From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Mon 24 Apr 2006 - 12:02:59 GMT
At 12:59 PM 4/23/2006 -0700, you wrote:
>Keith,
>
> > At 10:50 PM 4/19/2006 -0700, Dace wrote:
> >
> > >There's no flow of information from one person to the next. You're
>thinking
> > >analogically when you should be thinking digitally. The information is in
> > >my mind. I write something that expresses to my satisfaction what I'm
> > >thinking. You read it. However, you fail to understand my point and
> > >therefore the information in my mind has not been transmitted to yours.
> > >It's not as if by writing it down and having you read it, I've managed to
> > >propell the information two-thirds of the way to your mind. It's all or
> > >nothing. Either the info is there, or in this case, it isn't.
> >
> > If the information is "important" to get it right, then we have error
>correction
> > mechanisms that are very much like those used in electronic
>communications.
> >
> > To drag out baseball (rules) again as an example, the number of strikes
>and
> > balls might be misunderstood when a kid first is learning the rules. The
>other
> > people who do know the proper numbers will correct such misunderstandings.
> > So depending on the block size you want to consider "a meme" then it would
> > be possible for part of it rather than all of it to be conveyed.
> >
> > I.e., if you consider the number of strikes to be a meme, it is either
>going to be
> > correct in the receptor mind or not. If you consider "baseball rules" to
>be the
> > meme, then only rare people have a completely accurate version of the
> > information in the rule book.
>
>As Katie would point out, only the rules, taken as an abstraction outside
>the context of any given game, would constitute an RS. If you learn
>baseball from a rulebook, then the baseball meme has been transferred. But
>if you learn baseball merely from watching and participating in games, then
>it's mere imitation. My point is that there's no more information contained
>in the rulebook than there is in the game itself, that in neither case is
>there information, which exists strictly within the mind as we *interpret*
>the relevant material. However, whether we learn baseball from a rulebook
>or from watching it, the relevant memes are still transferred from mind to
>mind. So I agree with Katie that no information is contained in the act
>itself but disagree that this denies a memetic transfer via imitation of the
>act.
I don't see this as logically consistent.
>Furthermore, and this was my original point, RSs exist only in the
>mind, not physically, whether in the brain or any other object, including
>rulebooks. Once one person's RS has been reproduced in another person's
>mind, the meme has transferred, whether the intermediate material involved
>is a baseball game or a baseball handbook, a piano sonata or a musical
>score.
>
>While it's convenient to refer to a game as concrete and a handbook as
>abstract, in reality both are concrete, material items, and the abstraction
>exists only in our imagination. Indeed, without this tendency to endow the
>concrete with abstraction, games like baseball would lose their magic.
>After all, it's just a ball going over a fence. The home run is not on the
>field but in our own field of dreams.
Nice poetry though.
>For a thing to exist physically is to be presented (ball over fence). For a
>thing to be represented is to exist mentally (home run).
>
>ted
Keith
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