From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Thu 12 Jun 2003 - 19:18:08 GMT
Date sent: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 14:40:14 -0400
Subject: Re: birthdays
From: "Wade T. Smith" <wade.t.smith@verizon.net>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Send reply to: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>
> 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.
>
NOW you're making the very communication of information part of your
so-called 'cultural venue'; I was under the impression that that term had
to do with one's environs, such as geography and artifacts. If you keep
expanding its purview, pretty soon it'll stand for EVERYTHING, which
will mean that it equally stands for NOTHING, that is, nothing that can
be distinguished from the nonexistent non-cultural-venue.
>
> >> 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.
>
QED - one need a brain, that is, an internal cognitive gestalt, with which
one can comprehend and store such information, in order to know it.
And had one not been born, one would have no birthday; its facticity is
supplied by the fact of one's birth, and the information about the event
is communicated to one by others and replicates inside one - that
makes it a (very person-specific) meme, one that possesses both the
'between' and the 'within' phases.
>
> - Wade
>
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
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> 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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