Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id LAA21035 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 17 Mar 2000 11:26:31 GMT Message-Id: <4.1.20000316214711.00cf6e40@mail.rdc1.bc.wave.home.com> X-Sender: dplante@mail.rdc1.bc.wave.home.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 03:25:52 -0800 To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk From: Dan Plante <dplante@home.com> Subject: Re: Complete thoughts In-Reply-To: <20000316122857.AAA28043@camailp.harvard.edu@[205.240.180.1 78]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
At 07:28 AM 16/03/00 -0500 Wade T.Smith wrote:
>Very interesting....
>
>I would only but this but-
>
>>Also, the "complete thought" MUST be a WRITTEN one
>
>- that I think there is something very right about the above statement,
>in that culture (vs society- after all, ants have a 'society') should be
>artefactual- but, I would contend that art (images, dances, rituals,
>etc.) are just as valid as writing to be cultural artefacts, and thus
>contain 'memes' under your refining definition.
>
>Yes, no?
Yes, no, and no, respectively. Sorry, I couldn't resist :-)
Yes, I agree that images such as pictures, paintings and such are artifacts,
because they exist in a physical, persistent, and fairly immutable form. Dances
and rituals, on the other hand are not; I prefer to call them social constructs
(unless the music is scored and the dance choreographed on paper, in which case
the physical CODING, and not the events, WOULD be artifacts). But I do have to
admit that I'm using the terms "cultural", "social", and "artifact" in very
specific ways now, since the way they fit into the framework I'm using is also
very specific.
Hmmmm. I feel that I'm explaining myself poorly. Again. Maybe I should suck
back and reload; explain where I'm coming from.
If you remember from my post of March 12th, I briefly outlined the derivation
of a "generic evolutionary abstraction framework" or "eigen-frame" if you will,
by abstracting common characteristics from a multitude of distinct emergent
complexes from atoms to molecules to genes to cells to brains to minds, plus
the dynamics that exist between them, and came away with a generalized
"template" of highly abstracted form and function from which to recognize and
order the specific form and function(behaviour) of other less well described
systems.
One of the most useful characteristics of this eigen-frame is, I think, in
using the feature of ascending dependancy between levels of emergence.
For instance, you might ask yourself: "Can a society exist without language?".
Not likely. Then you might say: "Can a society exist without artifacts?". I'm
sure you would agree that it could. To be sure, a social emergent CAN and DOES
express artifacts, it just doesn't HAVE to as a necessary aspect of its
emergence or continued existence. This, to my mind, is the conceptual "litmus
test" required to constrain the scope of the word "social". We have also
started to zero in on what IS necessary: language.
It then becomes possible to refine the characteristics of "culture" by drawing
better distinctions with a now more refined definition of society. I think one
of the most defining distinctions between society and culture at this point
would be the fact that the character of a culture is much less mutable across
generations, and much less variable within the duration of a lifetime. This in
turn suggests an entity with a "self-identity", which in turn implies "memory".
However, the most obvious hallmark is persistence of the organizational
information itself (a clutural analogue of genome). Think in terms of a
long-dead society completely bereft of any artifacts, compared to how much is
known about the Incan culture, even though the associated society is long-dead.
The overwhelming majority of what we know comes from written records. As a
matter of fact, even if ALL we had were written records, we would still know
most of the details about the other (presumably vanished) artifacts through
DESCRIPTIONS. At this point, WRITTEN language artifacts would seem to be at
least one of the order parameters by which cultures emerge and persist, due to
their permanence and flexibility of semantic content.
Dan
===============================================================
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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 17 2000 - 11:26:45 GMT