From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Thu 12 Jun 2003 - 18:40:14 GMT
On Thursday, June 12, 2003, at 01:33 PM, Joe wrote:
> What makes one's birthdate cognitively 'ready-to-hand' is nothing more
> nor less than the fact that it is part of one's self-concept and self-
> identity,
There is nothing outside of the cultural venue that makes one's
birthday 'ready-to-hand'. As I said, and as I repeat, there is _no way_
you can deduce the date of your birth without cultural referents. You
_cannot_ determine the date of your birth from information gleaned
solely from nature and your own observations. In order to insert your
birthdate into your brain (as whatever it is in there as part of your
cognitive gestalt), _someone_ has to _tell_ it to you.
Birthdays, as I also said, are an excellent example of an evolving
cultural venue.
Kenneth has it right.
>> Venues persist in the making of as many performances as possible so
>> that performances can be ' performed ' . Remerbering your birthday is
>> just one performance that the cultural venue needs for its ' evolution
>> '_ in order to mutate, and to be selected by it needs observable
>> aspects as much as it possibly can induce, to encourage ' expected '
>> performances...that is here remerbering your birthday.
To disprove me, please give me a method you could use to determine your
own birthday, if no-one had told it to you. The bold fact of the matter
is, you cannot come up with any method to do this because there is no
method to do this. Yeah, we, and you, can be assured you _had_ a
birthday, but, there is no way to discover your, or anyone else's,
birthday without cultural information, and in order for a culture to
impart information, there needs to be a cultural venue within which to
perform an action to communicate it- in this case, the counting of days
in a year, the naming and organization of segments like months, and the
actual recording of your birth in accordance with these rules. There is
no way nature will tell you any of this. Even with a lifetime of
observations, and careful plotting of the sun and the seasons, the best
you can do is an estimate of the time of solar cycle, since you won't
be able to start to figure any of this out until you figure out a
mathematical system for cyclical time. The actual date of your birth
will remain undiscoverable.
QED- this is information that needs to be told to you.
QED- this is cultural information supplied by a venue, not by your self.
- 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 archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu 12 Jun 2003 - 18:49:01 GMT