Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id LAA11953 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 12 Jun 2000 11:50:07 +0100 From: Robin Faichney <robin@faichney.demon.co.uk> Organization: Reborn Technology To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: Criticisms of Blackmore's approach Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2000 09:56:23 +0100 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.0.21] Content-Type: text/plain References: <200006110000.UAA13918@mail5.lig.bellsouth.net> Message-Id: <00061210291400.00467@faichney> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On Sun, 11 Jun 2000, Joe E. Dees wrote:
>I'm encouraged to see you giving consciousness, cognizance and
>cognition its fair due.
As I've said before here more than once, such concepts as you mention
there, and memes, have their parts to play in different explanatory
frameworks. They are, if you like, characters in different stories.
In practice, we can "mix and match" -- just as we can speculate whether
Superman would beat Batman in a fair fight -- but there's no place
for consciousness in "pure" memetics, nor for the meme in phenomenology.
Just as speculation on the Superman/Batman contest is basically
pointless, at the theoretical level these concepts are incompatible.
People have to get over the naive realist "theory of everything"
fantasy, and learn to get along in a world in which you have to switch
modes now and again.
>Howzabout this?
>Memetic dialectics:
>Level 1) showing: demonstration-imitation
>Level 2) telling: explanation-understanding
>Level 3) writing: composition-comprehension
>
>Each level depends upon the mastery of the prior levels to be itself
>learned. This proposal shows that I agree with your point that to
>learn to tell, one must be shown (referents for the word sounds),
>and to learn to write, one must be told (meanings) AND shown
>(written words). I would be interested in finding out about a
>possible falsification of this view; is there an instance of anyone
>who has learned to write with comprehension without first being
>able to speak (engage in discourse), say, a deaf mute who learned
>to read braille without having learned ASL (American Sign
>Language)? Imitation is not enough, however; if one learns to
>knapp a handaxe, yet never sees one used, does it really possess
>artifactual (frozen memetic) meaning for the imitator, or would
>spoken or written words possess meaning for those taught to
>recreate the sound or the script, but not taught the associations? I
>think not.
It's obvious that one cannot read/write a language one has not
learned. Whether one could learn a language solely by reading and
writing, with no oral experience, I don't know, but I don't see
any reason to rule out the possibility. I think my suggestion,
that to learn symbolic communication requires imitation -- and
that in memetic terms these boil down to the same thing, which is
the transmission and replication of memes -- is not only much
clearer, but likely to be very much more useful, than your
formulation. Your distinction between showing and telling
corresponds to mine between imitation and symbolic communication,
but to suggest that there is an equally fundamental distinction
between telling and writing seems to me, I'm sorry to say, off
the wall.
Note, by the way, that to focus on memetic replication is to
neglect the distinction between imitation and symbolic
communication. This doesn't mean either that memetics is wrong,
or that the distinction doesn't matter. It means that sometimes
we focus on one thing, and other times on another. That's life.
Get used to it.
-- Robin Faichney===============================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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