Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id SAA09359 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 23 Mar 2000 18:55:37 GMT Message-Id: <200003231854.NAA12087@mail2.lig.bellsouth.net> From: "Joe E. Dees" <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 12:57:43 -0600 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: RE: objections to "memes" In-reply-to: <A4400389479FD3118C9400508B0FF230040BC8@DELTA.newhouse.akzonobel.nl> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12b) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
From: "Gatherer, D. (Derek)" <D.Gatherer@organon.nhe.akzonobel.nl>
To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: objections to "memes"
Date sent: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 13:48:38 +0100
Send reply to: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Joe:
> It is not necessary to store all negated alternatives in order to store
> a proposition (as in Napoleon died in X [and not in Y and not in Z
> and not in...]); such consequences are deduced, as necessary
> from the original statement.
>
> Derek:
> No, that doesn't work. If I store 'Napoleon died in 1821', and then I
> deduce from it that 'Napoleon did not die in 1822', then am I storing
> 'Napoleon did not die in 1822', or not? After all, I am aware of the
> proposition 'Napoleon did not die in 1822' (why should I not be aware of
> it?, after all as you say I have deduced it), and the theory requires that
> we store propositions we are aware of ('calculus of mnemon conjugations'
> part 1).
>
You are not aware of it until you deduce it (no major logical feat,
true), and then you are free to promptly forget it and rededuce it as
need be. Knowledge and memory is like a parchment which is
continually overwritten by subsequent experience; the novel,
unusual and crucial remain longer because they make more of an
impression or make it in a lightly overwritten area, while the typical
and trivial is quickly erased by more of the same. We do not, nor
do we have to, remember everything, and especially, to internalize
a type (ideation) does not require us to store every possible token
(linguistic expression) of it.
>
> Joe:
> It is the single ideation, not all
> the proliferent linguistic expressions of it, which would be stored.
>
> Derek:
> Why is 'Napoleon died in 1821' an ideation, and 'Napoleon died in [some
> other date]' merely a 'proliferent linguistic expression' of it? Either we
> store propositions or we don't.
>
Sure, we store some of them, but words refer to experiences,
which is mostly what we store, either in immediate form (memory)
or in symbolically mediated (knowledge) form. Language is a
shorthand we use for encoding and storing perceptions to save
neural space; it is the skeleton of experience, and as such is bereft
of most of what would occupy such space. We read or listen to
words so that we do not have to recreate another's enfleshed
experience to gain the skeletal knowledge that they learned from it.
We store not only a vocabulary, but certain facts, which we
correspond to various possible ways of putting words together. To
store a Chomskyian deep structure proposition does not require us
to store every possible surface structure instantiation of it. When
we store Napoleon, we do not have to store him separately for 1821
and Waterloo and Josephine and so on; Napoleonic knowledge,
like any knowledge, is interconnected in a neural gestalt, which
makes contiguous access easier, and aviods space-consuming
repetition. Memory, being experiential (involving imaginal
recapitulation of sense experience, perspective, etc.), is much
more neuron-quantity-intensive than knowledge (our bare symbolic
shorthand of it). Remember the saying, a picture is worth a
thousand words? Well, it probably takes much more than the
equivalent of that to store, once we learn the basic vocab and
syntax we may pan-apply to make fact storage neural space
efficient. And a lot of facts we forget (few of us are mnemonic
Kreskins); our most important knowledge is the knowledge of how
to look them up.
>
> ===============================================================
> 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 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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