Re: RS

From: Kenneth Van Oost (kennethvanoost@belgacom.net)
Date: Thu 18 May 2006 - 20:09:27 GMT

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      Hi all,

      Becoming somewhat of a lurker these days, but you all got my attention...

      I like to add the following and will give you something to think about,

      Ardinoccg an ivtignesaoitn at an Eclisgnh usitervniy it dneos' t mttear in wcihh
      sgneuecne the lttrees of a wrod are pclead; the olny tnihg taht cnutos is taht
      the frsit and the lsat are at the rghit sopt.
      The rset of the ltteres may be pcaled in any atrabriry oderr and we wlil sltil be
      albe to raed the txet.
      Taht is due to the fcat taht we dno' t raed ecah lttreer speatere but the wrod
      as a wohle.

      Rgraeds Kntneeh

      ----- Original Message -----
      From: Robin Faichney
      To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
      Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 3:08 PM
      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

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