re: #515 Salamantis

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.

great, but the question was “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?”

Note that you completely didn’t answer, unless the answer is “he whole thing is one big Memeplex” in which case, whoopee do: you haven’t defined the UNIT. A meme is a unit. If, of course, it actually exists as a useful term. Just SAYING that there is an empirically defineable entity, and giving examples isn’t enough. Here: on this webapage, is there anything that isn’t memic? Give it a go. Put in all the aboutness you can manage.

When I say:

“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.”

You reply:

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.

But you have simply avoided the question again. If parts of cultural artifacts (say poetry, music) are memes, and someone manages to pick a poem that has 4 lines, and magically manages to define the firsdt two lines as memic, and the second two lines as non memic, then someone asks “what are the second two lines”, and said researcher recites the two lines, BEHOLD, they are now memic. A now completely untestable theory: Everything anyone talks about, ever, is now a meme! yay!