Ken Pantheists wrote:
> If you are asking if memetics can be applied to itself, of course-- we
> had a whole discussion of that in the Meta-meme thread. But that line of
> thought can only be useful to a certain point because it leads to a huge
> abstraction. If you say memes are about thoughts, then what is the
> thought that contains memes-- it's like asking What contains the
> universe?
Actually, you might want to look at the way Computer Science tackled and
still tackles the problem of `rooting' object hierarchies in OOP
programming. One technique (not my favoured), is to simply arbitrarily
declare two `res,' Object and Class, the top of the hierarchy. Class is
the immediate parent of the Object object.
Preferentially in my eyes is the technique of simply /not rooting it/.
Objects inherit from other objects or they don't; they are
self-defining. Just as memes about memes are /not/ really Meta-memes,
they're just memes whose object of reference is another meme. In a
linguistic sense they /are/ metamemes, but only in name, they needn't
have special properties just because of their reference.
--
Alexander Williams {thantos@alf.dec.com / zander@photobooks.com}
Prefect of the 8,000,000th Terran Overlord Government Experimental
Strike Legion, Primary Transport TOG "Bellatores Inquieti"
======================================================================
You ride in 250 tons of molecularly aligned crystalline titanium
wedded to a ceramic ablative matrix. You carry a 200mm Gauss
cannon, two massive 10-gigawatt lasers, two SMLM fire-and-forget
missiles, a Vulcan IV point defense anti-missile system, and a
deadly assortment of other equally lethal weapons.
Your vehicle is the ultimate product of 4,000 years of armored
warfare.
Your life expectancy is less than two minutes.
-- RENEGADE LEGION:
CENTURION