Ok. You have misinterpreted (as well as misquoted) what I said.
I did not use the word Earth. I said world.
There is an archaic meaning to this word, different to what is commonly
used in conversational English.
A "world" can be a body of thought.
The monastic traditions of bygone centuries referred to the world, not
as a physical thing, but a way of thinking about it.
Post Modern Theorists have continued this idea.
I don't know the Polish word for world--
But in greek it's KOSMOS
I just called my Ukrainian friend, he says the word is svit (sorry no
cyrillic) in Ukrainian. It is the root for the word Svitla, meaning
light. Where zemlja means Earth. In Polish, he says the word I want is
sweit. .... (?)
(Hey Hakeeb, Orwell was right about language, eh? ;)
Tad wrote:
let's make the scenario simple <snip> all people on Earth are dead).
Will the Earth still exist ("by itself") or not?
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Of course it would.
Or, to be more accurate, the ideas of physics and so forth have led me
to believe that it would. (ie. my brain is sufficiently infected with
physics to hold this belief.)
But once life blinked out of the last brain- our world would cease to
exist.
Reminants of it might last for a while.. in the ruins of our buildings,
in the artifacts we left behind. But our world would be extinct until,
say, aliens came and brought their world with them. If they managed to
interptret our artifacts, their world would become infected, not with
our memes, but with their owns memes they invented to explain our world.
(Hey David Mcfadzean... is this what you meant by dormant memes?
Artifacts? If so, I'm prepared to disagree with you on that. ;) Put 'em
up!)
Please refer to the response I gave David McFadzean if you want more.
I hope this sheds light on why I say (and still believe) that in order
to see things memetically you have to treat everything as *just* another
meme.
(I resurrect this because you recently mentioned it again yourself.)
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Darwin gave up his comfortable
position as the prize creation of God, when he came out and laid
evoultion on us.
We have to give up our comfortable ensconcement in "truth".
Things are true because you learned they are true. Nature is a sometimes
predictable and sometimes unpredictable thing. We have enough memes out
there that we can put together a pretty effective toolbox for descibing
the Earth with great accuracy. That's all it is-- great selection.
Look at what happens when the meme pool is reduced. Say you are stranded
on a desert island with a movie star, a millionaire & his wife, a
professor, Mary-anne and two stupid sailors.
Now-- Say the professor drowns---
Not good.
Maybe this is why we developed writing and storytelling---
"this is a warning to my cave-children Ot and Zing, lightning is bad
news, don't play in the rain."
Okay-- lightning *is* bad news. That only helped spread the meme more
effectively, giving it more-- what word should I use?
Truth -power
crediblity
veritos
....Pravda?
BTW. I thought your reference to list members' drinking very mean
spirited. Consider yourself chided.
-- Regards +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ Ken Pantheists http://www.lucifer.com/~kenpan Virus Theatre http://www.lucifer.com/virus/theatre TooBa Physical Theatre Centre http://www.tooba.com +--------------------------------------------------------------------+