From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Wed 18 Jun 2003 - 15:12:46 GMT
Selfsame -
Precisely the same; the very same; identical.
Lawry offers that the level of understanding by person B about person
A's ideas is a result of the quality of performance of person A and a
result of the level of cultural and personal insight of person B. Of
course, I agree with this. It is also a result of the level of
allowance given to the performance and to the idea, which is a quality
of the venue. (A forum of communists will not allow criticism of Marx.)
All three factors are part of the level of understanding, and therefore
part of the level of identity in replication. But about ideas, and the
motivations in the mind of physical behaviors, we cannot make a claim
of selfsameness.
After all, what idea is in the mind of a priest? Is it the selfsame
love of jesus idea that is the mind of a devout spinster? They both
pray the same, go to the same church, speak the same words, sing the
same hymns, eat the same wafer, drink the same wine. As we well know,
given the amount of protection and isolation offered to priests by the
oligarchy of the church, many there may only have been mimicking the
actions of the devout, playing a role, (as it has been shown all humans
are quite willing and able to accomplish), thereby showing the
surrounding culture 'devotion', but all the while planning his next
pederasty. Indeed, the priesthood may well have appeared to be a very
safe place to be a pederast, as there was, for generations, no
punishment for this crime, and insulation from the civic authorities.
Priest1 is not priest2, nor are their identical performances indicative
of identical motivations. Sorry for the horrific example, but, this
holds throughout all human behavior. (There is a wonderful palestinian
film doing the rounds now called Divine Intervention, in which the
first scene is of a man driving through his neighborhood, waving and
smiling to the pedestrians and others on the street. But he's
murmuring, all the while, 'asshole', 'cuckold', 'son of a whore'....
Very funny scene.)
We cannot know the ideas behind anyone's behavior, not really. This is
a glaring error of all memeinthemind models. Performance does not equal
idea. Intention is not complete in action. Performance is not a pure
analog of idea. Inference needs to happen. The observer does not
receive the meme in some telepathic instant, and that, Richard, if
you're there, is the only way any identical or selfsame or same meme
can get from one mind to another, as it's the only way _anything_ can
get identically from one mind to another, and I refuse to stop to claim
that telepathy is the only _possible_ mechanism for a meme to be the
same from one mind to another, if I stoop to assume there is a meme in
there in the first place, and, as you know, I am not standing behind
_that_ model. Thought transference, which is telepathy, is idea
transference, as ideas are only in minds, being intact and with any
self-same identity at all. (And once one has dismissed the impossible,
then whatever remains, however improbable, should be part of one's
model.) The process of performance, observation, and following
performance is not a process of passage of identical entities to and
from different brains, but a process of motivated bodily action,
sensory perception, and inferred analysis. Meme1 is not meme2, even
_if_ you demand that the meme be in the mind. As Lawry has said,
identical replication of the memeinthemind is not really a useful
mechanism for cultural _evolution_, as identical replication of the
geneinthebody it is not for genetic evolution, either.
Yes, certain cultural environments (venues) will produce performances
that will, perhaps, be ideationally and motivationally and certainly
observationally very similar. When muslims bow to Mecca, en masse, in a
mosque, in unison, one may well make a reasonable assumption that they
are all proclaiming their devotion to Allah. But, how reasonable is
this assumption for a single one of these muslims? After all, bowing
can become a very automatic behavior, and he may be thinking about his
job, or his wife, or that Allah is a jerk for making him do this, or
anything else, which has no ideational or motivational interaction with
his performance at the moment. It is a statistical median analysis,
that the same idea is motivating the behaviors of any group or other
cultural clanning of people.
Performance is not idea. Idea is not performance. (The performance
model goes on to say performance is meme, therefore meme is not idea. I
know this concept is difficult to grasp.)
If you don't perform the first four notes of the Fifth, even the
culture that knows they come from the Fifth (a rather specific venue,
even with Ludwig's household name status), does not know you are
thinking about them, and a culture that knows nothing of the Fifth
won't learn anything about those four notes. And if any culture does
not know you are thinking of something, it can't _do_ anything. And the
last time I looked, evolution was a process of _doing_, not merely a
process of thought. Your performance of these four notes can be used by
culture, but nothing _merely_ in your head can be. And there is no way
to empirically show that even the memory of those notes in one brain
are the selfsame as the memory of those notes in another, and yet, that
is what the memeinthemind models ask us to swallow, hook, line, and
sinker, and not just the memory, but something called a subclass of
memory. What? Where? How? _This_ is an operating and predictive model?!
Yeah, right....
Sorry, my mouth does not stay open that long.
- Wade
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