological. A thought experiment I would propose to make this distinction
clear would be considering a primitive tribe whose numerical concepts only
include 1, 2, and many. What does it mean to teach members of this tribe to
count? Would we be infecting them with a meme or simply giving them new
vocabulary for concepts that they already may have understood ... but not
amplified <mathematic operations: additon and subtraction>?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: KMO [SMTP:kmo@c-realm.com]
> Sent: Monday, December 14, 1998 6:15 PM
> To: virus@lucifer.com
> Subject: Re: virus: re: Meme Wars
>
> Is that criticism of memetics in Skeptical Inquirer on-line somewhere?
> If someone could post a URL, that would be great.
>
> -KMO
>