Re: virus: Angelica de Meme

Robin Faichney (r.j.faichney@stir.ac.uk)
Thu, 10 Apr 1997 10:53:00 +0100

Dave Pape:
>At 12:29 09/04/97 +0100, Robin wrote:
>
>>Science doesn't know what "conscious" means.
>
>"Science doesn't know what 'x' means"
>*************************************
>
>"Science" I think means "the community of all scientists".
>
>I think, then, that for Science to know what 'x' means, is for the
>linguistic input of the /word/ x to give rise to activation/expression of
>very similar ecological groups of memes in the heads of all scientists.

Sorry, but that's not what *I* meant. Scientists certainly know what
"conscious" means in the same sense that we all do. But science
doesn't know what "conscious" means, in the sense that there is no
scientific account of consciousness. I'd say, in addition, that there
cannot ever be such an account, because in order to be scientific
it would have to be objective, while consciousness is intrinsically
subjective.

In other words, the only memes that can play a part in scientific
theories are those that have a referent "out there", which the
"consciousness" meme does not -- the part it plays in our
memespheres is much more subtle than that.

Robin