From: Chris Taylor (christ@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Sun 24 Apr 2005 - 22:44:24 GMT
Hi.
This recent talk is all couched in terms which only serve to highlight
the crippling limitations of thinking in terms of dinner party memes.
The instruction in jazz allows you to construct/modify something
internally based on much finer-grained structures that respond in a
mechanism outlined below (but I'd rather not build that explanation
further yet).
Ted is also right about the dangers of reductio(nism) ad absurdum; but
again we don't need to claim that everything came in from without (I'd
reserve the right to have evolution maintain some useful midbrain programs).
The basic thing is that there is a super set of origins of these
persistent patterns that includes mimesis, but also allows for other
origins -- modelling the world (everything beyond the mind and the mind
itself even) produces things that are not so different; consider the
ease with which we ascribe totally inappropriate characteristics (like
personality) to inanimate objects -- no real difference between people
and cars or the stock market. This stuff is all fluid.
Incidentally the 'all-memes, all the time' view affords many benefits
for free, like an easy access to memory sans 'file allocation table'
(and this is almost an analogue of Ted's morhpo larks): Resonance is
marvellous; put a series of tuning forks in a room, fill it with a
particular frequency and watch one of them get picked out. Put me in a
scenario and watch bits of my mind light up. And by extension, put me in
a totally alien situation (maybe flick through 'Of Man and Manta' for
some fairly creative weirdness) and then picture the rabbit in
headlights; does not compute = no relevant experience = no resonance
with existing stuff and linked behaviours = no behaviour. An engineered
mind would have a fight or flight default surely? This also allows for
the application of only loosely-relevant (sub/meta-)experience to novel
situations.
Another thing here is the way our minds decide on what to store. It
seems to me that sometimes the 'record button' gets pressed at entirely
arbitrary times (I have some really goddamn vivid memories of some
really banal stuff, and I kind of remember a feeling that I was writing
to tape at the time). I think that we keep a buffer (maybe between two
and ten minutes or more? is there any relevant work here? CA/hippocampal
stuff?) that gets written to tape either (a) randomly in 'misfires' or
(b) [the 'purpose'] to record that which immediately preceded something
big, both so that the resonance of future and past expreience allows us
to predict, and so that we can dream-analyse our experience (with
hindsight, the leopard shit near the tree should have given a clue that
there was a leopard in it about to jump on our heads).
I don't think we seek rules but we do 'average' experiences (in an
extension of the resonance idea; literally identify like things [at all
granularities] and summate). Funny how studies on attractiveness find
that the average face is the nicest (all subjective but then what isn't
-- find me an objective metric and btw symmetry sucks as a meaure
whatever rape-fan-randy says).
All memes (with a little extra from our ancient past that has remained
useful, like face recognotion) explains _lots_ for not much.
Cheers, 'Chris' ;)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chris Taylor (christ@ebi.ac.uk)
HUPO PSI: GPS -- psidev.sf.net
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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