Fire walk with me!

From: finn@sense.ceh.servtech.com (The Finn)
Newsgroups: alt.memetics,sci.philosophy.meta,sci.systems
Subject: Re: Fire Walk With Me!
Date: Fri, 26 May 1995 01:26:07 -0400

> F i r e   W a l k   W i t h   M e !
>
> The day the meme was tamed
>
>
> 1995 (c) Copyright | this meme may be spread
>			| freely as long as it is
> By Onar Aam	| spread in  its entirety
> --------------------------------------------
> http://www.hsr.no/~onar/	      onar@hsr.no
> --------------------------------------------

Although many use the term "meme" much too loosely, this is not a meme.
This is a discussion of a meme. Methinks the author doth hope too much --
nobody would bother to copy the babble which follows.

> One of the great milestones in the human race towards civilization was the
> taming of fire. It completely revolutionized the lives of our ancestors.
> Before this great event, fire needed to be guarded as a treasure. These
> early humans had namely painfully learned that once a flame died out, it
> was gone forever.

This is nice to think about, but hard to defend from a scholarly point of
view. Do you have some sort of fossil record for this, or what? Sorry to
be so sarcastic, but you're attempting to be historically dramatic, rather
than scientific (or even meaningful), here.

> Amazingly it turns out that the evolution of the meme
> is directly analogous to the exciting history of fire. But the taming of
> the meme may have been an even more important event, for with it the
> direction of cultural evolution was staked out ever thereafter. The tamed
> memes, which we call symbols, enabled people to communicate across
> generations, yes, across millenia.

I don't even understand what you're trying to say in the first sentence.
And how can you tame the meme *of* "taming fire"? The more I read the
above paragraph, the more I realize it's full of shit and empty of
meaning. As Dorothy Parker may or may not have said, "There's no 'there',
there."

> Earlier we have developed no less than three metaphors of the meme,
> (cultural RNA, cultural photons and shadows of the mind) but all of them
> have a common underlying definition: memes are socially emitted stimuli.
> We shall bear this implicit definition in mind when we connect memes and
> the history of fire. The idea of meme as emitted cultural photons very
> naturally brings our attention to the _light source_. Without a light
> source there will be no light, and in "Shadows of the Mind" we learned
> that this source is the mind. The mind is like a raging fire, lighting up an
> otherwise dark world, the source of light perceived by other minds.
> Interestingly it was exactly a fire which produced the flickering shadows
> in Plato's cage.

This is a VERY badly applied analogy of Plato's allegory of the CAVE, not
cage. Just because there's light and fire in both does not mean there's
any connection between the two, and the author fails to make one.

> Before symbols were invented, stories and myths were passed on orally, from
> parent to child. But this oral tradition was tender as a flame. The
> stories lived on as long as they burned in the memories of the elder. But
> once the elder failed to ignite the minds of the young, the stories of
> that culture would be lost forever, sentenced to eternal darkness.

Uhhhh...symbols can be oral, too. The imagery in this paragraph is purely
specious -- while tries to sound profound, it doesn't really mean much of
anything beyond the puerile attempts at parallelistic symbolism.

> The problem with oral traditions is that these memes vanish the moment they
> are spoken, like a burst of light. They have no persistence and totally
> depend on a mind to animate and fuel them.

Sorry, but BULLSHIT -- this is the WORST bloody proposition in the whole
screwy argument. There is a tremendous record of oral tradition across the
world, from the eddas of the Norse, the hundreds of years of minstrels in
England and its environs (ever heard of Beowulf, hmmm?), Russian folklore,
Japanese tales of Jimmu -- hey, anyone ever hear about those little poems:
the Iliad and the Odyssey? These "memes" did not vanish once spoken --
although they were dependent on being carried in the mind, they were
rhythmic, easily memorizable stories that persisted in hundreds or
thousands of minds at once -- what better way to characterize a meme? It's
like criticizing a meme because "it was only written down on paper in
encyclopaedias"! What the HELL was meant by this supposed criticism?

> The symbols radically changed
> this. Humans learned that by carving the memes into reality they would
> persist, shining on independently of minds.

Seems one of the major characterizing qualities of a meme is that it
exists IN A MIND, and propagates therefrom. Hardly a limiting
characteristic.

