Which is more operationally vacuous:....?

...meme theory or intelligent design? (that is, which is harder to test)

That is, which proposal is less likely ever to come up with a testable hypothesis?

Another question: doesn't meme theory show a basic ignorance of the difference between social science and natural science? For it tries to gain an understanding of cultural phenomena (shared thoughts, practices and goals) by comparing them to the kinds of things you might find in the bottom of a test tube.

Well those are two different sorts of cultures!

Who needs to thematize meaning, intentionality, evidence and TRUTH (especially universal and necessary truth)? Let's drop all of those themes from our study of religion and society: let's instead treat cultural patterns like viruses!

To borrow from HLA Hart, this is like trying to understand a traffic signal by noting patterns of stopping and starting but ignoring the possibility that the light functions as a sign: self-stultification. To this criticism one might reply that one can find interesting patterns in compliance/non-compliance with commands only by quantifying behavior. Granted. Patterns that come to prominence through this sort of analysis become interesting, however, only when related it to distinctively human modes of action (wishing, hoping, trying, deceiving, comparing, etc.)

This motivates me to look into RD's book to see if he is being reductionist or just making ad hoc use of a metaphor.

Here's a general description of a potential problem: one can describe the subhuman anthropomorphically and then claim to shown how the so-called higher level, such as human agency, is nothing more than a complex set of interactions by material components at the lower level.

Back to memes: he is most likely not reducing the anthropological to the chemical. But inasmuch as he relies precisely on the likeness of purported memes to genes in order to come up with his insights, he might be engaging in a kind of reductionism. At least to the point that they ignore questions of evidence, truth, meaning, etc. or anthropomorphically find something akin to that in viruses. And to the extent that he must point out disanalogies between the two to come up with an interesting explanation, his use of meme-gene analogy is trivial, beside the point.

If there is a kind of reductionism going on, then it would be ironic to have been proposed by RD, as he also claims to be a proponent of "good reductionism," which, I believe, consists of allowing for different descriptive levels, and not reducing one level to the other (while still holding on to some ontological reductionism, which is a theme for another post). It seems that any attempt at meme theory has to navigate between reductionism and triviality.

Then again, he is a biologist trying to understand a domain other than his own: perhaps he is like the a carpenter who only a hammer for a tool: to him every problem looked like a nail. Or rather, he prefers to describe everything else as nails and then point out the differences. This flower is a special kind of nail... a rather soft one, and multicolored....etc.

Then again, in order to be consistent, I may have to quit referring to anti-theists who also believe in human rights, freedom and justice--while denying that humans are anything more than a harmonious arrangement of molecules--as parasites.

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...

If the universe is eternal and determinism is true, then...

...in that case it would be possible in principle to retrodict the past ad infinitum. The present would either contain an infinite amount of information or the universe would be cyclical, albeit (methinks) in a manner analogous to the plot of the Lorenz attractor.

The Human Question

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