From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Fri 22 Nov 2002 - 05:44:29 GMT
> >
> > > No, "true" is that statement which... everything you said. A true
> >> statement is a logically infallible one. But "Truth" is completely
> >> different and has nothing to do with logic or arguments. Truth,
> >> for me, is something related to the feeling (unaccompanied by
> >> words or thoughts) of my heart beating in my chest while I am
> >> meditating.
> >>
> >In otherwise, "Truth", for you, is that meme which hooks into your
> >emotional triggers.
>
> It doesn't have to do with emotion, but the phsyical, somatic,
> visceral pulsing sensation. I can use the beat to verify a
> proposition: my own existence. Each heart beat says, "I... am...". The
> one Truth is that I am. I don't like Descartes' statment, "I think
> therefore I am," because that requires thought for existence. I rather
> prefer the visceral experience of the raw Truth of my own heart
> beating. When you're lying in the hospital after a car wreck, hooked
> up to tubes, half-aware, and you can feel your heart beating, and hear
> the EEG, then it is like an anchor to something real, a fact about
> yourself -- you are alive. Again, that's just my subjective experience
> of Truth, and yeah, it's a meme.
>
But you ain't gonna find that in a mouldy text, unless you're predisposed
to believe it is there.
>
> >Logical perspicacity is not a flaw, but an essential virtue, when
> >presented with such claims. And several religions may share memes
> >which are not true, but merely effective - such as the proselytizing
> >meme that Christianity and Islam shares.
>
> I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "memes which are not
> true". What makes proselytizing a false meme?
>
I didn't say that it was false, just that it was not true.
It does not describe a truth, but instead prescribes an action.
>
> >Nope. Our perceptual gestalts are broken up into their constituent
> >impressions, and and these components are recombined in differing
> >ways. In dreams, this is not consciously directed, in imagination,
> >it more often than not is.
>
> That is one idea about how dreams are formed, and it is not a bad
> idea, but yet it is hardly proven. You seem to deny the brain the
> ability to creatively anticipate the future while dreaming. I rather
> tend to think that there are a lot of pattern generators in the brain
> that are constantly searching for new patterns, and that during sleep,
> they enter into feedback loops that can fractalize outward in ways
> incomprehensible to the primitive field of modern neuroscience.
>
Actually, the ability to deconstruct and recombine our knowledge and
memories into cognition and imagination is the very 'soul' of creativity.
> > >
> >> An 'apprehender' [sic] reads or interprets a message only through
> >> what they already understand, through the meme-constructs they
> >> already possess. The message itself could have had a completely
> >> different original meme than the one that infects the mind of the
> >> 'apprehender.' There are subtle signals that a woman gives a man
> >> which he may apprehend, but that doesn't mean he will get the
> >> message.
> >>
> >This is the well-known hermeneutic dialectic of explanation and
> >understanding. However, "besiege the unbelievers and kill them
> >wherever ye shall find them" is not open to multistable
> >interpretations which are equally likely on a fitness landscape.
>
> I agree that certain statements are less ambiguous than others; this
> one being a rather infamous exo-toxic meme typical of fanatical
> religions. However, I think that it is open to one other
> interpretation: "Whoever wrote this was an asshole!" I.e., total
> rejection is a way of deriving meaning from a statement.
>
Yep, but according to the Muslim myth, Allah dictated it to Muhammed,
and it must therefore be Gospel truth, so to deny its truth in front of one
who believes in it is to risk being the next beseiged (if that true believer
does not want to endanger his/her eternal soul).
>
> - JS Gilbert
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
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> 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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