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Old 09-23-2014, 03:56 PM   #41
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Default Re: Is video game violence memetic?

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Originally Posted by smurf View Post
Ok it is what I thought it was.

So apart from earplugs and blindfolds you can have counter memes.
Memes are ideas, especially when wrapped in some kind of spin (aka marketing). Nothing more, nothing less.

Fox News and MSNBC are both crude "memetic filters" - screens that can either diminish, magnify, warp, or leave untouched the ideas they encounter. Fox considers socialism a toxic meme and thus applies heavy negative modifiers, while MSNBC casts it in a more positive light. I'm sure you can think of many different examples, but there's no need to catalog them here. TS filters are more refined, but basically serve the same purpose. Perhaps they can detect the style of spin being applied, recognize it as low-value, and discard a message based on that.

Memes aren't some magical new thing. Memetics is simply the study and science of how ideas spread.
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Old 09-23-2014, 04:24 PM   #42
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Default Re: Is video game violence memetic?

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Originally Posted by RevBob View Post
Memes are ideas, especially when wrapped in some kind of spin (aka marketing). Nothing more, nothing less.
Memes are the building blocks of ideas, the analogy is to genes, not to proteins.
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Old 09-23-2014, 04:40 PM   #43
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Default Re: Is video game violence memetic?

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Memes are transmitted by *language*.

They can be, but that is not the only way. Heraldry and branding, for instance, were deliberately made to work without common languages.
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Old 09-23-2014, 04:49 PM   #44
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Default Re: Is video game violence memetic?

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Sorry confusion between setting and the real world.

But it still implies a darker side. ROI, Spain and Poland currently have tough anti abortion laws. Therefore, free choice, is a toxic meme. Now it could argued in the future this is not an issue.
Yeah, the situation doesn't have to involve a Jack Booted Dictatorship to bring up some fringe and grey areas when you're talking about reprogramming people and societies to eliminate and contain certain ideas, outlooks and thoughts.
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Old 09-23-2014, 09:27 PM   #45
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Default Re: Is video game violence memetic?

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Memes are the building blocks of ideas, the analogy is to genes, not to proteins.
I'm confused by this, because it seems self-contradictory. Genes are made of proteins, not vice versa. Also, just check out Wikipedia:

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A meme is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
(Definition quoted is from Mirriam-Webster.)

As I said, memes are ideas. Ideas spread. Some ideas spread better than others. Pretty basic concept, but the details get complicated quickly.
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Old 09-24-2014, 03:23 PM   #46
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Default Re: Is video game violence memetic?

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I'm confused by this, because it seems self-contradictory. Genes are made of proteins, not vice versa.
Genes aren't "made of proteins". Genes are the discrete replicators of biological heredity. They are stored as sections of DNA (which is a nucleotide not a peptide) and are the instructions for constructing polypeptides (from amino acids) and RNA (from nucleic acids) that do work in biological systems (proteins).

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Also, just check out Wikipedia:

(Definition quoted is from Mirriam-Webster.)

As I said, memes are ideas. Ideas spread. Some ideas spread better than others. Pretty basic concept, but the details get complicated quickly.
Here's the original section of The Selfish Gene:
"But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution ? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. `Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like `gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.(2) If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to `memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with `cream'.

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.' "

So yes, memes are "ideas" but they are also discreet replicators, so they have to be the smallest part of culture that can be replicated intact, right? They are also not the clothes or the arch or even the song, but the instructions on how to construct these things, just as genes are instructions on how to build proteins.

Consider the sentence "Memes are the discreet replicators of culture". It is possible to dissect it, both grammatically and conceptually, and still have meaningful cultural content, right? "Meme" itself is (at least) a meme, but so are the other bits of that sentence "discrete" is a meme, "replicator" is too as is "culture". These things have meaning independent of this particular sentence. So a science of memetics would have to include how individual discreet concepts go on to build larger and more complex ones like this sentence or America.

