From: Chris Taylor (chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Sat 04 Feb 2006 - 00:43:11 GMT
Well I hate to bang on about it but the memes-only Dennettite
ecology of the mind thing pertains. In that view your mind is an
ecology and as with the real world those ecologies are in most
cases resilient to major structural change in many senses,
through the coadaptation of the species within them.
New ideas come in, find an ecology completely incompatible with
them and therefore find no succour. They cannot find a niche,
pure and simple and either hang about like a spectre or
disappear completely. (this may involve some form of mimicry [I
use the term loosely] and masking to achieve denial -- I think
once a meme gets past the skull it cannot not have some sort of
effect however minor and so always leaves a trace of itself
although that echo of a pattern may get 'absorbed' into the
general hubbub.
Then you have to think how 'we' rationalise that activity. We
are arch rationalisers; we strain to make dreams linear and
meaningful. How would we rationlise this denial behaviour (a
simple process of rejection on the ~meme level with little that
is complex) perhaps by actually (bear with me here) selecting
for masking in some sense.
Complete tangent: I think part of the role of consciousness is
to accentuate and focus the process of quasi natural selection
and evolution going on in your head as a matter of course, by
making some ~memes artificially fit, in part in response to
sensory stimuli, thereby making a spotlight on one set of ideas
and producing a linear stream of consciousness; almost like the
original homunculusy little guy in your head but not anywhere
near that really, just a point of focus that is probably driven
by sense and general fitness, where that would maybe be an
analogue of the 'connectedness' as the origin to us 'having'
ideas (in the sense of increased relevance to or resonance with
other ~memes, or sense stimuli, maybe as a result of changing
internal [constant process of rearrangement and change] or
external circumstances), again encoded in this neural pattern
form whatever the hell it is). Anyway.
In some cases invaders do run rampant; there are fragile
ecologies and dysfunctional ones -- consider crop monoculture
and invading pests, or less severe, the impact _some_ (a small
minority) have as 'alien' invaders (knotweed -- no proper
interactors in the food web but an ability to make a living in
the foreign environment -- rampant, mammals in Australasia blah
blah).
But even where invaders do do well, the background ecology
rarely shifts much. You have to do a lot to really trouble such
a mature structure. Like the many-layered structures of your
identity.
Another linked phenomenon is the ability of arbitrarily large or
small stimuli to produce what I'd guess would be some sort of
power law distributed spectrum of seismic shocks to presonality
from unnoticeable to devastating, and the similar distribution
of the resiliency of people's personality (i.e. the strength of
the internal structure) to a large shock. This kind of
relfection of other systems like this (I'm thinking rates of
extinction basically) when you consider that we're also facing
hoardes of tiny interacting (mental) beasties shouts at me that
this is just the way nature makes things. Gene expression and
cell biology are the same. In yeast a lot of the time when you
knock out a key gene you find that another one springs into life
to compensate; lots of little modular interactors making a
complex system with redundancy of function. My fundamental
argument is that there is nothing new under the sun (1) and that
we need to think hard about where we come from all the way back
to being a microbe with one end slightly more sensitive to light
than the other.
Hmm. That grew...
Night, Chris.
Kate Distin wrote:
> Keith Henson wrote:
>
>> At 10:53 PM 1/28/2006 -0500, I wrote:
>>
>> > Intercommunicating human minds are the environment for memes.
>>
>> On another list (Shock Level 4) a participant posted a pointer that
>> lead here:
>>
>> http://www.rxpgnews.com/specialtopics/article_3287.shtml
>>
>> This study--about how human minds work--has direct application to
>> memetics. I have made an EP based case in my paper on EP war and
>> memes that the ability to reason is suppressed in people operating in
>> "war mode," and the gain of xenophobic memes is turned up.
>>
>> According to what these researchers found, it looks like the process
>> is much more general, or perhaps "politics is just a continuation of
>> war by other means." :-) I love the image of twirling the cognitive
>> kaleidoscope.
>>
>> Keith Henson
>>
>>
>
> This stuff is fascinating. Its emphasis seems to be on the fact that
> partisans will find a way to maintain their affiliation in the teeth of
> negative evidence - which of course we all do, all the time, with people
> we love, and that's no bad thing (e.g. maintaining your affection even
> when its object is going through a growly or bitchy time for whatever
> reason). But it says a lot about the pointlessness of arguments between
> people of seriously entrenched views, in whatever field. Let's not get
> dragged into another debate about religion - people can become attached
> to philosophical theories with the same degree of passion as others do
> to religions or political parties - but whatever the subject it does
> seem that there's a degree of attachment to a viewpoint, beyond which it
> is impossible to hear what the other side is saying. I wonder what
> memes have to do to become so securely entrenched and get this level of
> mental/emotional protection?
>
> Kate
>
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>
-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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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