From: Chris Taylor (chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Wed 18 Jan 2006 - 10:16:25 GMT
Actually I think that early indoctrination would (from the
collected evidence presented here certainly, cf. Scott, myself
and Kate) be the best way to prevent them looking to the church
in later life :)
Hippies breed lawyers, lawyers breed hippies.
Now there's another one that could be programmed into a meme
machine: Why is it that we absorb memes willy-nilly up to a
point without question, then (funnily enough around early
puberty which is what makes me think this is a _biological_
control of a meme farm -- the kind of 'big lever' thing that
genes can actually manage) we suddenly reject a lot of stuff and
start to 'think' (i.e. recombine memes, actively search for new
memes to fill niches etc.)? We also become proprely empathic
around that time (at least on average), which suggests more
sophisticated internal ~memetic structures (cf. previous posts
of mine on autism -- _not_ using the machinery to support the
modelling of people (making true empathy impossible) frees up an
enormous amount of compute power making them appear to excel in
other ways).
I'd argue that in early puberty, the hormonal changes that cause
hair to sprout etc. also turn what was a 'low-connectivity'
environment where memes just sit around together in the mind
more or less unmolested (i.e. contradictions unresolved) into a
'high-connectivity' situation where memes can suddenly
_severely_ impact each other; we attempt to build proper
memeplexes resulting in niche competition, rejection, active
search for new memes to fill gaps etc. Teen 'crazes' start
around here.
Note that I don't want to tie this to a particular age but it is
somewhere from 7 to 14.
This is why I want this to be a proper science: Clearly it is
selected-for to be able to hold memes, clearly it is
selected-for to be able to allow those memes to interact,
compete and recombine (giving us our telencephalic powers to
model and predict, and to deal with the novel by analogy). What
we have is a system that just accumulates and accumulates up to
a point; then when biology assumes that on average we'd have a
good old sack of the things (and historically when we would have
reached proto-adulthood, cue Keith) the mode of operation of the
environment our brain provides for these things to live in
_radically_ changes.
There is a similar biological/behavioural switch, that operates
much earlier; at about age two suddenly things start to taste
nasty whereas previously babies would eat almost anything
(brussel sprouts!); this is because biology assumes that the kid
will suddenly be more mobile and able to stuff a much wider
range of dodgy stuff into its mouth without parental
intervention, with the attendent increased risk of poisoning...
We have evolved to let memes run our lives, our genes trust them
to keep them in the gene pool. It is so much more than backwards
baseball caps and ad jingles. This is us -- we are made of memes
-- the life of the mind _is_ the mind and the brain is built to
house and control their environment, just like so many
macro-organisms house and manage microbial symbionts (but who
has the whip hand I wonder).
Cheers, Chris.
Price, Ilfryn wrote:
> I hope your advice includes not force feeding the kids religion before the age of say 6 so that they are free to make their own
> choices later rather than programmed.
>
> If
>
>
>>Oh, suspicious one. Book two is "Gifted Children: A Guide for Parents
>
> and Professionals" (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, April 2006). And thank
> you. I've been wondering how with a clear conscience I could get a plug
> in on such a completely irrelevant list.
>
> Ok, maybe not a *totally* clear conscience.
>
> Kate>
>
> ===============================================================
> 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 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed 18 Jan 2006 - 10:37:33 GMT