From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Tue 20 May 2003 - 00:51:47 GMT
On Monday, May 19, 2003, at 08:21 PM, William wrote:
> I don't know about Wade, but I'm not denying the existence of
> "cognitive
> templates." I'm just denying that that cognitive equipment contains
> any
> memes.
I've mentioned it before, and I'll mention it again. I follow Bill on
all of this. Many of his posts helped me to see my confusion about what
I _felt_ was a real problem with the memeinthemind model, even
Dennett's, and I love that guy.
Yes, once again you can speak for me, Bill- I don't, also, think that
any of our cognitive equipment contains any memes. Memories, sure.
Ideas, sure. Feelings, sure. Templates, well, sure, call a stack of
memories and ideas and feelings what you want.
Bill's connection with music was also a prime source, because my ideas
about performance were mostly fed from the writings of John Cage, and
his exploration of what music is and how it happens was an early
aesthetic mountain I loved to sit on.
I think someone, it might even have been Bill, was asking about
language and music and poetry and dance. Well, I don't remember the
question, I'm afraid, but, another source, deep in my academic past,
always emerges when I see a question about the communicative
possibilities of different performance modalities. And that is, a
thesis that, once upon a time, just before recorded history, music and
speech and poetry and dance were not separate activities, at all, but
what language was. The thesis went on to describe how writing was
really more a matter of choreographology than mere sound analog.
Could be, I always thought.
And, I like that thought of 'could be' sitting in my head. It happened
when I first heard about memes. It happened when I first heard Dennett
mention algorithms. It happened when I sat in the audience listening to
Damasio and his feelings of what happens, because I had an old irish
myth sitting in my brain that was a tale of a hero's response to the
question, 'what is the finest music?' and he said- 'the finest music is
the music of what happens.'
- Wade
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