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From: mentifex@scn.org (SCN User)
Subject: Re: What is a library?
Message-ID: <E05Fy8.A4D@scn.org>
Sender: news@scn.org
Organization: Seattle Community Network
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 16:46:55 GMT
Lines: 49


In soc.history.science, Nacsady Vincent has noted and inquired:
>>
>>You are a  bridge  between two epochs.  You began life in the old
>>civilization of paper books and  inert  ideas.  You find yourself
>>in a dark forest because the direct way is lost, but History sees
>>you as the meme-vector of herself:
>>
>>
>>  /^^^^^^^^^^^\  Meme of Collective Human Memory  /^^^^^^^^^^^\
>> /visual memory\           ________   semantic   /  auditory   \
>>|      /--------|-------\ / syntax \  memory    |episodic memory|
>>|      |  recog-|nition | \________/<-----------|------------\  |
>>|   ___|___     |       |    |flush-vector      |    ______  |  |
>>|  /image  \    |    ___V____V___  word-fetch   |   /      \ |  |
>>| / percept \<--|-->/ conceptual \--------------|->/ stored \|  |
>>| \ engrams /   |   \ mini-grids / for thinking |  \ words  /   |
>>|  \_______/    |    \__________/  in language  |   \______/    |
>>
>>http://www.newciv.org/Mentifex/ original public-domain archive or
>>http://www.complex.com.pl/~venom/science.html Web site in Poland.
>>
>
>   You've spoken very well, but what do you mean, please, by "meme-
>vector" ?
>   Thanks.

Meme-vectors are human carriers of units of cultural transmission.
Although I personally do not think that memes are anything new un-
der the sun, opportunists such as  myself  are always delighted to
"jump on the bandwagon" of a faddish  movement  which will advance
their own ends -- in  my case,  the realization of the philosophic
ideas of Teilhard de Chardin concerning the phenomenon of man as a
not-yet-complete mental organism striving towards an "Omega Point"
of complexity and of harmony with...whatever is out there.

Just as the American  Lee de Forest  ushered in our current age of
electronics  in 1907  by inventing  the triode radio tube -- which
Thomas Edison almost but not quite  discovered in 1883 -- likewise
someone somewhere right now is busy perfecting the artificial mind
which will so unimaginably alter "la condition humaine" that Vinge
has named the coming event a Singularity beyond which no one sees.

The phenomenon of mentifex has been usurping the Usenet newsgroups
alt.memetics, soc.libraries.talk, comp.robotics.misc and others in
order to advance a candidate theory of mind that is more difficult
for educated persons to understand than the triode tube, but which
will similarly be recognized  as a fundamentally simple, evolvable
system whose function could have been deduced far earlier by luck.