> We can only imagine what an
> extatic, yes, religious experience it must have been to the people who
> invented the symbol. They had invented a light source which shone on without
> the help of humans. This must have been close to the experience of seeing
> an automobile for the very first time, a wagon driving all by itself,
> only greater. Cars stop after a while, but symbols keep on shining and
> shining, long after their inventors have perished. The symbol must be the
> closest thing to an eternal flame that humans have ever invented.
> Thousands of years after the extinction of cultures, archeologists dig out
> remnants of their symbols. And amazingly, they are still shining! Imagine
> what a feeling it must be to read the words that haven't shone on anyone
> for thousands of years. It's literally (!) like receiving a long-distance
> call from the past. The symbol is quite a miracle in the evolution of the
> meme and has enabled people all over the world to speak with the dead.

The relevant point (s?) in this post could have been summarized in one or
two sentences: "Hey, isn't it neat that people invented writing and could
thus pass memes on without direct contact?"

Instead, the author, having seen "Twin Peaks" one too many times, goes for
some pseudo-scholarly paean to symbology, with a bunch of
would-be-profound babble about "light" and "sparks" and other
pyro-symbolo-spewing.

(sigh).

Does ANYONE out there have one single useful, applicable, scientifically
interesting and/or rigorous thing to say about "memes", or "memetics"?
Although it's an interesting notion, I have seen VERY little that
justifies giving a rat's ass for the whole field of inquiry.

_____________________________________________________________________
The Finn, Expert Authority			 "...I don't do Windows."
finn@sense.ceh.servtech.com
			 "Plays well with others."

Pet peeve: Insecure egocentrics who put "Ph.D" in their .sig...

From: hanss@tudelft.nl (Hans-Cees Speel)
Newsgroups: alt.memetics,sci.philosophy.meta,sci.systems
Subject: Re: Fire Walk With Me!
Date: Fri, 26 May 1995 16:40:14

>nobody would bother to copy the babble which follows.
 it's full of shit and empty of>meaning.
 BULLSHIT --in the whole
>screwy argument. What the HELL was meant by this supposed criticism?
 "sparks" and other
>pyro-symbolo-spewing.
 giving a rat's ass for the whole field of inquiry.

Congratulations on your language! I know children that talk just like you.



>Seems one of the major characterizing qualities of a meme is that it
>exists IN A MIND, and propagates therefrom. Hardly a limiting
>characteristic.

I do not agree, this depends on the definition of a meme. If you see meme as a
replicated whole in human evolution, many memes never enter the mind. 

From: finn@sense.ceh.servtech.com (The Finn)
Newsgroups: alt.memetics,sci.philosophy.meta,sci.systems
Subject: Re: Fire Walk With Me!
Date: Fri, 26 May 1995 16:27:42 -0400

In article <hanss.67.0010AC2D@tudelft.nl>, hanss@tudelft.nl (Hans-Cees
Speel) wrote:

> >nobody would bother to copy the babble which follows.
>  it's full of shit and empty of>meaning.
>  BULLSHIT --in the whole
> >screwy argument. What the HELL was meant by this supposed criticism?
>  "sparks" and other
> >pyro-symbolo-spewing.
>  giving a rat's ass for the whole field of inquiry.
>
> Congratulations on your language! I know children that talk just like you.

They should probably be punished, then. ;-)  (Seriously, while you have a
point in that my language was less than gentlemanly, that's specious and
not germane to the substance of the discussion... I'll play nice, now...)

> >Seems one of the major characterizing qualities of a meme is that it
> >exists IN A MIND, and propagates therefrom. Hardly a limiting
> >characteristic.
>
> I do not agree, this depends on the definition of a meme. If you see meme as a
> replicated whole in human evolution, many memes never enter the mind.

You are correct that it depends on the definition - my point was that the
author to whom I was responding was (at that point) talking about a meme
existing in a mind.

On the other hand, seems one of the major problems with this newsgroup's
lack of content is that everyone's too busy defining "meme" and not busy
enough getting on with developing any SORT of a basic, scientific,
conceptual foundation and framework. It's still really in the "neat idea"
stage, not the "new branch of science" one.

_____________________________________________________________________
The Finn, Expert Authority			 "...I don't do Windows."
finn@sense.ceh.servtech.com
			 "Plays well with others."

Pet peeve: Insecure egocentrics who put "Ph.D" in their .sig...

From: buchanan@hookup.net (Bruce Buchanan)
Newsgroups: alt.memetics,sci.philosophy.meta,sci.systems
Subject: Re: Fire Walk With Me!
Date: Sun, 28 May 1995 22:58:44 -0500

onar@hsr.no (Onar Aam) writes (May 24):

>The tamed memes, which we call symbols, enabled people to
>communicate across generations, yes, across millenia.

