From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat 16 Apr 2005 - 20:49:45 GMT
I'm wondering what contrasts can be drawn being the
meme machinist view of self identity and that of the
evolutionary Jungians. I've been skimming eminent
evolutionary Jungian scholar Anthony Stevens section
on the Self archetype found in his book _Archetype
Revisited: an Updated Natural History of the Self_.
There are some juicy tidbits to be found that invite
comparison to the grinding we hear coming from
Blackmore's meme machine shop. For instance Stevens
writes (page 172-3, papercopy):
[AS]"The ego, having established a sense of unity of
body and mind, and a sense of continuity in time, is
then cast in the role of executant of the archetypal
blueprint for the whole life-cycle which is
sytematically encoded within the Self. This function
the ego proceeds to perform in the illusion that it is
a free agent, the master of its fate, the captain of
its soul." [AS]
Note the point taken about illusory free agency. Is
this analogous to the "benign user illusion" that
Dennett and Blackmore take off on as a tangent?
Instead of Blackmore's memeplexical view we have
Stevens championing the Jungian archetype of the Self
in the above quote. Stevens loves Jung and we get this
bit of hero-worship (yet let us remember that the Hero
too is an archetypal attractor):
[AS] "What Jung proposed was nothing short of
psychology's Copernican revolution: instead of
personality centered on the ego, he maintained that
the ego is a satellite of the Self." [AS]
Putting aside Stevens looking at Jung on a pedestal
(since meme enthusiasts may be tempted to do the same
for Dawkins and Dennett and evolutionists likewise for
Darwin), this does set the stage for a possible
contrast with Blackmore's treatment of the "selfplex".
Stevens is smitten with ethology, sociobiology and the
more recent emergence of ev psych, having contrubted
to a book several years ago that also had a
contribution by David Buss _Evolution of the Psyche_.
He has a chapter called "Jung and the ethologists"
where he compares Jung and Lorenz. Prominent Jungian
scholar Sonu Shamdasani incorporates what Lorenz had
said of Jung's work in the Russian Manucript I
mentioned recently in his recent tour de force _Jung
and the Making of Modern Psychology_.
I think, in some ways, comparing Blackmore's views to
those of evolutionary Jungians like Stevens would be
adderessing the crux of the narure versus nurture
debate and the differences between memetics and
evolutionary psychology, though neither would be too
smitten with much of Jung's work, except to see how he
had influenced parapsychology. Given that Blackmore
got her start studying parapsychology there could be
what Jungians like to refer to as "meaningful
coincidences".
There was a section in Dawkins's _Unweaving the
Rainbow_ that when I read it several years ago I could
help thinking of the so-called "primordial image" that
Jung had borrowed conceptually from eminent Swiss
historian Jacob Burckhardt (see Shamdasani for a
superb treatment of this topic). Dawkins even
implicitly cites Jung in the following passage from
the chapter "Reweaving the world" (page 266,
papercopy): "In this case, following the logic of the
previous chapter, we should say that the store
cupboard in the brain contains images from the
ancestral past of the species. We could call it a
collective unconscious, if the phrase had not become
tarnished by association." He's so close to Semon's
mneme here that his ears should have been burning. He
probably doesn't realize he's a hop, skip and jump
from Goethe via Jung's usage of Burckhardt on the
"primordial image" concept. See Shamdasani's book for
support of both contentions.
Carry on...
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
===============================================================
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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat 16 Apr 2005 - 21:07:20 GMT