Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id WAA19417 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 14 Sep 2000 22:09:39 +0100 To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 14:06:37 -0700 From: "Scott Chase" <hemidactylus@my-Deja.com> Message-ID: <PEHNGGOPFAGBDAAA@my-deja.com> X-Sent-Mail: off X-Mailer: MailCity Service Subject: RE: solipsistic view on memetics X-Sender-Ip: 209.240.200.113 Organization: My Deja Email (http://www.my-deja.com:80) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Language: en Content-Length: 4072 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
--On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 11:49:43 Vincent Campbell wrote: > >I like this definition of mysticism: the elevation of experience >over > >intellectualization. Says it all, really. > > The problem with this position Robin is that if you do not attempt >to intellectualise experience, in other words critically examine experience, >you end up make false assumptions about cause and effect, and this in turn >can be manipulated by the unscrupulous. > > Examples: > People suffering sleep paralysis interpret it as alien abduction. > People experiencing low frequency noise 'see' ghosts. > People suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy have intense feelings >of religiousity and assume God was talking to them. > People interpret the random neuron firing and endorphins released >near death as proof of heaven's existence. > People watch a medium cold read an audience and interpret it as them >making contact with the dead. > etc. etc. etc. > > It seems to me that there is a lot of harm in mystifying natural >phenomena, deliberately obscuring understanding, because I instinctively ask >why? Why can't a mystic give a straight answer to a straight question? If >the 'secret' knowledge is so wonderful true and enlightening why not share >it with everyone in as clear and simple a manner as possible? > > I've been reading Lucien Levy_Bruhl's _Primitive Mentality_. I think he was an ethnographer. I'm not sure how accurate the information he presents in that book is, but he gives an interesting overview of various ways in which some groups of people, say indigenous to Africa or Australia, interpret data via the filter of mystic collective representations (if I'm using this term correctly). He contrasts this mystic interpretation with that of cause and effect found in say science or some formal philosophy.
Some examples would be that if you or I went to the river and were taken by crocodiles, we would be attributing this to the nature of the animal itself. That's the sort of thing crocs are capable of. The natives Levy-Bruhl concentrated on might attribute this to the crocodile being controlled by some wizard using some sort of magical spell.
Also, instead of the jurisprudence we are used to, Levy-Bruhl concentrates IIRC on trials by ordeal, where instead of looking for the actual culprit of a crime and marshalling evidence for/against them, people are forced to submit to something arbitrary and quite dangerous, like drinking poison. If the poison doesn't kill you or make you ill, you are innocent. I thibnk they might poison your chickens, livestock or children too and survival might be correlated to innocence on your part. They also bury the dead person and sweep the grave site very smooth. Then they follow the direction of tracks made by an insect or other animal to the neighboring tribe where the culpit must reside. IIRC this is because the dead person is using this animal as a means of communicating with his comrades.
There have been mystical collective representations in Europe and the colonies if I'm not mistaken. I doubt people indigenous to non-European places had any monopoly on superstituous practices and ironically the missionaries tried to replace the superstitious beliefs of the "savages" with that of European Christianity.
I'm probably not capturing Levy-Bruhl's book adequately or his notion of collective representations. It sounds like, from what I've commprehended, that collective representations have some conceptual overlap with memes, but this is a tentative assumption. Levy-Bruhl has another book _How Natives Think_ where he might provide the necessary elaborations on conceptual tools such as collective representaions and mystic participation. I'm waiting for this book to become available at my library.
Before I have relied on Jung's views on these terms, so I'm also trying to compare/contrast Levy-Bruhl and Jung.
Scott
--== Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ ==-- Before you buy.
=============================================================== 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 archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Sep 14 2000 - 22:11:13 BST