There is an assumption here that memes in the form of symbolic mental
constructs have a continuing objective existence.  This is an assumption
which is not only just false - it is meaningless and self-contradictory,
not even fanciful in a creative sense.  No useful theory can be developed
from it.  It also leads to false inferences, such as the supposition that
what was meant by truth and liberty in ancient times is the same as was
meant in medieval and again in modern times, suppositions contradicted by
all eht available evidence.
Shared meanings in an absolute sense cannot be reliably taken as valid by
people in face to face contact, or by people communicating on the Internet
- QED.

>memes are socially emitted stimuli.

This is a confused pseudoproposition which seems intended to suggest some
deep truth relating concepts, perception, individuals and society, and as
such is merely pretentious and empty. Construed as poetry it can mean
anything. 

>The mind is like a raging fire, lighting up an
>otherwise dark world, the source of light perceived by other minds.

This sounds like the self-referential notion of a raging poet. (This post
is intended as a dose of realistic feedback, although it might be
variously interpreted as a dash of cold water or the work of the forces of
darkness - I do not really know...)

>Humans learned that by carving the memes into reality they would
>persist, shining on independently of minds. We can only imagine what an
>extatic, yes, religious experience it must have been to the people who
>invented the symbol.

We donšt have to imagine, we can read the Old Testament in which the
carving of objects of belief into concrete reality was warned against as
idolatry.  And Vedantists have seen the symbol has  as a very tricky
invention indeed, which both reveals and conceals the world which lies
behind appearances. Such talk skims over all the problems of language and
thereby falsifies.

>symbols keep on shining and  shining, long after their inventors have perished.

Poppycock. Unless the cultural inheritance of mankind is endlessly
reappropriated by each new generation it will be lost forever. Also
unending and important is the war of intellectual freedom against
nonsense.

Cheers!
Bruce Buchanan
*We are all in this together!*

From: onar@hsr.no (Onar Aam)
Newsgroups: alt.memetics,sci.philosophy.meta,sci.systems
Subject: Re: Fire Walk With Me!
Date: 29 May 1995 15:04:34 GMT



I've learned something in these last few days. When pushing perfectly coherent 
concepts right up to the border of the mythical some otherwise intelligent and 
rational people engage in emotional outbursts. Why? Why bother to spend energy on
something so unfruitful? 
	I rarely write my papers as mythical as I wrote "Fire Walk With Me!".
What puzzles me is that the few times I do so, it spurs emotions in people. Is
the mythical really *that* tabu? Is it really so touchy that one must be expected
to be flamed every time on makes such an effort?


>> We can only imagine what an
>>extatic, yes, religious experience it must have been to the people who
>>invented the symbol.
>
>We donšt have to imagine, we can read the Old Testament in which the
>carving of objects of belief into concrete reality was warned against as
>idolatry.


Yet, strangely the Old Testament is exactly an object of belief carved into
concrete reality. To my knowledge the Old Testament does not condemn writing.
(Writing, if you didn't know, is a way of carving memes into concrete reality.)

>And Vedantists have seen the symbol has  as a very tricky
>invention indeed, which both reveals and conceals the world which lies
>behind appearances.

Christianity is thrilled by words: "In the beginning was the Word..." (John 1.1)


>>symbols keep on shining and  shining, long after their inventors have perished.
>
>Poppycock. Unless the cultural inheritance of mankind is endlessly
>reappropriated by each new generation it will be lost forever.

Anthropologists would tend to disagree. Dozens of ancient, perished symbolic 
languages have been revived and re-intepreted based on inscriptions, scrolls, 
hireoglyphs and runes. For example, the writing system of the Inkas was
completely lost, but scientists were able to reconstruct it and thereby
learn more about their lost Culture. The same was the case with the Dead Sea
Scrolls.



>>The tamed memes, which we call symbols, enabled people to
>>communicate across generations, yes, across millenia.
>
>There is an assumption here that memes in the form of symbolic mental
>constructs have a continuing objective existence.

I don't see why. If you are familiar with the Linguist Noam Chomsky you will know
that he has for almost half a century adhered to the idea of a common universal
deep grammar biologically inhereted in all people. This deep grammar seems to be 
structuring all human languages. This means that it is surprisingly simple to
revive a lost language based on these deep syntactic similarities. No objectivity
needed here, just similarity.


>It also leads to false inferences, such as the supposition that
>what was meant by truth and liberty in ancient times is the same as was
>meant in medieval and again in modern times, suppositions contradicted by
>all eht available evidence.

If you want to make a relativist argument then at least be consistent about it.



>>memes are socially emitted stimuli.
>
>This is a confused pseudoproposition

Why? What is wrong with defining memes as purely physical patterns?



Onar.