virus: Re: sociological change

Ken Pantheists (
Tue, 24 Dec 1996 05:50:04 +0000

Alex wrote: (responding to me asking what artifacts they produce)

Have a dog?

`I'm pleased' (tail wagging, eyes wide), `I submit, alpha' (head down,
tail between legs), `let's play!' (bouncing around wildly, head
raised, ears raised).
If they are a language, then once infected by them, you would use those
motions to communicate your own pleasure, submission and playfulness.
And it wouldn't be a matter of mimicking the dog-- you would have to
have fully incorporated them into your brain in order for them to be a

(I'm sorry-- as I type this I can't help but chuckle as I imagine you
bouncing around your room on all fours, wagging your tail. Are you, by
any chance, a dog who has taken a human nick just to fool us?)

If you accept that there are no entities, merely meme-complexi, then
you can take `behaviours' themselves as `artifacts,' they are
creations, just as language and pottery, that serve the complexi in
some physical sense; like scribbles on paper, behaviours are `meme
But they can't become memes unless we use them.

It is this
> nexus of textual and contextual meanings that make a meme.
You have just removed the ability for people of /different/ cultures
to communicate.

It's been a major issue for a long time. Part of what you might call a
human condition.
Existentialism and post modernism seem like new spins on it, but I think
you can go back to some of the earliest, most primal stories and
symbols, you will see a kind of acknowledgement that you cannot
absolutely judge a man because you cannot share absolutely his

So much of human storytelling and art is about just that-- trying to
relay experience. I think we as a species understand that we have a
double edged sword for a mind. We have the capacity to apprehend many
experiences but can live only one. That is why we have developed
narrative structures and abstractions for experience (i.e. culture)

We can talk about pretty much /anything/, using language, thankfully.
Memes are real, absolute particles just as the cells in complex
cullular automata are real, absolute particles; ie., they're not, but
its the most useful way of viewing them and it does turn out results.
You place a lot of faith in that first sentence. I agree, we *can* talk
about pretty much anything. But can we effectively *communicate*
everything? I think not.

> Memetics is a meme we made up to explain human behaviour and human
> endeavors. Once you start applying it to animals--- well, I think it's
> like saying that you want to study Early Rennaissance honey bees, or
> Ming Dynasty cows.
Isn't that just what paleontologists do? I know animal husbandry
majors who have deeply studied the historical basis of agriculture and
could probably tell you a lot about Ming Dynasty cows.
I didn't make my litle joke clear enough. I meant to say that honey
bees, even if they lived in the time of human activity known as the
Early Rennaissance, would not have much of an opinion or idea of the
rennaissance-- because it is a purely human endeavour.
Likewise-- ming dynasty cows don't think of themselves as subject to the
rule of the ming dynasty emperors.

We study the behaviour of humans and employ memes as an abstraction to
do so. We study the behaviour of animals. Why shouldn't the same
tool be of use in that study? Unless you suggest there's some
qualitative difference between human behaviour and animal behaviour,
and then I'm just going to look smug and refer you to a good
theologician rather than the CoV ML.
Well, I'vebeen blundering out of my home territory for a little while,
so I'll come right back home and answer you withsomething from my own
specific toolbox of "skills". Among many things that animals don't do,
one is theatre. As a matter of fact, they're the worst actors around--
they are so totally themselves. W.c. Feilds was right to never want to
work with them. :)

> Where do you perceive this? Can you name a meme that exists outside of
> cultural influence?
Sure. `I'm hungry.' You don't have to enjoy culturalization to
understand this is a meme that represents an outside, physical state.
What memes it triggers and what complexi are involved are
culture-dependent, but the meme itself is not.
I. in my opinion, would say that hunger is an instinct or reflex, the
food you eat is made available by the environment, but how it is
prepared, what you eat first (soup or dessert), everything else is

> I would suggest that what animals have is Behaviour.

I would humbly suggest that all humans have is Behaviour. Its not the
act we're concerned with, its the mechanism.
Then we don't have memes. Memes are the specific act. Otherwise all
people in our species who are hungry would feed themselves the same way-
we would graze on grass or bring down an animal and eat its flesh- just
like animals do.

Actually, it does bring something to light: experimental
possibilities. Human cultures are large and unwieldy, hard to get a
handle on.<snip>
You are the first person I have come across that has said this.
Most people hear about memetics and say "wow, a theory that can contain
the multiplicity and duplicity of all culture-- mind boggling and
exciting".... you are using it to reduce. you are a reductionist.

You know, it just occured to me, if animals have no cultures, why do
anthropologists study gorillas in the wild?
For the grant money?

Once you accept that they
exhibit some kind of culture you've lost your footing and are headed
to the slippery slope of culture as spectrum not binary.
I still don't. So I'll keep my skis in the closet :)

> Memetics, when applied to the behaviour of human animals, helps to
> explain how we behave through our technology, through our social
> contracts and personal ideologies, through our media....
Important snip, `helps to explain how we behave.' ...

Even more important snip." through our technology, through our social
contracts and personal ideologies, through our media..

Ken Pantheists

"The opposite of a trivial truth is false;
the opposite of a great truth is also true."

-Niels Bohr