From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Thu 31 Oct 2002 - 08:14:49 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?
>
The meme is what is stored in memory. If one is self-evident, so is the
other.
>
> > 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.
>
But you cannot claim that all your typing is automatic, random and
fortuitous, without additionally claiming that you are quite a remarkably
statistic-violating zombie.
>
> > 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.
>
But WHICH language? There are so many human-created languages,
but only one type of spider web per species, of which all the
instantiations are tokens.
>
> > 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.
>
But spiders do not teach each other how to weave their webs. And yet
we teach our children our languages. That difference is cognition-
specific, for we can only teach them the languages we have not only
experientially learned but also cognitively stored.
>
> - Wade
>
>
>
> ===============================================================
> 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 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
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