re: #485 Jimmah

dawkins is widely respected? In some circles, yes, that’s true.

A meme is a unit, right? So if the first four chords of Beethoven’s fifth are a meme, where does the next meme start in the symphony? How would anyone find out? How do you quantify how many memes there are in the symphony? Are there parts that are necessarily memic and parts that aren’t? How would anyone find out?

If you claim that there are memes, then they need to be separated from non-memes, but as soon as a person communicates which bits are non-memes, alas, they become memes. Behold: the theory that destroys itself: everything and anything in a culture can be a meme. How incredibly useful.

It isn’t useful: its slipshod. If you declare something a unit by definition, and then can’t rigorously define its boundaries even in theory, you don’t have a unit.