From: Dace (edace@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed 28 May 2003 - 21:29:18 GMT
> From: Ray Recchia <rrecchia@mail.clarityconnect.com>
> Subject: Re: never wanting to grow up
>
> Ted wrote:
>
> >It's not the least bit arbitrary. Not all information flows memetically.
> >Much of it flows according to standard models of information transfer,
> >developed and refined over many years by social scientists. To claim
that
> >all [transmitted] ideas are memes is to defy conventional science.
>
> Which views are those? Don't social scientists have views on how
> subconscious habits are passed at all? That surprises me.
>
> Ray Recchia
My source is SUNY cognitive psychologist James W. Polichak. I'll just quote
from his 1998 article in Skeptic (Vol. 6, No. 3):
>>>
What is notably absent from [Aaron] Lynch's review [Thought Contagion, 1996]
and from the analyses of most memeticists is any mention of the research
that has been done in two fields that are directly concerned with human
information processing and the behaviors that result from the intake of
information-- cognitive and social psychology. Researchers in these fields
have been systematically investigating how humans receive, process, and
transfer information (Hunt, 1993). A cursory examination of some of the
basic findings in these fields will show that, rather than unifying the
study of the human brain and culture, memetic theory is based on an
inaccurate model of information processing, is incapable of accounting for
much of the activity of the human brain, and can only consider human thought
in an extremely limited way.
Meme theory is concerned with the way information is transferred. To
examine these issues, memeticists have chosen to focus on the information
itself, treating humans as hosts who may be active to a greater or lesser
extent in transmitting the information. It is the lack of emphasis on the
actual activity of the human being with the information that dooms memetics
to failure. Memeticists have adopted the view that information is
independent of either its source or of its receiver, and can be effectively
examined with little regard for either. The idea that one can examine the
transfer of information without regard for the systems sending and receiving
it has been challenged on a number of levels. Shuy (1993) argues, based on
his linguistic training and experience as an expert linguistic witness at a
number of trials, that such a position is a common misunderstanding jurors
have about the way language works. Using examples from real criminal
trials, Shuy demonstrates that people have the mistaken belief that they can
examine verbal testimony in the absence of context because all of the
necessary information is contained in the words spoken. This belief, Shuy
argues, has led to wrongful convictions a number of times. Reddy (1979)
argues that this inaccurate belief is based on the way the English language
has developed, and refers to the mistaken idea that information is sent and
received unaltered by the acts of sending and receiving as the *conduit
metaphor.*
[...]
Examining research on false memories will effectively demonstrate the
difficulties of separating information from information processing.
Roediger and McDermott (1995) presented participants with study lists of
words that were associates of one nonpresented word. For example, one list
contained the words "bed," "rest," "awake," and nine other sleep-associated
words, but the word "sleep" was never presented. During later free recall
tests, participants recalled the nonpresented words (e.g., "sleep") 40% and
55% of the time, in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively. Similar results were
found using word recognition tests, and participants were highly confident
that the words they had recalled were on the study lists. This finding of
false memories using word lists has been replicated and extended by a number
of researchers. Similar false memory data have been obtained using memory
for sentences, eyewitness testimony, and childhood events. Experimental
research on human memory has shown that people "remember" information that
they never saw and events that never happened under a wide number of
conditions and with a variety of testing methods. Payne et al. (1997)
summarize their theoretical position on human memory: "the act of
remembering involves the reperception of internal representations that are
created from experiences with the world... these internal representations
frequently are not separate and distinct from the sensory and perceptual
processes that give rise to them."
This description of human memory, while echoing that of Kolers and Roediger
(1984) is clearly inconsistent with memetic ideas about information
processing. People do not receive information and transmit it to others
without processing and altering it in a way that is both highly sensitive to
the environmental conditions at both the time the information is received
and the time it is remembered, and highly dependent on the perceptual,
attentional, and cognitive capabilities of those involved at both times.
Given the memory research, it is far from clear to what extent we can
meaningfully discuss information independently of the activities of the
people involved in the process of transmitting it. Memeticists must
demonstrate that they can account for the sensitivity of memory to the
factors identified by experimental psychologists. They must also adequately
deal with the numerous false memory phenomena, which are a powerful
challenge to meme theory. Presumably the word "sleep" fits the vague
criterion for memehood, given that, in this experimental paradigm, words are
presented to participants one at a time, and participants are expected to
recall and rate their confidence in each individual word. Yet this word,
recalled by about half of all people, was never seen. It does not seem that
we can reasonably view this information as having been transmitted-- who
could have done so? In these and the other cases, it is better to view the
memory as having been created. It is up to memeticists to challenge the
dominant theory in experimental psychology-- that all memories are created
in a similar manner to the false memories through active reconstruction of
past experiences that are heavily dependent on environmental, perceptual,
and cognitive factors whose impact varies at different times. Cognitive
psychologists have developed powerful models of human memory that challenge
memetic theory; it is up to memeticists to show that the experimental data
have been misinterpreted.
[...]
For the past 50 years, social psychologists have studied specifically how
people form and change attitudes and beliefs. Hundreds of carefully
controlled experiments have been performed examining the factors that affect
whether a person will be persuaded by information (or "infected" to use
memetic terminology), how lasting that persuasion might be, and whether the
person will actually act in response to the information to which they have
been exposed (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). One would think that this large body
of research would form a much stronger starting point for memetic analyses
than would an analogy to epidemiology. Yet, aside from a brief mention by
Blackmore (1997), this work has been ignored by memeticists. Memeticists
have neglected to consider virtually all of the experimental data, from both
social and cognitive psychology, concerning information processing, and the
behaviors based on this information processing, in favor of an inaccurate
model of information transmission (the conduit metaphor) and an untested and
underdeveloped analogy to the distantly related field of epidemiology.
[...]
With regard to how information is transmitted with potential mutation and is
subject to selective forces leading to differential survival, the writings
of memeticists are about as vague as their attempts to define the meme. It
is also not clear to what extent we can meaningfully discuss transmission of
information (as opposed to reconstruction of information). Memeticists have
also not done enough to differentiate memetic transmission of information
from non-memetic transmission. It is known that humans can transmit
information to each other that could not reasonably be considered memetic.
For example, Russell, Switz, and Thompson (1980) showed that human menstrual
cycles become synchronized through olfactory cues. Presumably there is some
variance in the degree to which people's menstrual cycles become
synchronized, but we would probably not want to say that this variability is
evidence for mutation and differential survival of any particular menstrual
cycle. It is up to memeticists to demonstrate that the information that
they deal with is different, and this will prove difficult. Cognitive
psychologists have demonstrated that learning and remembering are sensitive
to environmental and perceptual factors, which are not considered in memetic
analyses, and that most human thought is not likely to be memetic. They
have also shown evidence for the recall of information never transmitted.
Memeticists must show that, after accounting for these pieces of evidence
and the psychological theories based on them, there is some form of discrete
information left over that is subject to mutation (not merely variability)
and differential selection (not based on perception, attention, or mental
reconstruction of experience). In other words, they must demonstrate that,
contrary to current psychological models, not all forms of information in
the human brain are like the information discussed above before they can
develop meaningful predictions and models of memetic transmission.
>>>
I think Polichak makes a strong case that not all transmitted information
consists of memes. To be successful, memetics must clearly demarcate
memetic transmission of information from ordinary communication. When does
human agency give way to memetic agency? When does the information become a
thing-in-itself, capable of self-replication, as opposed to a passive
element in human mentality?
Ted
===============================================================
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 archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed 28 May 2003 - 21:33:12 GMT