Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id TAA07774 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:07:42 GMT From: Robin Faichney <robin@faichney.demon.co.uk> Organization: Reborn Technology To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: memetics-digest V1 #130 Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 19:04:45 +0000 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.0.21] Content-Type: text/plain References: <ECS10002151101A@imap.uea.ac.uk> Message-Id: <00022707432600.00404@faichney> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Soc Microlab 2 wrote:
>If you're
>looking for the importance of physical instantiation in memetics then I (and Dennett) think you're barking up
>the wrong tree.
I'm most certainly not doing that, but...
>It's the MEANING that gets copied, nothing else, and it's the meaning that
>makes the issue important.
What is MEANING, and how does it get copied? Is it hoisted by a skyhook or a
crane? I'm still (re)investigating Dennett on intentionality (I admit my
previous study was not as thorough as it might have been), but whether
intentionality or memes "comes first", memetics, for Dennett, absolutely
definately does not depend on subjectivity. Consider this quote:
A last hope for the Darwin-dreaders is simply to deny that what happens to
memes when they enter a mind could ever, ever be explained in "reductionistic,"
mechanistic terms. (DDI p368)
Clearly, those who argue against so-called reductionist explanations using the
concepts of meme "software" running on genetically designed "hardware" (or
"wetware") are Dennettian Darwin-dreaders, skyhook-true-believers. Which (in
broad terms) was the main point I was trying to make there.
To get a little more specific, regarding the syntactic/semantic dichotomy, it
seems to me that in this context the distinction is that of level of
sophistication of encoding. That the same meme is not encoded in the same
way in different brains does not mean that it is not encoded there, or that the
encoding is somehow special, transcending analysis. The most sophisticated
encryption techniques actually change between messages, and that's (roughly)
what is happening here. But the principle remains the same: memes are encoded
in brains, and in behaviour, and at no point is a Cartesian superhero required
to step in and magically interpret, process, select or do anything else to them
-- contrary to what some people would have us believe.
-- Robin Faichney===============================This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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