From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Sun 02 Mar 2003 - 17:41:06 GMT
>
> On Sunday, March 2, 2003, at 11:36 AM, memetics-digest wrote:
>
> >> You seem to have adopted a homeopathic model for cultural
> >> information, and it is just as invalid and specious there as it is
> >> in medicine.
> >>
> > This is the same question as the question of whether or not
> > hieroglyphics embodied memes prior to the discovery of the Rosetta
> > stone. I would say that the potential was there, and it was
> > rendered actualizable by the translation key.
>
> Nits are always pickable, many more than I ever attempt. (This is the
> mainstay of academic study.) Heiroglyphs were, nevertheless, symbols
> of language, and, so far, language is somewhat possessed of an
> intrinsic quality pre-evolved before culture/memes, is it not? Or is
> that question still up in the air?
>
No. Language communicates semantic content, which is what memes
are comprised of, thus language is eminently memetic in nature.
>
> At any rate, one can form and adopt and even use 'translations' of
> languages at any time, imagining the original semantic content, even
> being somewhat assured one knows the correct semantic content, but,
> one can never be sure, and one cannot create a new Egyptian hieroglyph
> anymore.
>
Actually, we can communicate ideas via the hieroglyphic system that
could not have been contained within its original culture. We can't
create a new hieroglyph for the same reason that we can't create a new
english letter; how ever would we use such a thing? Yet we can
combine hieroglyphs in new ways, just as new words can be coined.
>
> This is what is lost- the ability to make a new cultural artifact
> using the same behavioral context, and this is what creates memes,
> and, both with the Tlingit artifacts, and with heiroglyphs, this is
> lost, indeed. And what is lost, bottom line, is the ability to make
> the meme, as its full context is gone. One cannot make a Studebaker in
> an Edsel factory, even assuming one finds an Edsel factory. Talk about
> potential....
>
It is much more difficult, but conceivably one could make a close
approximation to a Studebaker without a factory at all; there are some
tribal Afghans who have been known to fabricate AK-47's from scratch,
hand-fashioning each component.
>
> 'Potential' is also a homeopathic term, and I am more inclined than
> ever before to designate the memeinthemind model as pseudo-science,
> too.
>
No, it is a physics term. Potential vs. kinetic energy, remember?
>
> - 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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