Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id BAA01785 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sat, 7 Oct 2000 01:18:43 +0100 Message-Id: <200010070015.UAA16425@mail2.lig.bellsouth.net> From: "Joe E. Dees" <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 19:20:47 -0500 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Purported mystical "knowledge" In-reply-to: <003001c02f25$9416ee00$25d910ac@oemcomputer> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.01b) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Date sent: Fri, 06 Oct 2000 12:31:46 +1300
From: Brent Silby <phil066@it.canterbury.ac.nz>
Subject: Re: Purported mystical "knowledge"
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Send reply to: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> (I sent this 4 hours ago but it didn't seem to make it through.)
> Joe,
> I think you are using a different definition of memes than the standard one that I have come to know (via Dawkins and Dennett). As far as I know, memes are simply self copying instructions that give rise to behavior that is not a part of a creatures innate behavioral repertoire. There does
not need to be any understanding. Consider the "waving goodbye to someone" meme. These are memes that are assimilated at a very young age (even before language). At such a young age there is no meaning behind the immitation of the action, but it is a meme nonetheless.
>
Of course it is not verbally linguistic, but it IS meaningful. Meaning
can be somatically expressed at a pretty early age. It is, in fact,
the indicative gesture, one of the first non-instinctual methods of
communication. When dogs bark at someone, they attract the
other's attention to themselves, but this is as a result of them
responding to a stimulus (the other) in a species-specific way, and
is only useful to the degree that it behooves them that their barking
doghood is noticed, which is why the behavior evolved. Different
cultures have different ways of waving that are learned, not innate,
and were at some time in the past created. They are also
meaningful, in the sense that the wave is meant to communicate
the hello or goodbye message to the other. Pointing is another
primitive meaningful gesture; it is done by X to direct Y's attention
to Z. Pointing probably evolved as an attempt to touch that which
was too far away to be touched; you point to what you would show
someone if it were in hand. The receiver, seeing that the hand is
empty but pointing, visually follows the direction in which the finger
is pointing.
>
> You wrote :"We are memetic beings precisely because
> we can transcend our genetically programmed species-specific
> instincts; otherwise, behavior could not change, and memes could
> not be propagated."
>
> I agree but I do not think this entails "understanding" or "meaning" or "consciousness" of the memes. It is true that the brain is flexible and can support new behavior, but it does not follow that the new behavior has to be "understood".
>
Some behavior is understood better than other behavior, but if a
significant (pun intended) portion of behavior was not understood to
a meaningful (pun intended) degree, the the distinction between
understood and not understood could not be drawn, and neither
could the distinction between meaningful and meaningless. Some
memes are subliminal, but the majority are not, because only
through attention being explicitly paid to them can they enjoy the
benefits of purposive memetic engineering, which promises to
improve their memetic fitness for survival and reproduction, to a
degree that randomness would have a hard time equalling, in a self-
conscious, meaning-giving, meaning-bearing, purposive and to a
certain degree empirically free to choose environment - the human
brain.
>
> I think it is plausible to suggest that consciousness emerged as the complexity of memetic structures increased in the brain.
>
Actually, you must be speaking of self-consciousness; even a tick
is conscious, but I cannot imagine one mutating memes, or
slinging them around to other ticks.
My genesis of consciousness is quite different. I believe that self-
consciousness occurs when the product of the number of neurins
in the brain and the complexity of their synaptic and axonal
connections breaches the Godelian limit, beyond which a
sufficiently complex system becomes capable of self-reference, or
recursion, and transcends closure to become an open-ended
system, capable of creating and learning (Piaget called this the
state of autoregulation, which makes self-organization possible;
this is what autopoesis has tried to appropriate). Godel's
Incompleteness Theorems are the most important general
mathematical theorems of the 20th century, and I view individual
brains as, among other things, particular concrete empirical
instantiations of their consequences.
>
> Brent.
>
>
> ______________________
> --Brent Silby 2000
>
> [Please Try These Links]
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>
> Room 601a
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> University of Canterbury
> Email: b.silby@phil.canterbury.ac.nz
> __________________________________________
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Joe E. Dees
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2000 5:04 PM
> Subject: Re: Purported mystical "knowledge"
>
>
> Date sent: Thu, 05 Oct 2000 15:52:15 +1300
> From: Brent Silby <phil066@it.canterbury.ac.nz>
> Subject: Re: Purported mystical "knowledge"
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Send reply to: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>
> > Hi Joe,> > Thanks for your response. What if I created a computer system or a robot that had the ability to immitate the behavior of other robots. Suppose I incorporated a small piece of software that enabled th
e robot to write itself new programs that allowed it to simulate observed behavior. I would
> not need to give the robot a sense of self, but wouldn't it be able to assimilate memes nonetheless? Of course, it could be suggested that the robot would need to view itself as a unified entity that could copy the ac
tivities of another, but I'm not sure if that amounts to a "sense of self" or
> consciousness.
> >
> No, there is a difference between the blind storage and replication
> of pattern and the meaningful recognition of an informational
> significance to such pattern. These would mean nothing to the
> robots in question (nothing would); only to we who view them and
> created the robots in the first place. They would only be memes to
> us, not to them. If we (the self-conscious) weren't around, there
> would be no one for memes to be memes to, or in, or between.
> >> > I think the issue you raised: "where would the memes live before they created us?" can be answered by going back to the biological analogy. Genes did not live anywhere before lifeforms can along. They appeare
d with life. The same could be said of memes. They appeared when the first human
> mimicked the behavior of another, and it was from there that the modern mind developed. It is hard to imagine a mind with absolutely no memes. It would be a dull, non-eventful blank space.
> >
> Of course memes have been both symbiont and virulent, and we
> have coevolved, but there is a difference to be drawn between the
> genesis of life (which required such a replicative genetic principle)
> and the emergence of conscious self-awareness within it (which did
> not require a memetic principle). The higher apes pass the mirror
> test for self-recognition, and are thus rudimentary memetic beings.
> They modify implements for specific use in the wild, and learn how
> to do so by watching and imitating others. The first minds with self-
> awareness were indeed impoverished places containing little
> meaning compared to our own, but even though memetic
> complexity and permeability and cortical size co-evolved, the
> advent of conscious self-awareness had to occur first, for meaning
> cannot occur in the absence of a mean-eror, in other words, the
> structure of signification requires the presence of the components
> of signifier, sign, and signified, whereas simple stimulus-response
> does not require same. We are memetic beings precisely because
> we can transcend our genetically programmed species-specific
> instincts; otherwise, behavior could not change, and memes could
> not be propagated.
> >
> > Brent.
>
>
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