From: Chris Taylor (christ@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Thu 29 Sep 2005 - 09:06:03 GMT
Dog blog :)
*arf* *arf*
Okay then in the spirit of combining the facts that (1) nature
abhors a vacuum and that (2) the emptier the vessel the louder
the sounds that eminate (so logically vacuums are raucous things
-- certainly my Dyson is noisy bugger)...
What about this (semi-related to the expectations point):
If I tell you that something is possible despite having no
knowledge either way, then, having previously abandoned all
attempts, you try with renewed vigour (because you believe that
I 'know' it is possible) to do it, with success, I (memeplex,
obviously) have created a niche that (internal) memes have
'filled'. This is some sort of surface/pheno copying (but _all I
had_ was a surface, cowboy-film-town-style); the existence of
that surface patently doesn't help in achieving the solution as
such; so some sort of selective/recombinatory parameter shift
has occurred to allow you to arrive at a solution that was
previously inaccessible (due presumably to loss-cutting through
some sort of Charnovian Marginal Value Theorem thingy blended
with some Wright-style landscape stuff). So what is changed in
you by my feeding you a 'placebo' solution?
Ahem. Anyway back to work.
Congratulations on moving Vincent.
Cheers, Chris.
Scott Chase wrote:
> --- 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.
>
>
>
> __________________________________
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> ===============================================================
> 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
>
>
-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk http://psidev.sf.net/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ =============================================================== 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
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