From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat 09 Apr 2005 - 22:53:42 GMT
--- Chris Taylor <christ@ebi.ac.uk> wrote:
>
[snip]
>
> Something that may throw light on this, and which,
> by luck is
> semi-germane, is the source of novelty; which is
> mostly the
> thought-experiment-remixing of existing ideas' bits,
> plus error (which
> is rarely a good thing). That is very much something
> that only happens
> in minds really. Which as I say throws a small light
> on some of the
> kinds of mechanisms we need to think about.
>
Blackmore is most lucid in her "The Meme's Eye View"
contribution to _Darwinizng Culture_ when she hits on
this "creative recombination" versus "degradation"
thingy. This is sorta turning into a hobby horse for
me now, if you recall my recent exchange with Wilkins.
I'm not super partisan on the imitation warfront, but
I think it was Richerson and Boyd in _Not By Genes
Alone_ (back at library no longer have it handy) that
pointed out that relying too much on imitation could
cause trouble when the environment shifts. If
everybody is imitating too much, who are the
innovators that get the population back on track and
is the innovator gonna like having the imitators
riding coat tails? Maybe some people innovate in some
circumstances and imitate in others so there's a
mutual backscratch dynamic going on.
So called meme fountains need to imitate stuff that's
gonna satisfice on the exaptive landscape or the
population's gonna fall off a cliff into the hated
maladapted vortex land. From where do the good ideas
come that keep them on track? Yet are bad ideas and
blind imitation as bad as one would assume from a
heavily adaptationist POV? People made it through the
Dark Ages I suppose. After several Republican
presidents the US hasn't gone the way of the Roman
Empire yet.
If it's asked how many teeth are in a horse's mouth
who's going to actually bother to look in the horse's
mouth versus the scholastics who consulted Galen
instead (interesting story from Kent and Miller
_Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates_ 8th edition,
p,. 20).
Learning from observing one's environment is
important. Taking the word of others (via imitation)
can get you in trouble. But, as Popper noted, we can't
take the bucket head approach. If one is going to
observe they've got predispositions that will
influence what parts of their surroundings they
concentrate upon and these neo-Kantian schema could be
factory presets (sensu Lorenz) and/or aftermarket
additions (sensu Durkheim).
Regardless of whether your notions of what to expect
derive from innate schemes or memes, it's gonna take
some personal gumption and elbow grease to get
yourself over the hump. You gotta know how to use what
you got. You may have gotten it from imitating others
or from making personal observations, but without
initiative it ain't goona amount to a hill of beans.
Crap, now I'm sounding like a motivational speaker :-(
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