From: Van oost Kenneth (kennethvanoost@belgacom.net)
Date: Thu 26 Feb 2004 - 20:24:10 GMT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Chase" <ecphoric@hotmail.com>
> My "dialogue" with sociology is currently limited to a couple crusty
oldies
> who probably aren't all that relevant nowadays, especially Lucien
> Levy-Bruhl. His _How Natives Think_ might be a bit archaic (and
> ethnocentric) by today's standards. He does start off, though, by saying
> (page 13) that collective representations (my current idee fixe) are
"common
> to the members of a given social group" and "transmitted from one
generation
> to another".............[ and thus NOT for the whole of the population as
such]
My adding ( Kenneth)
Scott,
Because, the above would appear as one and each social class/ cultural group
has its own peculiar/ corporate ' world view ', accordingly represented by
' greeded ' upon collective representations_ and moreover, their existence
would directly be expressed and by their own living conditions and by the
material conditions associated with the conceptual view of their ' world '.
That does indeed mean that each and every (sub)- class/ cultural group has
its own memetic determinants. In regard, what thus is seen as group- evolu-
tion [ and thus what is being ' natural ' selected] is just an imprint of
one
group 's dominance, imposing it view on the whole of social/ cultural evolu-
tion. That simplifies much the concept of which evolution is being measured,
but it is not what ' evolves '.
Memetic evolution expresses less the way any class/ group lives its con-
ditions of existence [ it does as a sub- class] but is more a way of showing
how those live in relation to the lived experience of other classes/ groups.
Memetic evolution as such within the group/ class itself runs against its
own
back, because as in their minds as in their lives they don 't get beyond the
limits of their own group/ class.
This is in fact a vicious circle, ' cause certain barriers in society as in
the
mind baffle and twart transformation/ new ideas. The many in memetics,
[ where they are caught with I don 't care] need to think ' memetically ',
and not in analogy with...., or being tempted to elevate their own private
expertise....We need, for starters, our own angle of incidence [ computer,
sociobiology, psychology,...] and from there working our way thru ' the
field.
Kenneth
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