re: #583 Salamantis

Sal2: You didn’t answer my question, because you can’t, without impugning your own position, since it is a good analogy.
But the second meme in Beethoven’s 5th, almost always found linked with the first, but less prevalent than it, because the first meme does appear in the ansece of the second, would be the SECOND four notes of the symphony.

Most people who can remember the second four notes also remember the third phrase. How can you be sure that the second four notes is a unit, other than just by your say so?

As to what an individual meme is composed of, it is composed of a cortical pattern that corresponnds to information or meaning, and it is a unit when it cannot be further subdivided and still maintain significatice characteristics.

LOL! So the first three notes of Beethoven’s 5th have no independant sgnificance? If a meme is composed of a cortical pattern, and my experience of the first 4 notes is strikingly different from (say) a native of Borneo, or a prfessional musician, then presumably our cortical patterns will also be different. So they aren’t really the same meme, are they?

Kinda like you can’t split up a hydrogen atom and have it still exhibit atomic characteristics.

If by “kinda” you mean “nothing”, yes.

Sal1: Likewise, one cannot point to ‘memes’ in general, but individual memes, such as the first four notes of beethoven’s 5th Symphony or the tendency for some people to cover conversation gaps by compulsively saying ‘you know’, can indeed be pointed out.

Yes, learned behaviors and culturally significant artifacts can be pointed out, but that des not mean they are causally efficaceous units.

Sal2: Actually, you can do no better. The tones corresponding to those notes can be objectively quantified as to frequency, sequence and length,
No: those aren’t the subjective experience.

while the composition of a star comes down to peoples’ subjective readings of electrospectroheliographs.

No, those are inferences made from subjective experiences. You have committed a classic category error again.

And while people can intersubjectively agree on those readings, they can also intersubjectively agree that a particular tonal sequence is an example of the first 4 notes of Beethoven’s 5th, too.

Not always. I gave an example of that above.

Unless they are ignorant of it, and then they could make mo more heads or tails of it than could a scientific illiterate trying to read an electrospectroheliograph.

Now you are confused: the fact that people can recognise a pattern does not mean that the pattern represents a unitary causal entity. I can objectively define a star as a unit. You haven’t done that with a meme, except by pure assertion.