Re: transmission

From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Tue 20 May 2003 - 00:51:47 GMT

  • Next message: Wade T. Smith: "Re: transmission"

    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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