From: Wade T.Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Date: Thu 31 Oct 2002 - 04:29:19 GMT
On Wednesday, October 30, 2002, at 10:57 , joedees@bellsouth.net wrote:
> And what about the storage of meme-ory?
The fact of memory is self-evident.
What about the storage of meme-ory? How is that self-evident?
> But to obviate my point, you would have to be thinking of nothing, both
> before and during your automatic-writing performance.
Writing is both intentional and haphazard, directed and aleatory- I am
not making a claim that it is 'automatic' at all. I am merely saying
that I do not, regardless of how carefully I think about it, capable of
commanding precisely what falls from my fingers, and I do claim that
no-one is, ever, nor has been. Other things can and do happen,
unforeseen.
> Uh-uh. In the first case, we have physical differences;
My first case was a specific species of spider making specific webs
against varying supports- I stand by it- this is a hard-wired stratagem
that nevertheless, due to purely environmental differences, will produce
similar but non-identical webs. Language is precisely this sort of
stratagem, and environment will produce similar but non-identical
structures.
> in the second,
> we have cultural, that is, cognitive ones - exactly the kind of thing
> your
> behavior-only attempt at memetics cannot admit without self-
> destructing.
My second case was English vs. Chinese- yes, cultural differences, but
differences produced by _one_ unique species, homo sapiens, in different
physical and cultural environments, environment being the _only_
differing circumstance as the cognitive ability for language is genetic
and developmental, and thus the only affector of the language
difference. No destruction of the behavior-only memetic model is
occuring at any time in this, in fact, I see only underscoring and
support for the model, and, yes, self-destruction of the meme in the
mind model, as we cannot have had, at any time, a memetic transfer
across the Pacific Ocean, and yet we have languages on both shores. It
is the behavior that needed to change with the environment, not some
imaginary entity placed in a brain by some imaginary process involving
an ancillary layer of memory and cognition.
- Wade
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