From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Sun 09 Mar 2003 - 18:20:55 GMT
>
> On Sunday, March 9, 2003, at 07:17 AM, memetics-digest wrote:
>
> > Where do the memes come from that you transmit through performance?
> > Or do you think we invent them on the spot as we perform without any
> > forethought? Even if we manufacture them by performing them, we have
> > to shape them out of something in our minds. It's the information
> > that comprises the meme, not the transmission. The transmission can
> > take many forms and often does.
>
> You answer your question. Yes, the performance can take many forms and
> often does. There are no memes _transmitted_ in the performance model,
> because, yes, they are created anew in the time/space of the
> performance, _every_ time, and yes, we _do_ do things without
> forethought during the actual performance (as you have to know if you
> talk to performers), although we don't do it all without forethought,
> unless it is totally accidental, which, hey, it can be. The
> performance itself (a quite separate thing from the individual, I do
> wish you memeintheminders could see that), is shaped with agents from
> the individual mind- thoughts, skills, memories, mindful or mindless
> agents ad infinitum for all practical purposes- and with agents of the
> time/space of performance- the audience, the weather, the ground
> surface, the ambient noise level, et cetera, almost ad infinitum, with
> some limiting parameters that the culture determines and presets, if
> possible, to assure similar performances- ritual, spectacle, enclosing
> walls, etc.
>
Wade, would you listen to yourself? With your inversion of the
accepted term spatiotemporal to create your own time/space jargon,
and your inversional denigration of the memeinthemind model for
entirely spurious reasons, such as leveling Occamic criticisms to the
only model to which the type/token distinction that solves them may be
applied, you begin more and more to sound like an acolyte of the New
Morphic Resonance. Are you becoming Ted Dace sub2? And of
course, this forethought to which you are forced to admit is precisely the
accessing of the stored memetic template so that it may guide
performance. Calling it something else does not change what it indeed
is.
>
> I do not view these cultural presets as memes, although they 'evolve'
> and 'speciate' through memetic activity.
>
> Examples of performances are any and all activities in cultural
> time/space, which itself demands observation _by definition_, and
> which performance includes the manufacturing of artifacts, which are
> observed in an extension of cultural time/space due to their material
> existence. Once manufactured, an artifact becomes an agent in the
> 'gestalt' of the cultural presets.
>
> Examples of cultural presets in performance time/space are uniforms,
> podiums, auditoriums, red carpets, ceremonial musics, logos, catch
> phrases, table manners, laws, et cetera, et cetera.
>
And books and movies and recordings are all just 'agent' objects, bereft
of all capacity of intentional informational transfer? Huh -uh! A chair is
made to sit upon; a book is written to be read.
>
> Yes, in the performance model, what Dawkins originally discussed as
> examples of 'memes' are instead cultural presets. Is this just a
> matter of nomenclature? Not to the performance model, it is not.
>
> Because, for what it's worth, this model works for me, even if I stand
> alone with it. It consiliates too much of cognitive, biological,
> philosophical, aesthetic, and mechanistic disciplines for me to
> ignore, while the memeinthemind model seems to be willingly ignorant
> of or blind to performance itself as an agent of cultural evolution,
> and does not survive Occam's razor.
>
As I said before; your construction does not allow for the application of
the one relationship, the type/token one, that banishes Occamically
violating and meaning-dissolving chaos. If no performance can be said
to be a token of any type, then there is no common similarity to which
one may ascribe a generic meaning, and meaning disappears, or
rather, it explodes so that each action and object requires its own
specific meaning and name, nonrelational to any other, and definition
and communication become impossible, as does memetics itself.
>
> > It's the information that comprises the meme, not the transmission.
>
> That is a meaningless statement to the performance model, I hope you
> see that. The agents of performance, the individual and the cultural
> time/space, are not 'transmitting' 'information', but, rather,
> engaging in a performance that, because of the environment of the
> cultural presets, continues to be similar. When the performance is
> dissimilar enough (due to some individual agency- person1 is not
> person2- or to some environmental agency- time/space1 is not
> time/space2), it might alter the cultural presets, but, there is no
> guarantee of that (some cultural presets continue, some do not), and
> this continuance and alteration of the cultural presets is what we
> discuss as cultural evolution.
>
It is then a useless model, for encoded semantic content is precisely
what is shared in communication/memetic replication.
>
> We can only perform within cultural time/space, and culture can only
> act upon or react to a performance.
>
But we do not live in an isolated present, bereft of memories and
anticipations. You illegitimately fragment the phenomenological flow of
sequential consciousness into a polyfurcated string of nonrelational
moments.
>
> Memetics is the discussion of these human performances amidst these
> evolving cultural time/spaces. When humans evolve, that will be part
> of the discussion, as well, of course.
>
The discussion is evolving quite nicely via criticism of your inadequate
and flawed memeintheaether model.
>
> - 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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