From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Wed 28 May 2003 - 22:24:05 GMT
Since I cannot acces this article, I would greatly appreciate its being
posted in its entirety.
> > 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 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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