Sayke@aol.com writes:
> In a message dated 11/4/99 3:43:02 AM Pacific Standard Time, asa@nada.kth.se
> writes:
>
> > Seriously, I think the queme idea isn't completely ridiculous. Maybe
> > the quemes are correlations/consistencies in the world around us? They
> > replicate in a way, since a world with many correlations is likely to
> > produce new events and pbjects embodying the correlations or new
> > meta-correlations. Of course, now we come full circle since genes and
> > memes are special instances of quemes.
>
> quemes = emes? not long after i read _the selfish gene_, i starting
> thinking that memes and genes were subsets of 'emes' in general, where an eme
> was any pattern of cause and effect that spread across and ran on multiple
> substrates. so, pool balls being hit could be viewed as emetic substrates of
> a sort, with momentum being the eme... i guess my beef with this viewpoint is
> that its waaaaay to general, so it probably doesnt help much if your looking
> for explanative/predictive functionality. however, with refinement it might
> become something useful...
I think you have a point with 'emes'. (however, the term emetic is not very good - it is medicalese for a drug that produces vomiting :-) It reminds me a bit of soliton waves, where a soliton wave doesn't disperse and generally behaves as a kind of particle. Maybe an interesting class of emes would be the discrete emes that don't disperse quickly (like an electromagnetic wave would, when it reflects from the environment). The momentum of the pool ball might or might not belong to this class depending on the timescale you use (in the long run the momentum has dispersed into heat). Such emes may interact with each other and the environment, replicate and sometimes die out. Their discreteness makes them easier to handle than just general effects that spread over multiple substrates. I'm still not sure what explanative/predictive functionality they might have, but it seems to me that we need a vocabulary to speak about substrate independent (or weakly substrate coupled) phenomena.
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