Compos Mentis

Golems!

This post may sound a little odd to those people who don't like the idea of memes, and who think that I dislike them, also. You certainly would have reason to believe that, but since I am defending them, or at least assuming that they exist, in this post, I wanted to make sure everyone knows that it was not the idea of memes that I was attacking previously, but merely the idea that memes are all-encompassing in the realm of mental activity, and the idea that memes create our selfness. So, with that out of the way...
The history of science has been filled with some very strange coincidences. It has also been dogged by the history of thelogical explanation of the phenomena that science has described. A lot of the latter versions of these histories have been written with the angle that some scientific development had brought enlightenment to these poor deluded theists. What the histories fail to realize is that at every instance there have been theologians saying, "but that is what we've said all along!" While this may partially be because the theologians are trying to cover up their own inadequacies, I believe that in many instances they are correct. There are two parts to this: one is the idea of insight that I have mentioned previously. The religious texts are so full of rich ideas that they cannot explicate them all directly, and so things have to be interpreted. Often the interpretations correspond with modern ideas in other fields. This is where the other explanation comes in, that corresponds to the coincidences we find in science.
If memes are ideas that are meant to be modelled and spread, isn't it obvious that we can 'build' some memes from other memes? Leibniz and Newton had the same information and the concept of the calculus erupted at two places at the same time. For the theologians, it is a little different. They can get the same memes, but with a different angle. If you get the same information with a different emphasis, it reads differently. The theologian would build the same world-view, but with a spiritual emphasis. Other theologians would have said similar things in the past, and so the new guy gets to say that they've been saying it all along. Or you can think of it as an aspect of the eternal truth that transcends through history and is now revealing itself in a different guise. But you see, that the two discriptions I have given are the two different contentious views!
Okay, it's time to stop; I've just combined a bunch of my old posts together and nothing new has come up. But we can call it application.

posted by Emmett @ 18:24