Alex Williams wrote :-
> To accept that memes can be both dormant and active as well as
> seperate from a mind violates Occam's Razor in my perception. If you
> start with the simpler axiom that only active memes can breed memes,
> the means or vectors of transmission become mere abstraction. If one,
> on the other hand, prefers your paradigm, the additional complication
> of dormancy without context or ability to become active becomes
> present.
Have you ever heard of the Ebola Virus? Or better yet, have you ever heard
of a "book"? These self-replicating entities can be called dormant, yet
when given the right environment - from which they whence came - they can
be reactivated. If the reactivation is different from the original form -
then we'd have to call that a "mutation".
Without this principle, human knowledge as we know it today would probably
be based on stories at the fireside in the forest. So what exactly is
"dormant" anyway? Is my e-mail dormant until I read it? Do the ideas
fade away if I read them too late? To me genes, memes, words, all
that is "order" which can be "recorded" on paper, DNA, disk, is code.
This is the sequence as I see it :-
1. Code (pattern : raw ordered data)
2. Meme (information : interpretation of data by similar species which wrote code)
3. Behavior (emotion : caused by meme, encouraged to replicate meme)
Meme replication takes place by oscillating between 1, 2 & 3.
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I live to simplify ideas and have them simplified for me. If I'm dead wrong
at least simplify the argument without dumbing-it down.
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Hakeeb A. Nandalal
nanco@trinidad.net
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