Response to assigned questions with citations

¶ … knowledge, or epistemology, has viewed knowledge in very different ways over time, but in the future I believe it will be the field of memetics that will dominate the field. Memetics has its roots in evolutionary epistemology, or the idea that "knowledge is constructed by the subject or group of subjects in order to adapt to their environment in the broad sense." (Heylighen, 1993) What people know is constructed from other pieces of knowledge and if it aids in survival, that knowledge is retained. Memetics builds on this idea by asserting that a piece of knowledge, called a "meme," no longer depends upon the individual who knows it but can be transferred from person to person. Its success no longer depends upon it ability to assist in survival but in the number of people who know it. In a world of instant communication and massive information availability, memes can spread throughout the world in an instant and can be retained indefinitely. The Internet can allow for memes to disseminate and as technology spreads and improves, so too will the field of memetics.

2. I would like to have dinner with Aristotle primarily because he was an empiricist at heart. He may have believed that the information gained through empiricism had to be perceived by the individual, but his work laid the foundation for modern science and I would love to discuss how knowledge has expanded because of his ideas. I would also like to hear what he thinks of how the field of epistemology has evolved to dismiss the ideas of absolutism, but to include social, economic, political, and technological aspects. But mostly I would like to know what his pupil Alexander the Great was really like.

3. When a person wants to gain knowledge they must be able to assert that what they know is accurate. One of the ways that has evolved to solve this dilemma is a form of empiricism called the "scientific method," or the idea that knowledge can be gained through observation, hypothesizing and experimentation. "Claims which count as scientific and therefore as reliable do so because they are established by means of a scientific method." (Gower, 1997, p.4)