From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Sun 15 Jun 2003 - 19:11:09 GMT
Date sent: Sun, 15 Jun 2003 11:47:59 -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 Sunday, June 15, 2003, at 12:11 AM, Joe wrote:
>
> > But if you mean that cultural venue encompasses the between but not
> > the within
>
> The cultural venue is a term I started to use more in place of the
> also and previously used 'cultural ecology', but, of course, I did not
> want to use that phrase, as it smacked of newagism, and 'venue' was
> more apt to the performance aspect of the model I was intrigued with.
> So much for my etymology.
>
> The cultural venue _is_ the 'outside' (the between and the around)- it
> is the realm within which performance happens, and the performers are,
> on this planet, humans, who have brains. (If a self-conscious creature
> could be so without a brain, then, so be it- culture _could_ happen
> without two _brains_, but not without two self-conscious creatures. We
> just don't know about any other way to accomplish self-consciousness.)
> And the observers are self-conscious humans. But the technologies of
> communication and observation are part of the venue. (There are no
> televisions or prosceniums or orchestra seats inside a brain.) The
> specific language used is part of the venue. (Each specific language
> is from the society outside the brain.) Every tool or media utilized
> is part of the venue. (There are no artifacts or newspapers inside
> brains.)
>
> > Of course I can't
>
> > So my counter-challenge is to explain how one can remember one's own
> > birthday in the absence of a brain.
>
> This is not a true counter-challenge to my challenge of discovering
> one's birthday solely from nature, since a brain is part of nature,
> but, I'll continue nonetheless, as your challenge provides incentive,
> albeit off-vector, and you've completely acknowledged that meeting my
> challenge is impossible. I try not to bet on unsure things....
>
> The cultural venue 'remembers' birthdays quite well without brains,
> because it uses artifacts- after all, it created both the need for
> birthdays and the particulars of their specifics. I have my birth
> certificate in my possession. I could be a robot and bring it out to
> show you. _My_ brain was not necessary to supply either this record,
> or the conditions of its manufacture, or its distribution to your
> perception. (I know people who have birth certificates for pedigreed
> animals, who do not remember such things, and also could be trained to
> fetch and display them....) As you say, other brains, _all_ of them
> acting within the specific cultural venue within which I was born,
> were required. But the venue itself was, and always is, a requirement
> of cultural information and distribution, and in the case of
> birthdays, there _is no other way to arrive at one_. Nature, and any
> science of it, are not sufficient, to supply a date of birth. One
> cannot discover one's name in likewise extra-culturally dependent
> fashion. (I suppose this is the time for a fascinating sidestep upon
> some cultures', notably some amerindian and aboriginal, inclusion of a
> magickal or spiritual name which one can discover in shamanistic
> passages through an external/internal supernature, but, not now....)
> Nature is that which is not dependent upon culture, from a
> socio-centric viewpoint. (We may be changing that, here upon this
> planet, for better or worse, in an ironic technologically magickal
> retrogression, but time will tell.)
>
> Every artifact is a venue-specific demonstration of a performance, and
> a cultural venue needs to be maintained to supply the meaning to this
> artifact. (There is, and I have, empirical proof of this assertion- it
> is more than axiomatic to cultural evolution.)
>
> But remembering is not the same, even the selfsame, as creating. And,
> yes, in order to create, we do need a brain. In order to remember a
> cultural specific, we need a brain, and a venue, and an observer.
> Without all, as you say, the external and the internal, culture is not
> possible.
>
> The performance model truly _accepts_ this triad of condition, and
> calls the necessary and sufficient agent of this cultural continuation
> and evolution the 'meme'. (Which, AFAIK, was the original proposed use
> of this word- the unit of cultural evolution.) As a performer, a
> venue, and an observer are all necessary and sufficient to continue or
> to mutate a cultural specific, and the blanket condition wherein all
> these agents are active _is_ a performance, I adopted the performance
> model of cultural evolution for its sheer parsimony. For me, nothing
> else is sufficient to explain cultural evolution, and putting the meme
> in the brain only does one third of the job. Last I knew, one third is
> a good two-thirds short.
>
> For one to remember one's birthday, all three agents need to be
> active. As I've shown and you've agreed. Remove one of them, and there
> _is_ no birthday, regardless of the fact there most certainly was a
> birth. But even that has no need itself to be remembered.
>
Memes are both within and between in different encoding formats. And
it not only requres human brains, with their self-conscious awarenesses
and their learned code-knowledge, to create/encode the meaning-
bearing cultural artifacts of which you speak, but also to
understand/decode them (actually to translate between codes, in either
case, but in opposite directions - in the first case FROM neral
encodings, in the second case TO them).
> - Wade
>
>
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
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>
===============================================================
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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