From: Chris Taylor (chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Tue 16 May 2006 - 15:04:19 GMT
Yeah -- piggybacking / gaining kudos by association is a biggie...
There's definitely some maths to be had there about trade-offs.
Parent: "If [insert name of childhood friend] jumped off a cliff
would you do that too!?"
Child (silently): "Yes if it meant I was as cool as him, er hang
on actually..."
Advertiser: "This guy bought a car and before you know it models
were throwing themselves at him..."
Chris Lofting wrote:
> Mimicry is built-in to the neurology that we share with other life forms,
> but a major difference between us and our monkey cousins is they cannot
> detect MIME - we can where that detection reflects the development of our
> imagination from our complex neurology.
>
> Thus there is a scale of development of 'mirror neurons' that ultimately
> transcend all life forms bar us.
>
> That takes us into the IMAGINATION of meaning; we see more than is there in
> the first place.
>
> The set of basic behaviours such as mimicry is 'built in' to our general
> methodology of meaning derivation/communication. What makes a difference is
> the development of sense of self where that development follows on from
> birth and is detectable through identification of the development of
> emotions that need a sense of self to be 'meaningful'.
>
> That sense of self become our 'singular', unique, nature whose properties
> and methods are derived form local social dynamics operating WITHIN the
> genetic expressions of our particular/general species-nature.
>
> Part of that social dynamic will be the use of imagination and so pretence
> and include 'local' universals ('memes') that can seed our behaviours and so
> force tighter integration with the local context.
>
> At the level of the neurology, instincts/habits are encoded into the input
> areas of our neurology and so conserve energy by allowing context to 'push'
> us. At the level of cognition/psychology local 'instincts/habits' can do the
> same thing except that a change in context can replace these locals with
> alternatives for a different context.
>
> Included in the social will be mimicry of actions that are seen to be
> 'beneficial' but there in no understanding of the content/intent - just the
> understanding of 'wave hands like this and that bus stops and I can get on'.
> Finer details then focus on the requirement to signal the driver if you want
> to stop the bus but that level of detail can come later (or even not at all!
> "I don't know man, I just wave my hands and it like stops!")
>
> The GENERAL 'meme' of 'reflection', of 'mirroring', is exploited at the
> particular level such as in show business where it covers vanity, narcissism
> etc It covers the actions of some 'star' or 'king' where they pick their
> nose in some unusual way and others around them copy it anticipating that it
> is in some way 'special' where as the truth of the matter the king's arm
> went to sleep and so the action to suddenly pick his nose was 'extreme'! -
> Due to his position, no one dare question the reason, they assume it is of
> special purpose and so copy it.
>
> These GENERAL programs are products of the methodology in deriving meaning
> and included in that methodology are artefacts that encode a sense of
> 'purpose'.
>
> Chris.
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk [mailto:fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk] On Behalf
>> Of Robin Faichney
>> Sent: Tuesday, 16 May 2006 11:09 PM
>> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>> Subject: Re: RS
>>
>> Tuesday, May 16, 2006, 10:13:35 AM, Kate wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> So long as the letters exist on a page or screen, and there are people who
>> can understand them, why doesn't it make sense to say that these letters
>> represent information? Of course they lose that meaning when there are no
>> human minds to interact with them, but that doesn't mean that they are
>> 'meaningless' in the sense that an undiscovered boulder is meaningless.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> What's the difference between letters on a page where there are no minds
>> whatsoever, and an undiscovered boulder?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I think that it is very easy to imitate a tune, without any conceptual
>> apparatus. Just as it is easy for children to imitate our hand movements
>> or facial gestures. But I'd agree that there are different levels of
>> imitation. At one level we just imitate the details, without any proper
>> understanding of what's going on, and at another level we imitate the
>> functional structure of the behaviour, and may even vary the intermediate
>> details. And, as you say, it's the addition of this context, this
>> understanding (metarepresenting what's going on: seeing it *as* something
>> that has a context) which lifts things to the memetic level.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Just imitating the details, without any proper understanding, will often
>> get the job done, and isn't that what matters? A proto-human sees another
>> doing something and later does something very similar, with the same
>> result. It was learned not by individual trial-and-error, but by
>> imitation. A way of making pots, for instance. Why shouldn't that count as
>> a meme?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Robin mailto:robin@mmmi.org
>>
>> ===================== 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
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