Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id XAA10894 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sat, 4 Mar 2000 23:59:01 GMT Message-Id: <200003042356.SAA15462@mail5.lig.bellsouth.net> From: "Joe E. Dees" <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2000 18:00:57 -0600 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Monkeys stone herdsman in Kenya In-reply-to: <B0000508138@htcompmail.htcomp.net> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12b) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Monkeys stone herdsman in Kenya
Date sent: Sat, 4 Mar 00 17:22:12 -0000
From: "Mark M. Mills" <mmills@htcomp.net>
To: "Memetics List" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Send reply to: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Lloyd Robertson said:
> >> My three conditions involve change, repetition and transference. You appear
> >> to be not satisfied with these three conditions for the existence of
> >> memetic evolution. Why?
>
> Joe Dees said:
> >Because for memesis to be said to be taking place, there must be
> >internal ideation of the meme... which can be behaviorally demonstrated by
> >external modification of objects to conform to some internally
> >conceived design...
>
> Joe,
>
> This sounds like an 'agency' requirement ("there must be internal
> ideation"). I don't think requiring a homunculus adds anything to
> Lloyd's three conditions.
>
The existence of self-consciousness does not entail the necessity
of some homunculus viewing a mind movie on a cartesian theatre
screen; this canard demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding
of the consequences of intentional and signifying conscious self-
awareness. There must be the idea of the thing for the thing to be
intentionally created, and yes, for an idea to originally occur (to be
first thought of), there must be an "ideator", that is, a self which
conceives the idea, which thinks it up. Conceiver-conceiving-
conceived is a mutually interdependent tripartate structure, like
perceiver-perceiving-perceived and actor-acting-acted upon, no two
components of which can stand independent of the third.
>
> Your demonstration, 'external modification of objects to conform to some
> internally conceived design' is useless in practice since we have no way
> of independently knowing directly an 'internal design.'
>
We know that anything which is modified for a chosen purpose
becomes cultural rather than natural, and that there must be an
internal memetic plan or design behind the external memetic
physical-instantiation-by-modification, unless it is entirely random,
in which case it will make no sense and serve no discernible
purpose, or unless like a beaver dam, it is instinctually mandated,
in which case significant (meaningful) variations between
instantiations will not be found. Thus, we can know the design,
and whether there IS a design, through the mediation of an
inspection of the modified objects which serve as instantiations of it.
>
> Mark
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
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>
>
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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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