>You are skeptical about us but have faith in logic.
>We are skeptical about everything-- ourselves, you, logic--
>What it boils down to is that you have to look at how you've
>constructed yourself and your truths.
What is logic? What is truth?
Logic deals with the concept of the resolution of uncertainty in any
statement or thought. This makes logic anti-memetics since the
concept behind logic is to "kill" ideas and not propagate them. This
makes it sound like an absolutely logical thinking person could never
be infected by memes since any uncertainty of an idea would not be
accepted, and most of the memes we are confronted with have uncertain
ideas behind them or inherent in them. Therefore to be skeptical of
logic is to be more susceptable to them since you have no system or
method to determine uncertainty in memes. But that isn't completely
true because of flaw in logic: it isn't enough to simply be logical,
since anything can be made to sound logical IF you accept the
precepts that a particular system of thought offers. The scientific
method was developed to address that weakness in thinking, because
people discovered that logic by itself could not be counted on to
ensure progress in our knowledge and understanding of the world
around us. The scientific method added many things to logical
thinking systems and one of those things was to say that it isn't
enough to simply prove that a hypothesis is logically true, it must
be verifiably true and confirmable with evidence. The most successful
method for verification was that a hypothesis must be able to predict
new facts and not predict the existence of phenomena that could not
be provable. That elimimated the uncertainty that could be present in
the precepts of any hypothesis.
Logic, together with the scientific method, make an unbeatable
combination in determining the accuracy of any statement concerning
the knowledge and understanding of reality. Now science cannot
determine the absolute truth of theories or hypothesis, it can
only determine the relative truth...indeed science says there can
never be any such thing as absolute truth. But without it, progress
will grind to a slow halt, new knowledge will come to light only by
accident, and people will eagerly accept any idea no matter how
obvious it contradicts reality.
So when I posted my email about the "science" of memes, I wasn't
trolling so much as eliminating fadish-meme-infected thinkers. To say
the memetics was a science, and yet not even understand the method or
concept of it, was blasphemous and outright stupid. You may wonder
why I would use such harsh words and not be a little more diplomatic
in my dealings with the people who over-reacted to my posting and
I'll tell *you* why. Because people who have been brainwashed are
unable to comprehend new ideas unless you get their immediate and
undivided attention. This is why I brought up the issue about pot
smoking since there is much propaganda about it that simply is
blantently untrue (ie -- "killer weed", it leads to harder drugs, it
is the motivating force behind most crimes committed, it causes loss
of coordination, etc. This was the deception taught to the public in
the 1960's). I hoped to point out many of the falsehoods that many of
the people in this email list have gullibly swallowed, despite their
supposedly complete knowledge of memetics (John S. still doesn't
realize his blunder in saying that DNA contains genes instead of the
other way around). Some of these people have over-reacted to my
initially harmless post about the "science" of memetics to the point
that they have done what many of the superstitous and
backward-thinking people of the Dark Ages did, and that is to "kill"
me (or literally "killfile" me). They are the real losers because
they have shut off their minds to ideas they don't like (they *all*
said I was intelligent, so stupidity had nothing to do with it), and
they are confining their memes even more tightly into their own
little world of make-believe. At least they didn't close the door
before I could plant at least a few seeds of reason (read: memes of
reason). They didn't even know what I was doing to them, did they?
But at least I accomplished my goal, which was to reduce the
unproductive components of this email list to a minimum, since it
obvious who is here to really take a serious look at memetics and who
is just going along with the meme crowd just to look cool or sound
intellectual to their friends.
If we boil away all the sensationalism behind the current thinking
behind memes, we will be left with a valuable nugget of facts that
can be used to build up something more valuable. You will never be
able to do that if you remain skeptical of scientific reasoning. You
can see that I never said I didn't accept the concept of memetics,
because I do...just not in the state that it is in right now since
much of it *has* been converted into a popular fad and *not* a
science. I first had my insight into the concept of memes when I
first went to China...but I will save that for another thread.