Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id AAA01879 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 18 Feb 2002 00:11:08 GMT Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2002 16:05:25 -0800 Message-Id: <200202180005.g1I05Pg04866@mail9.bigmailbox.com> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary X-Mailer: MIME-tools 4.104 (Entity 4.116) X-Originating-Ip: [65.80.163.167] From: "Joe Dees" <joedees@addall.com> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: ality Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk('binary' encoding is not supported, stored as-is)
> "Dace" <edace@earthlink.net> <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Re: alityDate: Sun, 17 Feb 2002 13:25:17 -0800
>Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>
>
>> >So it makes no sense to assume that memories
>> >are contained in the brain. The brain is precisely that aspect of mind
>> >that cannot retain the past. The only other option is to assume that
>> >there's no such thing as memory, that no one actually recalls the past.
>> >Instead the brain, by amazing coincidence, happened to evolve into
>> >an information-storage device, similar to our computers. This view
>> >appears to be driven by memes that exploit our desire to project
>> >ourselves (and our technology) onto nature. No different than the
>> >anthropomorphic meme behind "God."
>>
>> Well, we pull the bits and pieces out of somewhere to recreate what we
>> remember. If not from the brain, where? The bits may not all be stored
>> in the same place within the brain, but even if they're scattered about,
>> it must be within that repository of past experience where we watch
>> dreams and memories flash across the backs of our eyes as if our eyes
>> were seeing them. At least that's how it seems to me.
>>
>> Grant
>
>If memory involves storage of information, it's not memory. To remember
>is to recall the past, not to look up information about it.
>
To recall the past is to access cortically stored information that include spatiotemporal context; this is indeed memory. If the cortically stored information is bereft of spatiotemporal context and is a narratized or abstracted shorthand version, what is recalled is knowledge.
>
>The concept of
>memory implies that the past is in some way present. If reality is reducible
>to matter, then memory is impossible.
>
Actually, umm, no. Memory is encoded and stored in cortical matter/energy neuronal/dendritic/axonal/synaptic pattern configurations. The past is not present in some Occam-violating platonic realm; stored memories of it, which do exist in the present as information, may be recalled/accessed.
>
> To accept memory on its own terms,
>we must find a ground of material existence. We must find something that
>*precedes* matter and the space it occupies.
> That thing can only be
>time.
>
The spatiotemporal manifold is a seamless unity, that can only be illegitimately bifurcated into 'space' and 'time' by committing the error of absolutizing the predominance of the temporal aspect in audition to the exclusion of the spatial aspect, or by absolutizing the spatial aspect in vision to the exclusion of the temporal aspect. This error can only be committed by those who naively, and in an untutored and undisciplined fashion, misgrasp or misconstrue the fact that both aspects are nevertheless present in both perceptual modalities (there is duration in vision and direction in audition). In the most primordial sensory modality, taction, the dual aspects of the spatiotemporal manifold are equirepresented.
>
> If time is intrinsically real, then it doesn't need matter to exist. In
>other words, the past still exists.
>
The past does not 'still' exist; if it did, it would not be the past, but the present. What does still exist are cortically stored past memories that may be presently accessed. No memories can exist that have not been perceptually experienced and stored. To state otherwise is to be intrinsically in error.
>
> That it takes up neither space nor matter
>has no bearing one way or the other. This is why the mind can perceive the
>past but the eye sees only the present.
>
The mind can recall stored memories, but it does not perceive the past; it may access/remember stored information concerning it.
>
> The mind is made of time, while the
>eye is made of atoms. What we call the brain is the moment-to-moment
>spatiomaterial manifestation of the mind. What we call the universe is the
>moment-to-moment spatiomaterial manifestation of time. Time is universal
>life (animation) while life is local time (anima).
>
The mind is an emergent dynamically recursive set of pattern-configurations manifested/generated by the material substrate brain. Thus, yagotit backwards; brains may exist without manifesting minds (dead brains, comatose brains, etc.), but minds cannot exist in the absence of their material substrate brains.
The universe is matter/energy/spacetime. I makes no sense whatsoever to claim that a "time' that cannot even exist in the absence of the spatial aspect of the amnifold can generate either 'space' or 'material'; in fact, spacetime is dependent upon the gravitational field generated by matter/energy for its existence; the contained forms its own container.
>
>It's because organisms are intrinsically temporal beings that their
>activities are habitual rather than automatic. While a machine is motivated
>entirely by deterministic processes, a body functions according to ingrained
>memory. An organ remembers how to function based on the functioning of
>similar organs before it. An embryo develops properly because it follows
>the developmental pathway established by its predecessors. There's no set
>of instructions or mechanical constraints that guides it automatically on its
>route. Organisms are animated, not automated.
>
Here comes the magickal mystickal woo-woo world of Sheldrakean morphic resonance yet again; it not only furnishes no scientifically testable mechanism whereby organs can gain info from their spatiotemporally distant and rotted predecessors (unlike genetics, which furnishes us with a construction code) which would be hard-pressed to send same, but also, since such a code does indeed exist (and can be manipulated to cause differences to be built into subsequent organs), the very idea is Occamiciously superfluous. And organisms are spatiotemporal, just like rocks. There is no mysterious life-forcical elan vital to animate them any more than there is phlogiston to enable fire. They can do more than simply billiard-ball around, such as ingest, excrete, replicate and respond to stimuli, due to the complexity that they have evolved, but they are still comprised of matter/energy and spatiotemporally situated.
>
>Mechanistic ideology eliminates far more than just habit. You can't just
>pull one thread out and expect the remaining fabric to hold itself in place.
>Mechanism eliminates time, memory, novelty, self, subject, mind, will,
>freedom, creativity, representation, feeling, quality... in short, everything that
>comprises human existence.
>
Actually, umm, no again. These assertions are ungrounded in factual reality, and seem to merely serve the same threat-of-hell function that is found in more conventional religious memeplexes. The bare bones facts are that we ARE spatiotemporally situated entities comprised of matter/energy in complex configurations and yet DO experience all the things that you say are impossible to experience; thus, you must be wrong, as every scintilla of evidence of our senses and mentations contrafactually militates against your contentions.
>
> Is it any wonder that a society that produces
>this lunatic science manufactures fusion bombs by the thousands, destroys
>soil and clean water across continents, plows over whole ecosystems, and
>tampers with the chemistry of our atmosphere? It's as if a vast, inhuman
>evil were out to eradicate us, and we're helplessly disoriented because it's
>coming at us from within as well as without.
>
What is and is not indeed the case does not depend upon pseudoethical arguments or quasimoral appeals, nor can they negate actually obtaining states and processes of affairs.
>
>Of course, the impersonal evil is our own progeny, our cultural offspring,
>the memes that propagate by exploiting our egoistic fear and powerlust.
>
>Memes are the memories that got away.
>
Ted, you are not practicing memetics, but are instead a circus barker hawking your own personal variant of a vedantist religiously grounded memeplex. No one here is sipping such snake oil, no matter how indefatiticably you ignore unanswerable logical and empirical refutations and blithely continue to preach same. What you are advocating is not within the Popperian realm of science, but within the dogmatic realm of faith/belief; it does not good to futilily masquerade it otherwise; there is not enough camoflage in all the universe to disguise its nature as a meme which has you tightly coiled in its thrall and with which you vainly hope to infect others.
>
>Ted
>
>
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