Monday Videos — Meta-memes and Capability

By | May 17, 2010
2 Comments

Two videos about memes (both of which I think we’ve linked before) to provide some food for thought to kick off the week.

  • http://wheretheresawilliam.blogspot.com Will Brown

    On the “idea worth dying for” issue, I wonder if a given expression or instantiation of an idea being worth dying for might be a better statement of the sentiment? It’s quite easy to imagine how a given example of the idea of Nationhood might or might not be considered “worth dying for”. I suspect very few German soldiers assigned to the Eastern Front in Feb of 1943 were all that fervent to die for National Socialism, but I’m a convinced sceptic. That they were soldiers at all makes it likely they were at least willing to run the risk of doing so. Is even a bad application of an idea worthy of risking death to defend? A question I would like the chance to put to any of my surviving Vietnamese competion-as-was sometime.

    My initial suspicion is that an idea’s worth is directly correlatable to the extent of an individual’s sense of investment (of self or other worth) therein.

    Have to think about the other a bit more.

  • http://memeweaving.com Naomi Most

    Blackmore doesn’t do the greatest job of explaining her own point about why we need to define a Third Replicator.

    Genes, memes, and temes all have one thing in common: they “replicate”. The different between them comes down to their plane of replication.

    Genes replicate biologically. Memes replicate within the human sphere: brains and media (books and other communications that have endpoints in the human brain).

    Temes are so defined as replicators that act purely within the technological world — no human brains required. Proto-temes include computer viruses and “maker bots”.

    The examples you cited as “temes” are thus not actually temes — they’re memes. They may represent technology, but they have to be replicated with human brains as a medium.

    The reason Blackmore insists that the birth and flourishing of temes will be such a dangerous time for our planet is that, without brains being needed to replicate this type of information, replication and variation will happen at the speed of electricity rather than the speed of human thought.