re: #495 Hhar

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?

First off, the applicable term isn’t ‘memic’, but ‘memetic.’ Second, memes are more often than not found in systems of mutually supported fellow memes known as memeplexes. A musical phrase in a symphony is such a meme.

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.

This stance completely ignores the ‘aboutness’ of communication. Words for things are not the same as the things themselves. So the long necks of giraffes remain genetic, while linguistically labeling and talking about them is an example of the memetic spread of the knowledge that such entities as giraffes exist, and that they have long necks.

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.

The term ‘meme’ is a descriptor of actually occurring, and evolving, entities. The discipline is still in its infancy, but has advanced by leaps and bounds, through the work of Dawkins, Dennett, Brodie, Lynch, Blackmore, Gatherer, Shennan, Balkin, Aunger, and Distin, among others.

On the fine-grained microphysical level, the boundaries of the human body are uncertain. Does that mean that you doubt the existence of humans?