From: Van oost Kenneth (kennethvanoost@belgacom.net)
Date: Sat 24 May 2003 - 14:02:57 GMT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Wade T. Smith" <wade.t.smith@verizon.net>
Your wondering in an objecting way about the persistence
> of performance is, well, perhaps more intuitive than reasoned, however.
> Culture has a long established pattern of maintaining its venues for
> the single purpose of ensuring the similarity of performances within
> them. So, it isn't the persistence of the individual performance that
> is important for cultural evolution, but the persistence of the
> recognizability of performances- their relational connections with
> previous performances.
But for to get the ability to ' recognize ' you need a mechanism.
Seeing tears on one 's face has to be recognized as salt water
of laughter or pain. Behaving in the opposite is not only inappro-
iate but in many cases totally social unexceptable.
Why not settle the score for something like ' mirror neurons ' !?
> (In the cultural venue of the baseball game, the very fact that there
> is still a diamond base path and four bases, and a pitcher's mound, and
> an outfield, and two dugouts, and foul lines, and bullpens, and
> spectator seats- all these things are the cultural memory of the game
> in concrete form, in the venue of performance, and, as such, this venue
> commands the performance of a baseball game. Such is the information
> supplied by the venue, and it is this sort of information that the
> memeinthemind model ignores.)
In other words, what is the venue can be seen as the grundnorm !?
Conceded by definition and agreed upon by consensus !?
> Saying that the unit of cultural replication needs to reside in the
> mind negates every and all influences from the venue itself, and, while
> I'm sure no-one thinks a billboard is actually performing, as far as
> the venue is concerned, it is nonetheless playing.
You can surely drag performances/ thoughts and etc out of it....
The venue results into and within performances.
> The idea of the cultural venue is perhaps even more important than the
> idea of the performance as the meme, because we are all, by nature,
> players on a prepared stage. Analyzing that prepared stage is just as
> important as analyzing how the minds of the observers and the
> performers operate.
I agree, moreover I see an important role for genetic biased memetics
e(a)ffects, but that is my prerogative...
> But, as Joe and others have stated, there may well be a need for a
> memetic agency in the brain- perhaps as cultural animals we have need
> of other mechanisms than just language and society and memory and
> ideation- and perhaps fMRI or other modalities will find them- but for
> me, what we know and can understand about the brain is sufficient to
> explain the development of culture, and the performance model takes
> what is mind at face value, so to speak, with no added necessities,
> especially imaginary ones with no certain mechanism.
I already tried to eloborate this in my writing ' Mirror neurons, the
emergence of memes and the existence of culture.'
The memetic agency could be the ability to recognize the charac-
teristics of a particular venue to control and for answering to a specific
situation.
Regards,
Kenneth
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