serendipityoucity

I listened to a Ted Talk about Dangerous Memes by Dan Bennet this morning.  A metaphysicist in progress friend is thinking about starting up her own blog so i put a list of goods ones together for her! Next i know i am learning about memes, quantum physics, the immaterialness of material, and cultural evolution - in my jams!

memes - memplexes - the study cultural evolution definitions!

Meme theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection similarly to Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an organism’s reproductive success. So with memes, some ideas will propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and, for better or for worse, mutate. Memeticists argue that the memes most beneficial to their hosts will not necessarily survive; rather, those memes that replicate the most effectively spread best, which allows for the possibility that successful memes may prove detrimental to their hosts.

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The term memetic association refers to the idea that memes herd. For example, a meme for blue jeans includes memes for trouser-flies, riveted clothing, blue dye, cotton clothing, belt-loops and double-sewn seams. In this way, groups of memes can operate symbiotically (to use a biological analogy) in the sense that they act for their mutual benefit/survival.

The phrase memetic drift (formed by analogy to genetic drift) refers to the process of a meme changing as it replicates between one person to another. Memetic drift increases when meme transmission occurs in an awkward way. Very few memes show strong memetic inertia (the characteristic of a meme to manifest in the same way and to have the same impact regardless of who receives or transmits the meme). Memetic inertia increases when the meme transfers along with mnemonic devices, such as a rhyme, to preserve the memory of the meme prior to its transmission. See Telephone (game) for one example of memetic drift.

Nationalism, ethnicity, ideology, tradition, fundamentalism, religion…. 

It was also fun to have Snowcrash as a cultural referent and of course to embrace transdisciplinarity where literature, biology, evolution theory, communication theory, philosophy and physics come together! Interesting that His Holiness studies quantum physics and to think of the power of mantras as a meme transmision strategy, at least it is love, compassion and the breaking down of obscurring thoughts!  I luv this line on subjectivity-

certain quantum properties only have meaning in the context of a measurement (Talking physics with the Dalai Lama).

Soo interesting, since the claim to objectivity by scientists is observation, methods and measurability!  Yesterday i read somewhere about the same concept of measurement of time and space as being a subjective way of organizing the world.  It made me laugh, especially since i spent a great amount of time just recently discussing concepts of accuracy, reliabity and authenticity in the sciences, and having doing so started question my own assumptions of truth.  But i never really questioned or perhaps thought of the fact that measurement in and of itself is just another agreed upon, standardized and subjective way to organize and categorize in order to reduce uncertainty.  I am sure it was in in Splintering Urbanism: Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition.  I did not find it but as i was looking i came across the following:

Time and space are both socially constructed together in all sorts of diverse ways withing and through contemporary metropolis, often via uneven use and connection to networked infrastructures that selectively help construct new social times and spaces (Casey 1998) pp.203. 

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Place, thus is a diverse social process rather than, as so often imagined in the utopian diagrams of modern urban planners and infrastructure engineers, a simple bounded piece of ‘Euclidean’ territory to be designed ‘rationally’ controlled, through physical plans and the configuration of infrastructure networks. Places are not contiguous zones on two-dimentional maps. They are not, suggests Doreen Massey. ‘areas with boundaries around’.  Rather, they are ‘articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings’ (Massey).  It is how these ‘articulated moments’ in the diverse circuits and space-times of urban life come (and do not come) together within a place that shateps the dynamic nature of that place.  David Harvey argues that it is ‘cogredience’ that matters most in making a place. He defines this as ‘the way in which multiple processes flow together to construct a single consistent, coherent, though multi-faceted time-space system’. pp.203

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‘the city is a gear box full of speeds’ (Wark) pp.204 

Anyway! Time to get back to the books.