X-Delivery-Notice:  SMTP MAIL FROM does not correspond to sender.
X-Envelope-to: xtropy-l@ubvm.BITNET
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.xtropy-l
Date:         Mon, 13 Apr 1992 09:18:12 EDT
              <XTROPY-L@UBVM.BITNET>
From:         "Salamander~" <majcher@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
Subject:      [jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk: Memebabble]

Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 11:40:37 +0000
To: extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu
From: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk (Richard Kennaway)
Subject: Memebabble

IMHO, people on this list have been playing fast and loose with the
concepts of "survival" and "memes".  Consider Perry Metzger's comment re
Jellinghaus not signing up with Alcor, and not considering important the
survival of the information pattern which is "him":

>However, I will point out that evolution favors those of us who choose
>survival, so ultimately, your point of view is doomed. Those of us who
>choose survival become more and more prevalent through time.

Bluntly, this is BS.  The fallacy lies in the implicit assumption that new
copies of an idea come into existence only through reproduction of existing
copies.  Yet a copy of the idea "fire burns" is created whenever someone
encounters fire for the first time.  There is no reproduction involved.
Unlike genes, ideas are capable of spontaneous generation.  This makes the
application of concepts of Darwinian evolution to ideas ("memetics") at
best suspect and at worst entirely baseless.

I have a more fundamental problem with the way the concept of "meme" has
been used here.  In the quotation above, Metzger seems to imply - perhaps
he will say whether my extrapolation from his words is correct - that
since the meme "the survival of at least one copy of my personal identity
is unimportant" has (supposedly) poorer survival value than its negation,
there is no need to argue against it.  Never mind which (if either) of
them is true or false, all that can matter to us people, mere epiphenomena
of the meme soup, is being on the winning side, of having the surviving
memes.  In a similar vein, people have remarked that Asimov had
"contracted" the (supposedly) anti-survival meme "death is good".

Thus I see people, not arguing against ideas that they do not like, but
instead inventing "just so" stories to show that the unwelcome memes have
poorer survival value.  With sufficient creativity, such stories can
almost always be constructed (as they can for biological phenomena, BTW).
They prove nothing.

People propounding unwelcome ideas used to be seen as possessed by devils.
In more sophisticated times, they were viewed as possessed by repressed
memories, by false consciousness, by Communism, by internalising the
patriarchy, or some other such jargon.  Among Extropians, the demon's name
is "Bad memes".  The words change but the demon is the same: fear of
anything you don't control.

And when unwelcome ideas are seen as diseases, it is only a short step
from smugly crowing like Metzger that one will bury their believers, to
taking active steps to eradicate them.

--
Richard Kennaway     SYS, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.
Internet:  jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk               uucp:  ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU