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deranger


Registered: 01/21/08
Posts: 6,840
Loc: off the wall
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Re: Ideas are contagious diseases. [Re: Noteworthy]
#9998191 - 03/18/09 10:18 PM (14 years, 11 months ago) |
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What's your point?
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Nightingale
Seeker of Sattva



Registered: 01/25/09
Posts: 39
Last seen: 10 years, 5 months
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Re: Ideas are contagious diseases. [Re: Noteworthy]
#9998950 - 03/19/09 01:20 AM (14 years, 11 months ago) |
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Without dark you cannot recognize the light.
-------------------- Step 1: Look up at the stars Step 2: Realize they must be Gods Step 3: Know that you're the same
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Mr. Mushrooms
Spore Print Collector


Registered: 05/25/08
Posts: 13,018
Loc: Registered: 6/04/02
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Re: Ideas are contagious diseases. [Re: Lakefingers]
#9999204 - 03/19/09 03:00 AM (14 years, 11 months ago) |
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Quote:
Lakefingers said: Here's a disease that might choke your goat: memes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
I was wondering how long it would take for that to pop out. From the article:
Quote:
Memteicists have not definitively empirically proven the existence of discrete memes or their proposed mechanism; they do not form part of the consensus of mainstream social sciences. ....if one cannot test for "better" empirically, the question will remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a validly disprovable scientific theory. An objection to the study of the evolution of memes in genetic terms (although not to the existence of memes) involves the fact that the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection-pressures neither too great nor too small in relation to mutation-rates. There seems no reason to think that the same balance will exist in the selection pressures on memes.
In his chapter titled "Truth" published in the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Dieter Lohmar questions the memecists' reduction of the highly complex body of ideas (such as religion, politics, war, justice, and science itself) to a putatively one-dimensional series of memes. He sees memes as an abstraction and such a reduction as failing to produce greater understanding of those ideas. The highly interconnected, multi-layering of ideas resists memetic simplification to an atomic or molecular form; as does the fact that each of our lives remains fully enmeshed and involved in such "memes". Lohmar argues that one cannot view memes through a microscope in the way one can detect genes. The leveling-off of all such interesting "memes" down to some neutralized molecular "substance" such as "meme-substance" introduces a bias toward scientism and abandons the very essence of what makes ideas interesting, richly available, and worth studying.
Another philosophical criticism sees memetics as re-introducing, or reinforcing a form of classical Cartesian dualism, that of mind versus body. Memetics interposes into the human evolutionary picture the concept of discarnate memes as a prime unit of heredity separate from the physical heredity determined by genes. This dualism remains tenable, but many prominent philosophers have criticised it widely and historians of philosophy[who?] often see it as waning.
Memes=myth. Campbell would approve.
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