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Memes aren't some magical new thing. Memetics is simply the study and science of how ideas spread.
Memetics as opposed to some other model of socio-cultural evolution requires that discrete replicators exist that behave like genes, and postulates there are some universal laws which apply to all evolutionary systems (including the presence of discreet replicators). This is a new (at least as of 1976) idea.

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Old 09-24-2014, 06:32 PM   #47
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Default Re: Is video game violence memetic?

I think it was intended for the replicators to be separate and distinct from one another rather than being circumspect and careful to avoid offense.
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Old 09-24-2014, 06:56 PM   #48
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Default Re: Is video game violence memetic?

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Memes are ideas, especially when wrapped in some kind of spin (aka marketing). Nothing more, nothing less.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
Memes are the building blocks of ideas, the analogy is to genes, not to proteins.
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Selfish Gene
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.
(All emphasis mine, TSG quoted by sir_pudding.)

Like I said: memes are ideas. I said it, Dawkins said it, and you cited it to...disagree with me? I don't get it.

Some ideas are simple, and others are complex. The complex ones are usually, if not universally, built from simpler ones. The building blocks for simple ideas, though...those are words, shapes, and other things that do not communicate a coherent concept on their own. A photo of a cat is not a meme; that photo with a caption that puts it into some context is.

(Okay, yes, some ideas can be conveyed by single words or simple images, but I would argue that in those cases, the word/image is not the idea, but merely a symbol for it that depends on the surrounding culture to be recognized. The + symbol does not inherently say anything about humanitarian medical aid; it functions as a meme for that because we know what the Red Cross is and associate it with that symbol.)

Anyway, back from that tangent...it looks to me like you've gotten caught up in your analogy to the detriment of the idea it is supposed to illustrate, and thus it - your own meme - is leading you astray. Let it go; this is not as hard as you make it appear.
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Old 09-24-2014, 07:52 PM   #49
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Default Re: Is video game violence memetic?

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Originally Posted by jeff_wilson View Post
I think it was intended for the replicators to be separate and distinct from one another rather than being circumspect and careful to avoid offense.
Yes, it appears I got it right in the first usage but not in subsequent ones, though. Fixed, anyway.
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Like I said: memes are ideas. I said it, Dawkins said it, and you cited it to...disagree with me? I don't get it.
Yes, sure they are ideas. They are also discrete replicators.

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The building blocks for simple ideas, though...those are words, shapes, and other things that do not communicate a coherent concept on their own.
If memetics is correct then those things aren't whole memes, but rather something like codons or even base-pairs.

Quote:
Anyway, back from that tangent...it looks to me like you've gotten caught up in your analogy to the detriment of the idea it is supposed to illustrate, and thus it - your own meme - is leading you astray..
It's not my analogy, it's Dawkins'.
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Let it go; this is not as hard as you make it appear
If "memetics" is a valid model (as it is in TS), then it means that a)memes exist, b) they are discrete replicators, c) all cultural expression is the result of instructions carried memetically and d) memes behave in respect to socio-cultural evolution as genes behave in respect to biological evolution.

"Memetics" isn't just "socio-cultural evolution happens and it is governed by information theory and a kind of selection" it is much stronger than that.
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Old 09-24-2014, 08:56 PM   #50
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Default Re: Is video game violence memetic?

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Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
If memetics is correct then those things aren't whole memes, but rather something like codons or even base-pairs.
Exactly. Ideas are memes, not building blocks. (Although, as noted, simple memes can be building blocks for complex ones.) Just like I keep saying.

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Originally Posted by sir_pudding
It's not my analogy, it's Dawkins'.
No. "Ideas are building blocks, not memes" and the whole "codons, proteins, amino acids" overextension of that are your babies. Dawkins and I both disagree with that construction, as you yourself cited.

I agree with Dawkins' analogy. I disagree with yours, because you've warped it into an overextended and incomprehensible mess.
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