Sal2: Sure it does, when meaning is a main characteristic of a meme (which is why symbols are always memes, but the existents to which existents refer are not themselves always memes). Words are memes. We mem-orize them, and communicate by means of them. We also impart them to people who don’t possess them.

Ummmm….in what way is a word necessarily a ‘unit”? Words have meanings: these meanings apparently differ from person to person. To me, a book is an object with pages cover, binding etc. To you its a word with a huge amount of weird baggage that must be gotten rid of to talk about memeplexes or somesuch. In what way is the word “book” a unit?

Sal2: What Dawkins brought to these topics - politics, religion, art, technology, language, etc., was a way to see them as tokens of a single memetic type, with a single set of rules for their alteration and propagation. It’s like you are saying animals change, plants change, thanks, Watson & Crick & Gregor Mendel, I didn’t know that before.

LOL! That’s simply false in fact. Watson and Crick defined the chemical substrate of heredity empirically. Gregor Mendel defined, empirically, (some of) the laws of heredity. dawkins said “Memes exist, and are useful, because it seems to me that they are. ” Meanwhile, you can’t even define the second meme in a memeplex putatively bristling with them. The darn thing is in there somewhere though, I’m sure.

Sal2: Actually, as long as we remember things, there must be traces of those memories in our brains. If you choose to deny this, please inform me whether you favor the heart, the stomach, the liver, or the akashic record via the pineal gland as a storehouse for human memories. And people subjectively possess different memes precisely because they have subjectively had differing experiences.

So are you really saying that subjective experience is reducible to neurobiology? Oh good. In that case, what are the objective units of measurement for beauty?

But they also possess many of the same memes - common vocabularies, for instance, that permit them to propagate other memes via intersubjective communication. Because they had similar experiences in learning these memetic symbol systems.

Ah, so when I say “book” you and I think the same thing. That’s why its a unit. No, wait: we went through that…..