From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu 21 Apr 2005 - 02:15:30 GMT
--- Bill Spight <bspight@pacbell.net> wrote:
> 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.)
>
Aunger cites someone named Juan Delius in an endnote.
He calls Delius "a prominent neuroethologist" (page
347). Not familiar with Delius firsthand yet. In this
endnote Aunger also references the Hebbian synapse.
For Calvin's work Aunger says "my schematic approach
to replication shares little with Calvin's
sophisticated neuroscientfic approach".
BTW, as you might have read, I've been reading grandpa
Hebb's work on the cell assembly. Doesn't Calvin
fashion himself after Hebb in a way?
All neuromemetic roads will lead back to the problems
Hebb and Lashley grappled with and I'd hope that
someone who calls themselves a neuromemeticist would
address the work of these pioneers adequately, by some
detailed treatment of the original source material.
Lashley's classic "In search of the engram" can be
found in Orbach's _The Neuropsychological Theories of
Lashley and Hebb_. Lashley talks about multiple
representation towards the end of that article and
says, "Somehow, equivalent traces are established
throughout the functional area." He makes an analogy
to wave action and patterns of interference, but his
notion of reduplication is quite curious as it seems
to imply a redundancy of the engram(s). Aunger should
address stuff like this before he dismisses Lashley's
work with the magical wave of a hand and goes on to
talk about the distributed nature of memory. Lashley
was well aware of localization
problems...ummm...that's what he was addressing in his
work! He even has an article exploring electric field
theories via placing gold foil ribbons upon the cortex
of monkeys. Another article addresses evolution of the
mind, oh my!
And if Lashley asked himself about what reduplication
of the memory trace might entail, could the resultant
equivalent traces be considered "replicated" through
the cortex in a sense? That's what multiple
representation implies to me. Maybe Kate could chime
in since representation is her forte.
Just a mutant thought...
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