Comment 14 by Zeuglodon

But literalist is what the meme theory has to be if it interacts with matter at all. The reason a man can call someone a Muslim is that they hold ideas they've inherited or tick a few boxes of criteria in the observer's head. But this still says nothing about whether the ideas or even meta-ideas are replicating entities.

That sort of begs the question of who gets to decide that a meme has actually been copied. There's no such problem for genes, because a gene is a physical object, and thus replication means physical copy, but what's the criteria for a meme being passed on ?

That is why I raised in #13 the fact that the copying of an idea is a somewhat meaningless concept because something that is not actually a 'copy' may still nevertheless be decided by external observers to be 'the same thing'.

My point is...if a million people think that person A has the same ideas as person B, something must have been copied even if we ourselves would judge the ideas to be totally different.

So there is a second type of meme.....meme2 one might call it....which is not so much the literal idea but the idea of the idea. The meta idea. And I would judge that to be by far the most prevalent type of meme. In fact one could probably argue that it's the only type of meme, because at the end of the day whether an idea has been copied is entirely a matter of perception.