From: Richard Brodie (richard@brodietech.com)
Date: Sat 07 Jun 2003 - 00:58:13 GMT
Dace wrote:
<<Memetics began as a way of avoiding social and cognitive psychology by
simply reducing culture to its particulate elements-- memes. Cultural
evolution, rather than being a product of human intelligence, results from
the Darwinian competition of memes to replicate. The irony is that in order
to understand why some memes are selected and others are not, we must study
precisely the cognitive factors that Dawkins hoped to avoid. Of course,
Polichak's critique is nearly five years old now, and the field may have
matured in that time. Aunger appears to be interested in cognitive factors,
and I'm glad to hear that Boyer is as well.>>
You are simply misinformed if you think any of the pioneers of memetics
sought to avoid cognitive factors. Dawkins simply popularized the term to
indicate the possibility of a non-genetic Darwinian process and has never
been too interested in the details -- this from his own mouth. Dennett is a
cognitive scientist/philosopher who has written a prize-winning book on
consciousness. I called evolutionary psychology one of the four cornerstones
of memetics and touched briefly on cognitive psychology.
However, as Keith said, much interesting understanding can come without
knowing the details of the brain's workings.
<<When it comes to standard discourse, it's humans
beings, not the information they exchange, that have agency.>>
Science is a cornucopia of models, each useful for some purposes and not for
others. We all know it's usually useful to look at human beings as having
agency. The surprise is that it's sometimes useful to look at memes that
way.
Richard Brodie
www.memecentral.com
===============================================================
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 : Sat 07 Jun 2003 - 01:02:54 GMT