From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Sun 25 May 2003 - 18:22:07 GMT
On Sunday, May 25, 2003, at 05:48 AM, Kenneth wrote:
> The memetic agency could be the ability to recognize the
> characteristics of a particular venue to control and for answering to
> a specific situation.
When I went down this same road, I wondered about things like birdsong,
which is also explained as an 'agency' as you've described it above,
although, yes, 'the ability to recognize' needs to be truncated. But,
deep in my anthrocentric head, I reject that animals have culture, and
thus, there could be no 'memetic agency' (the ability to recognize) in
a bird, as memetics is a theory about culture, not about behavioralism,
which would be enough to explain culture if one wanted it to, I
suppose. Granted, this means that birdsong _can_ be explained as
imitative behavior and instinctual algorithms of the birdbrain, acting
upon stimuli from its environment. And yes, I think birdsong is
effectively and reasonably explained by these mechanisms, with no need
for abilities of recognition.
The fact that birds react with birdsong to their environment (or to
their biological and environmental venue in a more precise phrase) led
me to look at other animal behaviors which were instinctual but yet
differed with every application, and which also did not require
abilities of recognition, and I decided to list spiders' webs. While
the basic behavior of spinning and attaching and weaving a web is an
instinctual one for any orb-weaving spider, the web itself must
conform, must be constructed in a reactive way, to the immediate
environment, because no spider makes its web in precisely the same spot
every time, as the exigencies of wind and weather and surface are never
the same. But, any instinctual behavior needs to react to changing
environmental conditions, and if it can't, it will not survive,
therefore evolution has provided sufficient algorithms, at least in
many species, to deal with the aleatory in nature, and where and when
environment changed too rapidly or too much, species did not survive.
That we have fossils of extinct species is a fact. That we have
cultural artifacts that are also extinct is also a fact. Whatever
causes extinction in biology should have a mirror mechanism in culture,
and, since the biological and environmental venue is the primary cause
of extinction in evolutionary theory, the cultural venue needs to be
the cause of extinction in memetic theory. And I had vivid and
empirical knowledge of an extinct cultural venue- the Tlingit, as we
all have reported knowledge of lost languages and cultures. (And I
daresay I could show any one of you the first type of DictaPhoneŽ
cartridge, and there would be no recollection of its use, as the
cultural venue that created it is mostly gone- but I doubt any of you
would shed a tear at the loss.)
And, of course, "Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?"
And so, as these sorts of reactive behaviors were obviously part of the
animal kingdoms, among at least two very distinct species, and homo
sapiens is part of the animal kingdom, then such instinctual mechanisms
must be part of our reactive systems as well, and, indeed, much of
sociobiology is concerned with this very question, and where the lines
will be drawn between instinctual reactions and social behaviors and
even cultural institutions is still not clear, although we have a
fairly thin line of a fairly deep shade of grey at some places.
So, it is not enough to have reactive, or imitative, or both,
behavioral mechanisms to explain culture, there needs to be something
else, and this is where the memeinthemind model and the performance
model of culture diverge. The memeinthemind model demands, in addition
to the instinctually reactive and imitative behaviors of homo sapiens,
an agency within cognition that is in addition or attached to
self-consciousness and language, that it calls a meme, and the
performance model accepts that homo sapiens has self-consciousness and
language, and does not attach any other agency to the cognitive
gestalt, to use Joe's phrase. As Keith has said, memetics does not need
to explain the mind, but it does need to form some explanation for how
a mind functions as a part of culture. A race car driver does not need
to explain or understand aerodynamics, but he does need to responsibly
supply feedback about how the car performs, such that his information
can be interpreted and utilized by the engineers, who do understand
aerodynamics. (And thus, comprehension is not requisite for
cooperation, culturally. The biologic analog to this is also obvious-
the heart does not need to comprehend the eye, and both cooperate with
the body- the spider does not need to comprehend the wind, and
nevertheless cooperates with it by making larger holes and less
strands.) The driver is an agent of the cultural venue that is car
racing. He needs to have language and social behaviors similar enough
to the rest of the agents of the venue to participate as a performer,
and the culture itself needs to supply the physicalities that will be
utilized in his performance- the car, the track, the machineries to
construct and repair and manipulate the car, and all of these could not
have been formed without careful instruction and learning from the
utilization and artifactualization of such physicalities. There is no
way a racing car can be perfected with just a series of thoughts.
Interaction with a cultural venue, and the ability to maintain and
utilize and change this venue must also be present. The spider does not
manipulate the venue, it reacts to it. Humans manipulate the venue,
and, AFAIK, are unique in that respect.
So culture itself is a recursive process involving three participants-
a performer, an observer, and the venue within which they perform and
observe. And all of these things did not spring up from some other
dimension, they all arrived here at the plodding and careful pace that
evolution demands- one change at a time, surviving or not, maintained,
allowed to continue, and continuing.
And so, since culture demands all these things, the meme itself, that
smallest of all possibilities for culture's evolution, _has_ to be the
recursive process itself, and that is the performance by a performer,
observed by an observer, within the venue that allows their combined
presence. There is no possible reduction of these agents to explain
cultural evolution.
> I needed some directed performances to survive.
You sure do. The stranger in a strange land will not survive if he
remains a stranger to it all.
- Wade
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