From: Chris Taylor (chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Tue 17 Jan 2006 - 10:45:21 GMT
How can you know that the guidance comes from without?
I actually think that there is a lot more to be had from
memetics; at the moment we have a theory of dolphins that says
that they are things that you see popping out of the water
occasionally (which is true) but what about what is going on
beneath the surface? 'Median memetics' seems to eschew (twice in
two days hurrah) consideration of what we are made of (mostly)
preferring to defer to the psycho black box model brigade but
what if the migrant memes we see flying around are just the
dolphins out of the water and a wholehelluvalot more is going on
within brains? Minds are made of (~)memes surely? What else
would evolution bother to do? Make a nice meadow for them then
go for a beer basically not make a bloody expert system (and how
to encode that for development in a way that could
track/generate change so fast, when your liver gets more genes
than your brain?).
I've seen models that show that this 'make a generic
meme-friendly brain and go to the pub' model works fine even if
half or more of the ideas floating around are bad; on average
the meme pool evolves to favour the survival of the vehicles
(environmental policy emerges); even for suicide bombers
(heavily-extended kin selection).
Anyway, back to the point: If a person is a mighty memeplex,
then split personality could be multiple equivalent memeplexes
fighting the linearising machinery of consciousness. But
inbetween are most of us to a greater or lesser extent 'hearing'
other thoughts coming from outside the main stream of
consciousness; ideas bump up against each other all the time,
blending, swapping, reacting to each other (dreams are crucial
here for an intensive burst of this shake and bake activity).
This is why we are so totally freaked by the idea of a shared
dream, and so excited by the idea of thinking the 'same' (not!)
thought as someone else.
But is the guidance you in some sense receive maybe this? Not
that that is distinguishable from a transmitted source. A
personal god could be a licensed 'slave' conciousness?
Omg I need to do some work. I still have another post sat
waiting to go too...
Maybe I should have been a blogger instead. (nah...)
Cheers, Chris.
Kate Distin wrote:
> Derek Gatherer wrote:
>
>> At 08:49 17/01/2006, Kate wrote:
>>
>>> And if by "supernatural forces" you mean God, then yes of course I
>>> believe that He still acts in the world today. That kind of goes
>>> with the Christian thing .
>>
>>
>>
>> But that "action" could be, as Dostoyevsky suggests in Karamazov,
>> along the lines of the idea of God inspiring people to change their
>> lives. That wouldn't be, I shouldn't think, supernatural in any way
>> (although psychologically interesting).
>
>
> Ok - sorry - you're distinguishing between miracles and daily
> guidance/inspiration. But I still think that the daily guidance bit is
> pretty supernatural, if it involves God interacting with human beings.
> And I do also believe in present-day miracles.
>
>>
>> Do you know Don Cupitt? I never met him, but he was all the rage
>> during my time in Cambridge. Is he still Dean of Queen's? My
>> impression of the "Anglican Buddhism" thing was that it was possible
>> to have a non-supernatural religion.
>>
>
> I don't really know anything about him.
>
> Kate
>
> ===============================================================
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> 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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