From: Dace (edace@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue 09 May 2006 - 21:19:45 GMT
Kate writes:
> >> I'm not convinced that baseball rules do constitute an RS.
> >>
> >
> > Nor am I claiming they do. The RS in question is natural language.
It's
> > via language that the rules of baseball are expressed. I agree with
your
> > thesis, as expressed in *The Selfish Meme* (Distin, CUP, 2005) that
memes
> > exist only in the context of an RS. But the fundamental RS is not
language
> > or musical or mathematical notation, etc., but conceptual thought
itself.
> >
> I don't think that there is a 'fundamental' RS. I think that all of
> them have equal status (although natural languages are easily the most
> flexible).
>
> > It's because we share a conceptual RS
>
> Presumably you mean some sort of Fodorian 'mentalese'? I'm not
> convinced by Fodor on this one (or perhaps haven't read enough of him,
> recently enough, to have been convinced yet).
As I argued vociferously in my philosophy of mind class in college, if the
brain had its own language, then we would need a translator in order to
carry out our thoughts. Mentalese follows from the notion that the brain
contains information that represents the world and ideas. Surely the brain
doesn't encode its information in English. Hence the need for a translator
between brain and consciousness.
This is the sort of absurdity that pops up when thought is located in the
brain, as if we inhabit the folds of the cerebrum rather than the outer
locales of our actual lives. The brain doesn't think about the world but
merely enables us to think about it. In the course of reflecting on the
world of people, places and things, we develop a means of conceptualizing
this material, as reflected in our natural languages. The RS of language
merely expresses the internal RS of conceptual thought. As Chomsky shows,
this universal RS includes complex grammar.
> > that the baseball meme can be imparted
> > by watching baseball games and reflecting on what we're seeing rather
than
> > consulting a rulebook that imparts the meme on the basis of the RS of
> > natural language.
>
> When we watch games and infer the rules by reflecting on what we're
> seeing, I don't think that the baseball meme *is* being imparted.
> Rather than being replicated, we're re-inventing it for ourselves, the
> basis of knowledge that we bring to the situation.
It's precisely by reconstructing the rules of baseball that the individual
enables the baseball meme to be replicated.
> > So long as musician and listener share roughly the same
> > aesthetic RS, the meme for a tune can can come across just as easily by
> > hearing it as reading a score.
>
> Again - I think that the tune itself can come across either way, but the
> information underlying it (was that note a B flat or an A sharp? Is the
> music written in 3/4 time or 6/8 time? etc.) does not come across unless
> you have the music in front of you.
When you listen to music, the meme that comes across carries the tune. When
you read the score, the meme that comes across carries abstract information
enabling easy reproduction of the tune. It's just a difference in the type
of meme that comes across. Either way, the meme is reconstructed on the
basis of an RS, one of them aesthetic, the other conceptual.
> You can reconstruct it for yourself
> by listening, but that isn't the same thing as replication.
Where the meme is the tune, it's the other way round. When you read the
score, you must reconstruct it. When you hear it played, it simply
replicates in your mind.
> > Physics is about
> > matter and energy. When you claim that the words exist on the page,
you're
> > saying these are elements of the physical world, that physics includes
> > "word" and "representation" as quantifiable concepts. Certainly, this
is
> > not any kind of physics that Galileo, Newton or Einstein would have
> > recognized.
>
> Physics is one level of description for any natural phenomenon. There
> are others, equally valid and in some contexts more useful: e.g.
> biology, chemistry, psychology. Physics is about not only matter and
> energy, but also the arrangements of matter and energy, interactions
> between them, etc.
All the arrangements of matter in the world will never yield representation.
However you stack the atoms, A still equals A, not B.
> > Rather than
> > literally conveying the information, the arrangement of ink merely
> > facilitates its reproduction from one mind to another. At no point is
the
> > information physical. At no point does it materialize in the form of an
> > artifact, such as a book of rules or a musical score, in its passage
from
> > mind to mind. Yet the information still gets across.
>
> Ok - I think that here you've crystallized our fundamental difference of
> opinion. I accept that genuine replication happens in culture, and you
> (in common with many others, it must be said) do not.
I see reconstruction as a genuine, if inexact, form of replication. Only in
physics does replication imply exactitude. Vagueness is an essential
characteristic of mentality and therefore unavoidable in memetic
transmission.
> I agree with your interpretation (below) of what's going on when
> watching a game or listening to a piece of music; but I think that there
> is something fundamentally different going on when we get our cultural
> information via RSs. I think that then there is genuine replication
> going on.
The problem with this view is that the meme for a piece of music comes
across when reading the score but not when listening to it played. It's
just not convincing. Clearly, a theory of memetics should explain how the
meme gets across either way. So too, a theory of memetics that replaces
consciousness with a memeplex is unconvincing. After all, consciousness is
self-evident. A theory of memetics that finds memes in the minds of birds
is also unconvincing, as it attempts to explain phenomena that can already
be handled from a strictly biological standpoint. If memetics is redundant
when it comes to birds, why not humans as well? By emphasizing the RS, you
establish both a role for reflective consciousness, from which RSs emerge,
and a boundary between memetics and biology. For this reason, The Selfish
Meme is essential reading, particularly for those who've been led astray by
Dennett and Blackmore.
I think you've taken two steps forward, but in materializing the RS, you've
taken one step back. Such is life!
ted
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