Do you deny the existence of stars? Okay, then tell me precisely how many of them are in the sky. Do you deny the existence of grains of sand? Okay; then tell me precisely how many of them there are on earth’s beaches. Do you deny the existence of water molecules, or of oxygen molecules? Okay, then tell me how many of them are in the oceans, or the atmosphere. Do you deny the existence of atoms? Okay, then tell me precisely how many of them there are in the universe.

LOL! I say “Where is the second meme in Beethoven’s fifth and you relate that to caounting stars! LOL! Look, I can tell you where I see one star and don’t see another, and I can define a star empirically. same with grains of sand, water molecules, whatever. You can’t even tell me where one meme starts and another begins! This is hysterically funny.

And yes, the fact that ideas, words and communications are memes allows us to say, by using them, that the things to which they often point, such as actual things, are not uniformly memetic, although they can be.

LOL! A tremendous advance: symbols are not the objects that they refer to, though sometimes objects are symbols! Thanks Dawkins! We are way ahead of where we were…ummm…..five millenia ago! Brilliant!

A lump of marble is no meme, but a sculpture carved from it is. The difference is that if meaning-giving is involved, we can speak of memes. Meanings are what distinguish memes from non-memes, and different meanings denote different memes. But the reason one cannot say precisely and unequivocally how many memes are in a section of music is because the question then arises: in whose mind? In the mind of a Borneo tribesman, who has never heard any of Beethoven’s 5th? In the mind of a classical musician, who knows the symphony by heart? In the mind of a teenybopper, who heard a small piece of it in Roll Over Beethoven? Memes are in the minds of their possessors, just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This does not entail that neither memes nor beauty exist.

That’s right. So it isn’t a unit, is it? You can’t say something is a unit if even in theory you cannot hope to define its limits. You can’t even be sure you are referring to a real thing.

We know that memes form memeplexes because we can separate some component memes from them,

But you just said that memes are in the eyes of the beholder. How do you know that in my mind, the first four notes form a meme? How do you even know that in anyone’s mind they form a meme? “Well, I just think so. They seem to play together”. Well! THAT was rigorous, wasn’t it! Science! AND it provides a great insight! Phrases and melodies are often memorable! I’m just bowled over by this. LOL!

and find the identical components in other memeplexes. For instance the memes that to believe in a religion or its message saves or redeems the believer, and that proselytizing the faith is a sacred and caring duty, are found in many (but not all) different faiths.

Why not call them “ideas”? I mean, you have taken a perfectly good word: “idea”, and translated it into something that you say you can’t be sure of the composition of and that is entirely subjective. A great gain! SCIENCE! LOL!

to be continued…

Oh, please do. This is hysterically funny.