Anything you learned from the envrionment and can be transmitted to another brain is a meme, though not necessarily a very successful one.
Memes are what you get culturally. There’s a big mountain of human experience that is not culturally transmitted—because it is learned anew in each generation. When you learn how to tie a new knot, maybe 10% of the skill is culturally transmitted, and 90% is muscle movement information discovered by trial and error on the spot while figuring out how to get to the goal.
Meme’s seem to be more or less used interchangeably with ideas, which isn’t right obviously since there are things we learn that we can’t transmit with currently available tools.
Indeed: “A meme is not equivalent to an idea. It’s not an idea, it’s not equivalent to anything else, really.”—Sue Blackmore
If a day comes when I can directly upload and share the exact smell of a loved one or the muscle memory of me playing basketball for half an hour those things too will become memes, or some other kind of replicator if one wants to quibble about definitions.
Yes, when we can upload our minds, things like knowledge of how balls bounce will be capable of being transmitted memetically—rather than being learned anew in each generation, which is what happpens today.
However, that day has not yet come.
But my primary point was, you can’t really make a you without including lots of the information encoded in your genes or memes [...]
Memes are what you get culturally. There’s a big mountain of human experience that is not culturally transmitted—because it is learned anew in each generation. When you learn how to tie a new knot, maybe 10% of the skill is culturally transmitted, and 90% is muscle movement information discovered by trial and error on the spot while figuring out how to get to the goal.
Indeed: “A meme is not equivalent to an idea. It’s not an idea, it’s not equivalent to anything else, really.”—Sue Blackmore
Yes, when we can upload our minds, things like knowledge of how balls bounce will be capable of being transmitted memetically—rather than being learned anew in each generation, which is what happpens today.
However, that day has not yet come.
Sure, granted.