Well, probably not in an information-theory sense. Genes and memes are part of who you are, but there’s a whole buch of other stuff that wasn’t inherited from anywhere and was instead learned from the environment. It is likely to consist of more information than the genes and memes combined.
Anything you learned from the envrionment and can be transmitted to another brain is a meme, though not necessarily a very successful one. 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. 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.
But I’m using learned from the envrionment in too narrow a meaning, I think you are using learn here as any difference of behaviour or function that is the result of your interaction with your envrionment. If a slight heavy metal contamination in my childhood caused me to grow a bit less neurotypical or less likley to receive a religious experience or fall in love or anything at all, if someone was trying to upload my brain, that would clearly be something that would need be simulated! It constitutes information about me, even if it isn’t something we would in the everyday sense of the word call “learning”.
Perhaps I’m spending too much of my intellectual life in RH’s scenario of a future of emulated minds competing with each other at the Malthusian margin, where my mind to be perfectly simulated on another medium, any of the states of my body or the rules that govern how these states transition to other states is a piece of information that can be shared and recombined with others. And you would necessarily find some propagating more while others not at all in essence replicator dynamics would I think being operating on a totality of what I am (I wish to emphasise I am making several implicit assumptions about the simulated envrionment here and these may not necessarily hold).
But my primary point was, you can’t really make a you without including lots of the information encoded in your genes or memes, even if this isn’t the totality, or as you point out the majority of information needed to build a you. Arguably if you change their medium, looking at them just as replicators one could argue that they indeed did survive the transition and you are still even in your uploaded and heavily modified or in your “rational” unbiased form the lumbering survival machine of the subset of them that survived the latest selection challenge in their long long history.
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 [...]
Anything you learned from the envrionment and can be transmitted to another brain is a meme, though not necessarily a very successful one. 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. 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.
But I’m using learned from the envrionment in too narrow a meaning, I think you are using learn here as any difference of behaviour or function that is the result of your interaction with your envrionment. If a slight heavy metal contamination in my childhood caused me to grow a bit less neurotypical or less likley to receive a religious experience or fall in love or anything at all, if someone was trying to upload my brain, that would clearly be something that would need be simulated! It constitutes information about me, even if it isn’t something we would in the everyday sense of the word call “learning”.
Perhaps I’m spending too much of my intellectual life in RH’s scenario of a future of emulated minds competing with each other at the Malthusian margin, where my mind to be perfectly simulated on another medium, any of the states of my body or the rules that govern how these states transition to other states is a piece of information that can be shared and recombined with others. And you would necessarily find some propagating more while others not at all in essence replicator dynamics would I think being operating on a totality of what I am (I wish to emphasise I am making several implicit assumptions about the simulated envrionment here and these may not necessarily hold).
But my primary point was, you can’t really make a you without including lots of the information encoded in your genes or memes, even if this isn’t the totality, or as you point out the majority of information needed to build a you. Arguably if you change their medium, looking at them just as replicators one could argue that they indeed did survive the transition and you are still even in your uploaded and heavily modified or in your “rational” unbiased form the lumbering survival machine of the subset of them that survived the latest selection challenge in their long long history.
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.