RE: Silent memes

From: Scott Chase (ecphoric@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon 07 Jul 2003 - 21:31:20 GMT

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    >From: "Richard Brodie" <richard@brodietech.com>
    >Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    >To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
    >Subject: RE: Silent memes
    >Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 07:27:44 -0700
    >
    >Children and immigrants still possess language skills. I would love to see
    >the degree of correlation between possession of language skills and
    >transmission quality of "silent memes." It might be a difficult experiment
    >to set up though.
    >
    >As a kid I had the "Paper Airplane Book," a book of printed diagrams and
    >instructions for making a variety of airplanes.
    >
    >
    As a kid I received a model airplane kit for a present. The problem was that the instructions for building the model were printed in Japanese. Needless to say I hadn't a clue how to build the plane and the instructions were of little assistance.

    OTOH if a person who could only speak Japanese were to show me step by step how to build the plane just by performing the operations involved, I might have stood a better chance of building the model airplane in future attempts, even if the Japanese person's instruction involved non-verbal means.

    How I responded to the nonverbal cues may have differed from the instructor's original intent and my ideas related to putting the plane together may have differed as neurally stored, for instance my internal self-talk would be in English and theirs in Japanese and my relevant assocations dependent on my own personal history of model building.

    Two different neural encodings could bring about similar results, given that I was able to put the model together nearly identically to the instructor.

    The engrams (J-mnemons in the intructor's head and E-mnemons in mine) would not be "selfsame" on many levels, yet their behavioral outcomes could be, given that one could take a look at the J-plane and the E-plane and not see significant differences.

    This may lend some credence to Wade's "memesinmotion" model in that things are "selfsame" at the performance level, yet different at the mental level.

    OTOH, there could be counterinstances where the same mnemon in an actors head could lead to significantly different behavioral outcomes depending on the context within which the memory is elicited (ecphorized).

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