John Bottoms:
From a modeling perspective:
·
Languages are first level abstraction of real
world
·
Languages are _expression_ of the world, allows us
to express and communicate past, present, future, real and imaginary, proven
and unproven aspects of the world.
·
Words are parts of a language.
·
Nouns are used to express “things” in English
language. Things - as in entities. ( Not
all words are things. For example, verbs are words, but not things)
·
Nouns are a subset of words.
·
Memes are ideas / concepts, real or imaginary,
proven or unproven.
Question is : do we need to model
meme??
My opinion : Concepts can be named with a name and modeled.
At present we do not use the verbiage –“ meme” for it. Probably we can use the name “meme” in the future.
About Darwinism, Americans use the word Darwinism from a scientific evolution point of view vs theological, god made us, changed us ( mutation) etc.
Maxwell, & Dr. Steven.
Thanks for summarizing my gibberish writing. ( It was not scientific feed back, it was more of a general discussion)
There is natural evolution due to mutation and then there is human intervention for change. Grafting & genetic engineering are human intervention. My point was Darwinism did not include human intervention, or cross breeding among subspecies. You mentioned that his theory includes cross breeding among
subspecies??
However the following is not totally proven in all cases and is open for speculation and there are ethical issues about genetic engineering. ( I don;t want to go there)
- crossing between different species is genetically fatal ..
Thanks,
Pavithra
Pavithra,
I may not have remembered his wording correctly in the use of
"word". Also, it is a difficulty of linguistics that "thing" often
gets used when a better selection would be "entity". However, the
audience understood the intent of the question. Words come and go
and likewise memes come and go. They share some characteristics
and there is a shoot-from-the-hip impulse to put them in a lexicon
or dictionary.
Another view might be that memes are types of propositions that
need to be evaluated. They could be classified into
"indeterminate" until they are evaluated. Dennett does recognize
that memes are "good" or "bad", and I suppose we should accept
that they can be resurrected. One theory I have is that the term
"meme" applies to atomic entities that have particular attributes
or properties that can be generalized or rationalized. If that is
true then we should be able to build classifiers for memes. A
question for exploration is whether that property can be
understood in a way that makes sense or is useful.
Your view of giraffe evolution is referred to as Lamarckian
inheritance and it survives today only as a weakened theory.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism)
-John Bottoms
Concord, MA USA
On 4/9/2013 8:39 PM, Pavithra wrote:
Hello,
Words are not things. "Words" representation things if they are
nouns. memes are ideas that spreads from person to person??
Darwinism and theory of evolution explains how living organisms
evolve over few generations according to the needs/usage etc.
According to him Giraffe has long neck, because they keep
stretching their neck to eat branches and eventually it caused a
genetic mutation
to aid survival -- a process known as
"natural selection." These beneficial mutations are passed on
to the next generation.
Darwin does not take cross pollination ( for lack of better
word) of plants and animals and between different species that
happens in one generation and produce offspring of blended
types into consideration. A Lion and Tiger may have a Liger
for a child. You can actually cut a branch of one fruit tree
and put it another fruit tree branch stub and tie it up and it
may bear the fruit of the first tree kind.. There is all sorts
of intervention that happens to change the way species of plants
and animal world to evolve into something new and different
not only by genetic mutation due to thousands of years of usage
or need for survival but due to cross pollination. I know this
is a thesis for genetic decoding not fiction.
I still have to read the book listed below..
Pavithra
Daniel Dennett's next book will be out in a few weeks and I
had the
opportunity to hear him talk about how memes obey the tenets
of Darwinism.
The title of his book is, "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools
for Thinking".
(not available yet,
http://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking/dp/0393082067)
His argument starts by asking if words are things. Then he
argues that
if words are things then we should consider memes as things
also. He
goes on to illustrate that memes follow the basic three
principles of
Darwinism.
His arguments are compelling and I wonder where they belong
in the grand
ontologies of entities. Are memes a new construct, or do
memes simply
replicate a known construct?
-John Bottoms
FirstStar Systems
Concord, MA USA
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