From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Wed 28 May 2003 - 18:59:35 GMT
>
> On Wednesday, May 28, 2003, at 09:01 AM, memetics-digest wrote:
>
> > What [the memeinthemind model] is capable of doing is analyzing
> > mental processes by which memes are altered.
>
> That is a remarkable claim, and as such requires remarkable evidence,
> and because you have no such evidence, this claim is suppositional, I
> certainly think it is specious, and it may be downright ridiculous.
>
> What the performance model _claims_ to do is model the effective means
> and methods of cultural evolution. It is _not_ concerned with the deep
> 'how' of cognitive processes, only that such processes are a quality
> of some of the members of the model and that we can see effects from
> them. Indexing, analyzing, or defining the pieces of cognitive causes
> is, as yet, beyond our knowledge.
>
> Furthermore, there is no reason whatsoever to explain the workings of
> consciousness or unconsciousness or cognition or perception or memory
> or sensation with memes. Again, this is facetious definitional
> hand-waving.
>
> There is no reliable method of analyzing mental processes, and no-one
> seriously involved with such work is using the word 'meme' in their
> investigations.
>
> And, what the memeinthemind model does _not_ do is explain cultural
> evolution, which, gee, is what I thought memetics was supposed to be
> doing.
>
> Pretty weak model, ain't it, one that fails to manage to work in the
> mechanisms of the cultural propagation it seeks to explain?
>
> The memeinthemind goes nowhere, starts nothing, and stays hidden. The
> mechanisms of performance and the parameters of the venue are equally
> as important, if not more so, than the individual cognition of one of
> the players on the cultural stage.
>
> - Wade
>
> PS- but for all of this, I'm happy to let this all rest, as Reed says,
> until we actually _know_ something. He guesses three years, I'm more
> thinking about five, but, maybe we'll all get a xmas present.
>
Things are usually explained in terms of their causes, other things
which are not them, but which demand that they be, and furthermore,
that they be as they are, and not some other way. Culture could not
evolve in the absence of brains (furnish a counterexample if you can),
thus, their causal efficacy has to be considered. Communication,
likewise, is constitutive of culture, but it cannot exist without a message
held by one to be communicated, and a common code that can be
transmitted by this person and received by another, who can then
decode the message the transmitter encoded within it. This code must
be open-ended and arbitrary and by mutual consent rather than
instinctually circumscribed, to allow for novel strings of sign-referent
pairs to be created, sent, received and understood. The arbitrary
nature of such a code means that many of them can be produced.
When the message is received, it may be rejected or filtered due to
excessive dissonance; if accepted, it must assimilate with and
accommodate itself to, that is adapt to, the preexistent cognitive gestalt
(which must also co-adapt to it)(in fact, it is accepted only if this is
possible); this co-adaption can change both the message and the
cognitive gestalt, although the cognitive gestalt is usually altered less
than the message. The altered, that is, mutated message can then be
transmitted by the mutating agent, and its recipients will decide whether
or not the mutation sticks when it collides with their cognitive gestalts.
>
>
> ===============================================================
> 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
>
===============================================================
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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