From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Wed 14 May 2003 - 15:30:53 GMT
n 1: the act of sending a message; causing a message to be transmitted
[syn: transmittal, transmitting]
That humans transmit is self-evident. That information is present in
the messages being transmitted is also not in dispute.
But what _is_ in dispute, and it's not a skeptical position, it's a
straight up logical and procedural one, is whether or not the
information being transmitted gets transmitted in toto from one human
to another, and it is my contention that, since there is no direct
means of this transfer (i.e. telepathy is not an agent in this
universe), the information in one mind is, at best, a reasonably
accurate representation of the information in another's, and the
maintenance of the accuracy of this representation is the duty of
culture, as well as a function of a mind in a society of minds.
Thus, I claim, and I see no refute, that saying 'information is being
passed from one mind to another' is a grossly simplistic way to
describe the actual events, agents, objectives, participants, media,
and processes that go into _any_ cultural (indeed, any interpersonal)
interaction.
And it is a simplicity that dumbs down any further effort to explore
memetics, if not halt it altogether.
- Wade
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Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
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