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From: minsky@ml.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Musical Memetics
Message-ID: <1996Mar5.215417.3212@media.mit.edu>
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Date: Tue, 5 Mar 1996 21:54:17 GMT
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In article <DnLwyr.GIz@utcc.utoronto.ca> Rocky Persaud <rocky.persaud@utoronto.ca> writes:
>lcarnelian@aol.com (LCarnelian) wrote:

>>I am a musician and am new to the concepts and theory of memetics.  I have
>>been playing with the idea of 'musical memes' and how they might  work.  I
>>thought to do some crude 'research' by asking you meme guys; what do you
>>think of music memes?  can you refer me to some theorist whom has covered
>>this subject?  describe how memetics might apply to music and to the
>>creation of it.  
>
>They're evil, I tell you, EVILLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>

Richard Joly suggested my article, Music, Mind, and Meaning.  It's in

   ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/minsky/MusicMindMeaning

It doesn't mention memes specifically, but it is the only article I've
seen that has some theories of why people like music.  If you find
anything similar, I'd really like to know.

A really good novel that has neat ideas about music memes is

  The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester

To be sure, he has professional ESP characters in this novel, but that
doesn't bother me very much, because I predict that within a few
hundred years, we'll have non-invasive brain scanners that can
download a person's mental structure, and present mental state.  

I don't mean to say that given a (huge) diagram of a person's neural
connections, it is then easy to read a person's mind.  It would be
very hard -- for a person.  However, by that time we ought to have
ultracomputers so smart that they can figure out anything they want to
know about that person's mind, given a few quintillions of
connectionist-functional data.  Needless to say, those machines won't
consider us to be intelligent, but perhaps they'll regard us as
interesting, anyway.




