From: Bill Spight (bspight@pacbell.net)
Date: Mon 25 Apr 2005 - 17:36:39 GMT
Dear Kate,
> So (continuing from my answer above) animals obviously are able to
> copy each other's behaviour - to engage in a some kind of
> transmission of cultural information - but what I mean by "primitive
> replicators" is that they are limited to exchanging simple,
> context-bound representations and do not have access to the abstract
> complexities that abound in human culture as a result of our
> meta-representational abilities.
Two things. First, and most important, why should memes be context free?
Second, human knowledge and cognition is not as context free as it may
appear. For instance, the Wason task defeats most subjects in its formal
"context free" form, using cards with letters and numbers on them, but
is easy in its detect social cheating form, even when the kind of social
cheating is unfamiliar. In Piagetian terms, almost everybody masters
concrete operations, but not everybody masters formal operations. In
fact, most people seem to have trouble with them.
Best,
Bill
===============================================================
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 : Mon 25 Apr 2005 - 18:29:50 GMT