From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu 29 Sep 2005 - 01:23:48 GMT
--- Vincent Campbell <VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> After three years of having little to no time to do
> anything but teach lots
> of limited ability students, I am finally escaping
> De Montfort University,
> and going up the road to Leicester University, so I
> will reappear on the
> list under a new e-mail in the next few weeks, but
> it'll still be me, and I
> hope I'll have more time to add the occasional
> comment (and perhaps to read
> the growing stacks of memetics books that I've been
> gathering but not had
> time to read over the last couple of years)
> insightful or otherwise (mostly
> the latter if my past form is anything to go by).
>
Well aside from a few posts lately, the list has been
pretty dead...nothing but cricket chirps. I've been
reading stuff that's only marginally related to
memetics lately, mostly about the emergence of
racialist ideas in pre-Nazi Germany (Haeckel,
Chamberlain, and the pro-Aryan Frenchman Gobineau).
Other than that I'm raising a puppy. Pretty smart rat
terrier. Feisty, opinionated, but has learned several
commands really quick. If dogs and wolves have a
semblance of culture or at least some social order
stuff (pack behavor, dominance hierarchies, etc) I
wonder if they pass cultural info between themselves
or learn vicariously by observation. My pooch is
pretty smart, but I guess her social skills are
probably not on par with *most* humans.
I do have ideas of what I want her to do in my noggin
and shape her behavior using reinforcement to get her
behavior to conform to my expectations and thus
establish some neural stuff in her noggin that is
gradual and cumulative. Hopefully in her eyes I'm the
pack leader, but I'm not too sure about that. Trying
not to get too anthropomorphic, I think she's
apparently got stuff in her noggin she wants me to do
for her and uses whining and barking in attempt to get
a response out of me, but I'm not having it. Maybe
she's trying to get my behavior to conform to her
expectations, whatever those are. Maybe she's trying
to, being a *terrier*, establish herself as pack
leader or is just plain stubborn.
Through training dogs can learn a whole bunch of stuff
and can be quite impressive in the way they grasp
commands and develop a repertoire. Not quite memetic,
but there's some cognitive stuff going on and
definitely some operant conditioning, so it is kinda
fascinating. If a dog was augmented in their learning
process by watching another dog perform a trick and
get rewarded, thus a bit of vicarious reinforcement,
wouldn't this be in part a semblance of imitation? I
wonder if dogs tend to learn better in obedience
classes by observing the behavior of other dogs. OTOH
maybe it's the owners who benefit more directly, if
inexperienced, by learning from the people running the
class, which itself might be memetic. Thus maybe the
info that the dogs grasp to obey commands isn't as
memetic as the info passed between their owners or
gained by their owners via other means, like reading
books or watching videos on dog training.
__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
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 : Thu 29 Sep 2005 - 01:41:57 GMT