From: Bill Spight (bspight@pacbell.net)
Date: Thu 14 Apr 2005 - 15:09:53 GMT
Dear Chris,
> Culture is not meaningless, it is key (in the wider sense as I have
> tried to define it above).
I. e., the environment.
> What is meaningless is to draw a ring
> around some portion of that which we experience in the world and say
> that _that_ 'is' culture (i.e. to stop at culture as usually
> defined).
>
Well, there is the crisp vs. fuzzy distinction, but that is another
discussion. :-)
> I admit I'm stretching what most people would understand by the term,
> by making it synonmous with the environment in full. I'm not
> tremendously bothered what camp this puts me in tbh.
>
Me, either. But a memes only claim is different from a ~memes only claim.
> (Nearly) all that is in me came in from outside, through my senses.
Well, the inside-outside distinction is fuzzy, too. ;-)
However, we do differ on the tabula rasa question. The more we have
learned about the genetics of human behavior, the less tenable the
tabula rasa hypothesis has become.
I symypathize with your general position, however. If you think about
memes in the brain, they really do not seem to be much different from
anything else we learn. What good does it do to distinguish between
them? And as for the distinction between culture and environment, is a
twig just a twig, or is it also a tool for fishing for termites?
Ciao,
Bill
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