Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id HAA10783 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 24 Mar 2000 07:53:30 GMT Message-ID: <A4400389479FD3118C9400508B0FF230040BD5@DELTA.newhouse.akzonobel.nl> 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: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 08:47:41 +0100 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Joe:
You are not aware of it until you deduce it (no major logical feat,
true),
Derek:
Fair enough, but it doesn't get over the infinite capacity requirement
problem. If I am aware that Napoleon died in 1821, then I can immediately
deduce that he didn't die in any other year n. That's _any_ other year, an
infinite number of other years. That's an infinite number of 'mnemons' (to
borrow the correct terminology from thought contagion theory) of which I am
aware. But since my brain does not have an infinite storage capacity, I
cannot store them all as individual mnemons. Therefore, there is no way
that we store awareness of propositions.
Joe:
and then you are free to promptly forget it and rededuce it as
need be.
Derek:
Again, fair enough. But every time we have a rededuction, we run into the
same problem.
Joe:
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.... [snip, snip] 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.
Derek:
I'm not sure whether or not Chomskians think we do _store_ 'deep structure
propositions'. I rather think they don't. It would be interesting to find
out. I'm also not sure what 'neural gestalt' means in a neurobiological
sense. Do gestalt psychologists believe that 'gestalts' are stored in some
way?
===============================================================
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 24 2000 - 07:53:46 GMT