From: Bill Spight (bspight@pacbell.net)
Date: Thu 21 Apr 2005 - 00:18:44 GMT
Dear Bill,
> Aunger's first half-dozon or so chapters are pretty good. But his neural
> memetics is gibberish. It's embarrassing to read it.
>
One of the joys of memetics is its interdisciplinary character. It
really lies at the intersection of quite a number of fields. :-) But
that is also a source of difficulty.
One thing that attracted me to Aunger is the fact that he is an
anthropologist. Since anthropologists study culture, I looked forward to
his take on memetics. But as a psychology grad student, I have studied
enough neuroscience to cringe at his ideas about neural memetics. (As I
have mentioned before, they are reminiscent of Calvin's speculations
about replicating patterns of activation in the cerebral cortex, but
Calvin is a neurobiologist. He makes sense.)
I was also disappointed by Blackmore. In "The Selfish Gene" Dawkins
talks about memes replicating by "a process which, in the broad sense,
can be called imitation." Now, that statement cries out for more
detailed explication and analysis based upon social learning theory. But
Blackmore takes off her psychologist hat for a second and says, "Hey,
it's imitation."
<sigh>
Bill
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