[FRIAM] the Skeptical Meme

[Steven A Smith]

Glen -

I'm definitely not the one to educate you (or anyone) on this. Following 
your allusion to Szaszian anti-psychology, what I'm seeking is common 
ground on whether there is even a valid question which the ideas of 
cultural evolution and more pointedly, memetics purports to answer (or 
"structure usefully" perhaps in your terms?).

I'm intuitive at my root, so if a set of heuristics, metaphors, 
rules-of-thumb, semi-formal analogies, notional models, seem to be 
failing in some significant way, I am happy to back off to a more 
fundamental level and seek fresh experiential bedrock to rebuild my 
house of cards upon.

May I ask how you DO structure your thinking around the *apparent* (or 
is this an illusion) structured "progress" of human 
knowledge/behaviour/culture/society/civilization???     Naturally many 
see our current state on the brink of (apparently) climate disaster, 
collapse of capitalism, fizzling out of representative democracy, 
possibility of a (regional?) nuclear exchange, etc.  as evidence that 
"we have not evolved!", but I would claim that is a gross 
misapprehension of the term "evolved".   I'd say we HAVE evolved to the 
state we are in (collectively).

For the sake of discussion, I'm happy to drop the attempt of the term 
"meme" to be a strong analogy to a "gene", but I'm guessing that is not 
enough to help you with the specifics of your skepticism?   I'm poking 
AT the perimeters of your skepticism NOT to pry it off of you, but 
rather to understand if there is something specifically useful (to me) 
in that crust for my own skepticism (or even my pollyanna).

- Sieve


On 8/13/17 12:17 PM, gepr ⛧ wrote:
> Well like I said in response to Frank's suggestion about self psychology, I tend towards a Szaszian perspective on talk therapy and psychology. But even that constellation of ideas, I think, has more structural truth to it than memetics.
>
> Of course my ignorance may be getting in my way here. So I'm relatively open to being educated on any of these subjects. But there is a pretty high skeptical hurdle that I have to leap over in order for any such education to take root.
>
>
> On August 13, 2017 9:56:16 AM PDT, Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>> Is there an alternate way of thinking/talking about the *apparent*
>> encoding of human/social/cultural artifacts in language units,
>> including
>> what appears to be something a lot like "mutation and drift" across
>> this
>> space?
>>
>> Or have I already (re)transgressed?