From: Chris Taylor (Christopher.Taylor@man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed 18 Jun 2003 - 14:37:12 GMT
Hi. I'm a much more extreme meme-ist than most here I think, because
most (I would surmise) see memes as a high order phenomenon, whereas I
prefer to think of memes (maybe I need a better word) as fundamental to
all but our basest animal stuff (face recognition, fear, the stuff you
can't lie about because it is part of the hard-wired honesty required
for social living). In essence I see (metaphorically speaking) atomic
level patterns, which are built into higher order structures (memes of
varying levels of complexity, up to memeplexes). These structures vary
wildly between people depending on the structuring of the meme(plexe)s
within them (what is a 'black box', and what has internal structure
etc., the general approach to structure [range, depth, branching] and so
on), various aspects will vary widely.
This leads me to (inter alia) two conclusions:
1) There are memes in our minds (many of which will be too 'small' to
ever be performed as such)
2) The type and degree of structuring of these memes varies
So performances (i.e. phenotypic-level copying) will vary, and the memes
in our minds will also differ (in all cases) to some degree because we
try to knock up things that replicate a phenotype, with no real idea of
(or hope of replicating) internal structure.
Now the reason I mention this is to ask the question how did memes come
into existence - how did we move from programmed behaviour to acquired?
I wonder if predator's search images provide us with a selected-for
starting point, or whether we need to go lower - note that I don't
consider operant conditioning to produce memes. The reason I picked
search images is that organisms tend to be programmed to spot movement,
but if your prey isn't moving, how can you pick them out from the
environment? So if you factor in the fact that we are 'looking' at a
sensory encoding of the world (enhanced edges, movement detection etc.)
then if the search image is applied, what appears to be just more
pattern will actually stand out from its background in the mind of (say)
a bird, because the search image is already separate from the background
in the internal representation. Big advantage in response to freezing +
crypsis by prey, therefore selectable. I'm not sure that's entirely
clear but I'd like someone to offer an opinion because there seems to be
little discussion about how we _got_ to a memetic world.
Cheers, Chris.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chris Taylor (chris@bioinf.man.ac.uk)
http://pedro.man.ac.uk/ »people»chris
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