Word: minding
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...cultural life is full of things that seem to propagate virus-like from one mind to another: tunes, ideas, catchphrases, fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. In 1976 I coined the word meme (rhymes with cream) for these self-replicating units of culture that have a life of their...
...always open to the possibility that the meme might one day be developed into a proper hypothesis of the human mind. I did not know, before I read Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett and then Susan Blackmore's new book, The Meme Machine, how ambitious such a thesis might turn out to be. Dennett vividly evokes the image of the mind as a seething hotbed of memes. He even goes so far as to defend the hypothesis that "human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes...
...message was a negative one: genes aren't the only pebbles on the Darwinian beach. In 1998, in Unweaving the Rainbow, I could be more positive: "There is an ecology of memes, a tropical rainforest of memes, a termite mound of memes. Memes don't only leap from mind to mind by imitation, in culture. That is just the easily visible tip of the iceberg. They also thrive, multiply and compete within our minds. When we announce to the world a good idea, who knows what subconscious quasi-Darwinian selection has gone on behind the scenes inside our heads...
Hart, from his studio in Nineveh, N.Y., says he would hate for people to think he's "a whacked-out religious-zealous fanatic"; he would also hate "for people to say I have an open mind," when Jesus is the way and the truth. The Post paraphrased him, saying that Jews and Muslims who don't accept Jesus will go to hell, that homosexuality is Satan's handiwork and that the world may end by the year 2010. The assertions are "really harshly stated," winces Hart, but he stands by them (except the bit about the Jews...
...Scorsese says she's a chameleon, having split time between New Mexico with her mom and New York with her dad. As a child she had bit parts in Scorsese films. Would she like to work with her father again? "Of course," she replies. "What actor in her right mind wouldn...