5 November 2015

Informational Memes

Objections to Daniel Dennett’s informational meme.

The concept of information seems to agree with the meme idea, and that is why many memeticists equate memes with information. This view is currently championed by Daniel Dennett himself and it is his own arguments that I want to scrutinise here. I myself also assumed that describing memes as information was a fair bet or at least that it would not hurt the meme idea. I came to discover how Dennett insists on describing memes (and genes) as information, to the point where this would be the only right way of describing memes, as opposed to codes for example. This got me thinking. Considering that I define memes as codes myself (link), I was compelled to try and find out whether the concept of information is a better way to describe memes or not. This is my attempt to better understand Dennett’s information and to find out whether information is really fit to serve as a model for memes.

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