Anywhere you go, I'll follow you...
Jun. 20th, 2003 09:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaHmmm.
This morning, on the way to work with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ao_lai, I observed that there was a left-hand, leather, but sadly not laceless, boot sitting by itself on the pavement. He remarked that the Bedstead Men were probably to blame.
When I'm talking (or occasionally when I'm writing), I tend to sling in random lines of songs, poems, bits of film dialgoue. Not for any real reason, I just like playing with words. And if you do that, it's nice to know that the people you're talking to have picked them up.
Not, as some people would have you believe, because I derive a feeling of smug intellectual superiority in knowing that my friends have read the same book as me, or what have you. More because it's like the mental equivalent of snap.
But, if you hear someone quoting something, there remains the problem of how to make it known that you noticed. Now, ideally you do this by making some witty remark, which adds something to the conversation, and isn't exclusive of people who didn't pick it up. So, what if there isn't such a remark, or (more probably, in my case :) you can't think of it ?
Do you just let the thing go ? If someone's worked a reference in particularly cleverly, it seems churlish not to acknowledge it... maybe I just lack the wit for the game :)
This morning, on the way to work with
ao_lai, I observed that there was a left-hand, leather, but sadly not laceless, boot sitting by itself on the pavement. He remarked that the Bedstead Men were probably to blame.When I'm talking (or occasionally when I'm writing), I tend to sling in random lines of songs, poems, bits of film dialgoue. Not for any real reason, I just like playing with words. And if you do that, it's nice to know that the people you're talking to have picked them up.
Not, as some people would have you believe, because I derive a feeling of smug intellectual superiority in knowing that my friends have read the same book as me, or what have you. More because it's like the mental equivalent of snap.
But, if you hear someone quoting something, there remains the problem of how to make it known that you noticed. Now, ideally you do this by making some witty remark, which adds something to the conversation, and isn't exclusive of people who didn't pick it up. So, what if there isn't such a remark, or (more probably, in my case :) you can't think of it ?
Do you just let the thing go ? If someone's worked a reference in particularly cleverly, it seems churlish not to acknowledge it... maybe I just lack the wit for the game :)
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no subject
Date: 2003-06-20 07:57 am (UTC)Sounds to me like you're identifying selection pressures for the memes. The variant memes are:
'laugh like you got it'
'throw a carrot at the speaker'
'insult the person who made an in-joke you didn't get'
'ask about the reference'
'say "I was going to say that but thought it too simplistic"'
and two pressures are:
'if you laugh and [at?] everything you look like a dork'
'if you miss Spanish Inquisition references everyone will be horrified'
The meme balance is indeed likely to depend on the relative presence of these pressures in the population.
Memes, like genes, obviously don't know they're being selected for. The stripes on the poisonous toad are caused by 'a similar gene to' [1] the ones on the faking-poison toad, it's the environment (and it's not liking to eat striped toads) that makes the gene succesful in either sort of toad.
[1] 'a similar gene to': I know this makes no real sense. I'm talking about a similar mechanism, a similar 'action'.
gene/meme
Date: 2003-06-20 09:14 am (UTC)I know but this is one of my complaints about the gene/meme thing.
If a meme is the smallest particle then it is possibly analgous to a gene. But the stripe on the toad you just gave in the example is a phenotype. The pressures are related to the phenotype which may be the result of several genes or maybe the result of a gene which has completely different pressures acting on it which are unrelated.
(I'll explain that if anyone asks - quick word list, gene linking and mutation rates).
Re: gene/meme
Date: 2003-06-20 09:27 am (UTC)Nice.
You can still perform the analogy, with the meme being "wanting to throw a carrot at the speaker due to having seen someone else do similar in the past". Specifically, I suppose that the meme then is the memory of having seen someone react in a particular way to a particular situation. Other memes (such as "people often take offence at having a carrot thrown at them") might then affect or suppress the action of the first meme. But at this stage I think it's clear that the analogy to genetics is being stretched purely for the sake of it :-)
Re: gene/meme
Date: 2003-06-20 10:21 am (UTC)The only sense in which memes exist is that 'social' evolution probably has a smallest particle upon which it operates. We'll call it a meme. [1] If there's no smallest particle then, by definition, they don't exist (IMHO).
What are generally labelled 'memes'[2] are recognisable, repeated patterns of behaviour generated by one or more memes. Each individual instantiation of these (eg. a particular response to 'oh no, not the cushions') is akin to your "phenotype which may be the result of several genes or maybe the result of a gene which has completely different pressures acting on it which are unrelated".
The entire collection of memes in an individual dictates (most) behaviour patterns. When an individual action occurs and is responded to in the world (either positively or negatively) then a set of linked memes are being tried out and do well or poorly. Other people either copy the pattern of behaviour (copying the linked memes, in a modified fashion) or not.
Society evolves because we copy what each other does. The memes are what is copied, often in linked sets - these are behaviour patterns rather than individual actions, genomes and not phenomes.
Hope that made some sense. I think there's a general misuse of the word 'meme' that I don't often react to, but does gradually erode any credibility the atomification of social evolution has...
(almost like ideas can be hampered by the other ideas they're linked with)
[1] Imagine Darwin faced with the same question - what's the smallest particle upon which evolution operates? - he might have called it a geen, but he didn't need it for his theory of evolution.
[2] Things like lj quizzes, ways of opening a banana, ways of spear fishing, ways of painting
Re: gene/meme
Date: 2003-06-20 10:26 am (UTC)If an observed behaviour (peeling grapes) can be made up of one or more memes then what are memes? What is the smallest particle?
Is it the smallest 'piece' of that behaviour that can be acted on in it's own right? If a gene encodes a protein then is it true that a meme encodes a smaller part than the entire behaviour like a word or partial phrase or does that start to cause the system problems as it becomes impossible to identify how many memes are associated with a behaviour?
Re: gene/meme
Date: 2003-06-22 03:12 pm (UTC)I think the problem we have here is that one meaning of the word is well-defined, but might not exist as far as we know and in any case we can't say anything interesting about it, whereas the other meaning of the word has all kinds of things we can say about it, but is not analogous to genes in genetics, and thus totally ruins the analogy to genetics.