From: Richard Brodie (richard@brodietech.com)
Date: Tue 08 Jul 2003 - 00:23:08 GMT
The fact that two different computer programs can print "hello world" does
not lend credence to the notion that the printing caused the program rather
than the other way around.
-----Original Message-----
From: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk [mailto:fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk]On Behalf
Of Scott Chase
Sent: Monday, July 7, 2003 2:31 PM
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: RE: Silent memes
>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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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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