From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Wed 28 May 2003 - 23:25:55 GMT
>
> On Wednesday, May 28, 2003, at 06:28 PM, Joe wrote:
>
> > 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 cultural 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 cultural gestalt, although the
> > cultural 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 cultural gestalts.
>
> I love it when you explain things like this, especially when you do it
> without the hand-waving about, well, you know what about....
>
> What you have above described is, in large part, the dissemination and
> propagation of the elements of language, which elements are held in a
> brain made by nature to be prepared for them.
>
> Culture needs brains, yes. It also needs language. (At least, I think
> it does.) It also needs places, and times, and a way to maintain all
> these things so that a cultural gestalt can be formed. (I'm happy to
> use gestalt instead of venue.) Replace 'cognitive gestalt' with
> 'cultural gestalt' in the above, and see what happens. All I will add
> is that communication is not requisite for either perception or
> learning, in a general sense.
>
> "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 and 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 consensual
> 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 cultural
> 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 cultural gestalt, although the cultural 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
> cultural gestalts."
>
> This is the sort of dynamic and yet stable mechanism that both
> language and culture share. The units of language are, what, phonemes?
> And yet, they are not, because the formation of language is
> developmental, not merely intrinsic.
>
> Was it language's job to create culture, or culture's job to keep
> language alive? Both have died in numerous quantities over the eons,
> but it would seem that language was a precursor to culture, at least
> to me. To others, who see animals without language to have culture,
> the egg lays the chicken, and yet, they have a good case for their
> argument, and one that should not be dismissed out of hand.
>
> Indeed, there are no cases to be dismissed out of hand around here
> these days. The more I've seen, the more it all seems to start to work
> together.
>
Actually, many phonemes are meaningless. Morphemes (some of
which are also phonemes) are the smallest meaning-bearing language
unit (to morph is to change, and the addition or subtraction of a
morpheme changes the message to which it is added or substracted,
into another meaningful but differing message), and thus morphemes
are the bedrock of linguistic meme-communication.
It seems that in the meme*is*themotion model, the entire idea of
encoding, not to mention all the multiple existent codes capable of
communicating the selfsame memes, seem to get ignored. The motion
is not the meme, but it encodes it, in varying ways (hand signals, lip,
palate and voice box, writing, etc.), and thus is necessary, just not
sufficient in the absence of a cognitively held message to be encoded.
>
> - Wade
>
>
> ===============================================================
> 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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