Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id DAA13174 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 16 May 2000 03:23:31 +0100 Message-ID: <39206B7B.9FCE390C@mediaone.net> Date: Mon, 15 May 2000 22:26:20 +0100 From: Chuck Palson <cpalson@mediaone.net> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (WinNT; I) X-Accept-Language: en To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: Central questions of memetics References: <20000516015507.AAA24577@camailp.harvard.edu@[204.96.32.182]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
"Wade T.Smith" wrote:
> Chuck Palson made this comment not too long ago --
>
> >What does repetition have to do with anything?
>
> The re-occurance of a game that requires a bat is a cultural repetition.
> Such things happen without precedent in various cultures. (Man may be the
> play-with-tools-beast.) Is the bat, which is a logical requirement of the
> game, a meme standing by waiting for its chance, or are the cultural
> forces that emerge the game enough to re-invent the bat every time?
A well framed question. I have occasionally seen bats standing around, hands
on their hips, occasionally hopping an inch or so off the ground as if they
were impatiently tapping their little toes, nervous for the game to begin.
If done well, it's quite a sight. It has always been a paper mache bat with a
person inside. As I said, a brain has to register the bat as part of a game
if the bat is a bat; otherwise it could be a generic club.
As to the "cultural forces", that is an abstraction of the aggregate behavior
of a group of individuals, each with their own behavior. Historians confuse
this kind of abstraction all the time with reality. They do this when they
insist that we can learn from their version of history. Here is how it works:
the historian traces the behavior he wants to track -- like how an A-bomb got
built and how it nearly destroyed the world. Then he (it's always a he that
traces an A-bomb) tells us we can "learn from history" by not building
another A-bomb that might get us destroyed. But he's wrong. He forgets in his
cloud of abstraction that there were thousands of people involved in their
own little way either opposing or supporting the construction of the bomb. We
can't stop the building of another bomb until we know something of how all
the various individuals decided to cooperate with each other to build the
bomb. In other words, we can't just note the end result of a process and call
that the problem.
I fear I digressed in an overly long illustration of my point. But I could
not resist my impulse to express my favorite criticism of historians. Hope
you got the point anyway.
PS - Ken Clark, great jazz organist, plays at the Kirkland cafe in Cambridge
on Wed. evening.
===============================================================
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 : Tue May 16 2000 - 03:23:56 BST