Re: virus: Wilson said

Joe E. Dees (jdees0@students.uwf.edu)
Thu, 2 Jul 1998 23:37:27 +0000


> From: "MarXidad" <marxidad@idirect.com>
> To: <virus@lucifer.com>
> Subject: virus: Wilson said
> Date: Fri, 3 Jul 1998 00:07:11 -0400
> Importance: Normal
> Reply-to: virus@lucifer.com

> > The approach I can only see as valid, unless memetics is to slip
> > uselessly (IMHO) into an academic circle of contention within philosophy
> > and psychology and sociology, or even a subset of all of them, with
> > rivaling [sic] schools, is a 'find the damn meme' approach through
> > cognitive neuroscience, microbiology, and medical imaging.
>
> I agree that as long as psychosociophilosophy is predominant in the field
> of memetics the definition of a meme will continue to be elusive. But what
> are we looking for exactly and how will we know when we've found it? I
> expect that a meme is made up of activity in different parts of the brain,
> much like an emotion seems to be. Most of it would be cortical but some of
> the more primal memes would show up as red blobs near the brain stem in a
> PET scan. What will these studies show specifically that will indicate what
> and where a meme is?
> That's the fundamental difference between a gene and a meme--a gene is a
> discrete and discernible sequence of nucleotides whereas a meme is a bunch
> of zipping electrolytes and chemical dumps in a sea of neurons. I think
> that before we can tell what a meme is we have to be able to identify
> thoughts in general. Physiologically, how is a thought formed, what's its
> relationship to other thoughts and where does it go from there? Can we
> actually track a thought or meme?
>
> Mark
>
Precisely! Also, the same meme would modify different baselines of
thoutht and behavior in different fashions, and would be imprinted as
a different cortical electrochemical pattern for each individual
cortical neurostructure. Memes are like perceptions or tendencies;
they are not static and isolable material "things", but dynamically
interacting organizations superimposed by experience upon the
preexisting neuron/dendrite/synapse/axon structure until they become
habits of mind.