Re: Cultural traits and vulnerability to memes

From: Wade T.Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 12 2002 - 23:17:14 GMT

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Subject: Re: Cultural traits and vulnerability to memes
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 18:17:14 -0500
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From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu>
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    Hi Jeremy Bradley -

    >Isn't hardwiring the same thing as instinct?

    It is also the hardwiring of the developmental organism. We are hardwired
    to make language. But it is not instinctual- it will not just happen, it
    has to be developed while interacting with environmental stimuli.

    As for what the perception and treatment of time is in a culture- man is
    a pattern seeker. Cultural interactions may or may not expand or reduce
    observed cycles to seasons, or months, or days, or epochs. The pattern is
    findable in any of these. Time is one of the patterns of culture,
    perceptually speaking. It is also a function of space, and vice versa,
    physically speaking.

    There will always be a problem finding shared patterns in the perceptions
    of reality, and the processes of reality.

    But reality, or time, doesn't care. One of the interesting things about
    aboriginal cultures, to put a name to many, is that they all have a
    mythology where they are the center of it all, and what they do affects
    the entire cosmos. Interesting conceit, of course. But conceit only.

    - Wade

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