David Rosdeitcher <76473.3041@compuserve.com> wrote:
> "...Basically, there's this competition between 2 meme-complexes:
> 1)What I call the Darwinian meme-complex or metameme which is
> characterized by the notion that our ideas evolve, like other things
> in nature, and 2)what I call a Platonistic meme-complex or
> traditional religion, which claims that certain ideas are eternal
> unchanging ultimate truths.
Great post, by the way -- I just have some tangent points to make.
I see the categories above as a specific example of a general division of
knowledge -- procedural and declarative. Skills and Facts, if you will.
Or Ritual and Dogma. I think you've missed a vital fact if you think that
religion(s) use only declarative knowledge.
Memetics is the science of idea propagation -- about how some piece of
declarative knowledge manages to transform itself into procedural
knowledge: one reads it and then acts to spread it around... This
transformation lies at the heart of the beast.
> Apparently for people to understand certain ideas, they must embody,
> or act out those ideas--sort of like you can't understand a martial
> art just by reading about it, you have to practice it.
The medium is the message? As true now as then, certainly -- so why don't
we act on it? Where are the virian rituals? (snake handling retreats not
with-standing!)
> Apparently, the idea of a memetically engineered religion was
> so foreign to many of these people that such an idea "had to be
> a joke".
I say we're a cult. What do you say?
> Does the concept that 'memetics is part of a religion' exist
> purely as a figment of my imagination?
No -- I certainly see it that way. And as has been pointed out enough
times already, memetics has been picked up by every two-bit atheist as a
sword of truth with which to hack at religion... If anything qualifies as
the dogma of the CoV, memetics has got to be close.
As to your imagination -- I have a wonderful quotation which I'm sure
you'll like:
"Whether it's my imagination is not the point, because the products
of my imagination are real to me." -- David Duchovny
ERiC