I'm intrigued by the discussion of memes, especially as a couple of posts
(Kenneth's, and Platt's, I think) have questioned whetther there is much of
a link 'tween the idea of memetics, and Pirsig's ideas on Quality.
I'll be brief, 'cos there seems an awful lot to be said on the subjects.
>From my particular perspective, where I've decided that, for the sake of
methodological convenience, I should treat the universe as basically 'made
of' information - where some of it is hard and lumpy (matter) and some is
less so, but 'faster' (energy), and so on, but essentially 'information' is
not a *property* of matter and energy etc, but quite the other way round.
In this scheme of thinking, 'Quality' (so far as I understand the concept!)
would seem to be fundamentally 'concrete', more so than particular,
temporary 'matter/energy states'.
So, from this perspective, the notion of a meme as some sort of replicating
idea seems quite directly related to quality, and presupposes only that
there must be some carrying agent in the form of percipient. The more
'competant' that percipient, the more efficient the replication of complex
ideas, which in turn lead to ascending complexity, and so on. This does seem
to begin to sound like genetics (though I'm not up on the arguments for the
inevitability of increased complexity - any links here gratefully rec'd).
My point in spelling out the above is just that, in the light of questions
as to whether organisations, cities etc might be carriers of memes, it seems
to me that the analogies with genetics would well support this kind of
comparison, in that we might talk of a 'gene-pool' in a statistical sense
and be describing something like the spread of ideas in a particular group.
Group ideas are manifestly not the same thing as 'lots of individual ideas,
added up', though. And it is this relationship - between what I call 'group
subjective experience', and individual subjective experience, which is, I
believe at the root of many conflicts within individuals, is the cause of
much philosophising, and so on. The argument about free will is especially
vigorous in this context, in that (it seems) many who feel the need to
strongly defend the notion may do so because they feel their individuality
threatened by a muted, sort of tremendous subterrainean pressure to 'fit',
to believe what is in the best interests of their surrounding 'society', or
'company', or 'profession', or 'family', or peer group, or...etc., etc.,
In fact, as an aside, I used to teach in the mid-70s that a company or
other similar organisation is a 'creature', with 'intsincts' -especially
survival orientated- and will favour itself as an entity over the interests
of the individuals who actually make up the organisation.
Some years later, on reading Popper and his notion of "worlds 1, 2, and 3",
that this was exactly what he had been talking about.
And it struck me that, in modern life, we 'sub-contract' so much of our
technology, learning, thinking (ie information-handling) and judgement, and
ideas, and so on, that we never actually function for very long as
individuals.
As such, and with regard to memes, - the idea of an individual being a
carrier of memes is hard to talk about in a practical way; in any case,
*carrying* from whence to where? The best we could talk about would be
concerning how an individual might be the point of confluence for different
memes, which, in colliding, bring about new (and more complex?)
idea-structures. Thus, creativity isn't just a product of 'free will', it's
something to do with being able to take in information, combine it, and turn
it around (and, of course, being in the right time and place)
To sum up, then:
It seems to me that "quality", "information", "memes (ideas?)" and the basic
cosmological questions of "who am I?", "what do I know about the world about
me?", and "how do I know what I know?" do indeed seem intimately
related......to me, at least.
ps. - I missed a few posts - did anyone answer my questions about Skinner
and my possible mis-construal of behaviourism?
cheers all
Peter Lennox
Hardwick House
tel: (0114) 2661509
e-mail: peter@lennox01.freeserve.co.uk
or:- ppl100@york.ac.uk
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