Week Six

 A few of Dennett's ideas are still confusing to me.  Despite our extensive class discussion, I still do not fully understand memes.  I am not sure if culture can be measured or divided into units.  Units are supposed to be very basic, so that measuring is easy and logical.  How can one begin to measure culture?  Memes seem so indefinable to us because culture is.  We had an easier time envisioning memes as a tune or phrase rather than a cultural movement, which makes sense because larger cultural movements are so much more complicated.  In other words, I can much better explain how a classmate ended up humming Lady Gaga than say the revolutions happening across the Middle East.  Explaining cell structure is so much simpler than explaining culture, and we only really began to figure out genetics in the last century.  I do not like generalizing and trying to fit too many things into unrelated groups.  Oversimplifying does not help us discover what culture is, in fact, it may prevent us from learning more.