From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Thu 31 Oct 2002 - 17:48:02 GMT
>
> On Thursday, October 31, 2002, at 03:14 , joedees@bellsouth.net wrote:
>
> > But you cannot claim that all your typing is automatic
>
> Again, I don't. Never did. Only that what does actually happen is
> affected instantaneously by the performance itself. There is so much
> corroborating data about this that I deem it self-evident. 'The best
> laid plans of mice and men aft gae aglay'.
>
But not all of them, or even most of them, do so.
>
> > There are so many human-created languages,
> > but only one type of spider web per species
>
> Are we at the point of claiming that all languages are unrelated or
> unique in developmental and syntactical forms? I don't think so. We
> are prepared by our genetic development to make language, just as the
> spider is prepared to make webs. I am not _comparing_ webs and
> language, only claiming a similar genetic importance. I suppose I am
> being sociobiologic.
>
Actually, languages all have syntaxes, but those syntaxes are not all
similar. The syntactical structures of Chinese and German, for
example, are vastly different.
>
> > But spiders do not teach each other how to weave their webs
>
> Of course not. They do not have culture, or memes, and yet they
> produce similar but unique versions of webs just as we produce similar
> but unique versions of languages.
>
That is because the way each species of spider produces a web is
hardwired, unlike English, !Kung, or Urdu.
>
> > 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.
>
> Totally agree with this. I just wonder why the 'and yet' needs to be
> said.
>
> Cognitive storing seems to be our dividing ground. You want this
> stored very specially and specifically in some 'meme-ory', and I don't
> particularly see any need to store it anywhere special or specific,
> and would call it a very usual and developmentally preset function of
> usual memory to deal with such experiential learned information.
>
Languages are not stored in our big toes, and neither are memories or
their replicating subset memes. They are stored in, and accessed from,
our brains.
>
> - 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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