Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id LAA27217 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 18 Jan 2001 11:04:00 GMT Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 10:59:21 +0000 To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: DNA Culture .... Trivia? Message-ID: <20010118105921.C433@reborntechnology.co.uk> References: <200101171601.LAA13193@mail5.lig.bellsouth.net>; <20010117194749.A432@reborntechnology.co.uk> <200101172019.PAA25505@mail1.lig.bellsouth.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.12i In-Reply-To: <200101172019.PAA25505@mail1.lig.bellsouth.net>; from joedees@bellsouth.net on Wed, Jan 17, 2001 at 02:18:44PM -0600 From: Robin Faichney <robin@reborntechnology.co.uk> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On Wed, Jan 17, 2001 at 02:18:44PM -0600, Joe E. Dees wrote:
> >
> > You accept that information is not necessarily meaningful, and that may
> > be enough. Our previous argument as to whether memes are meaningful was
> > really about the use of the word "meme", ie semantics. My quest is for
> > an understanding of how meaning arises out of the universe's inherent
> > meaninglessness, and how memes can be carried by or encoded in matter.
> > How can the structure of matter be meaningful?
> >
> It can be meaningful if it refers to something other than itself, when
> apprehended by a consciousness capable of such referential
> attribution who has chosen to imbue such a referential meaning
> upon tokens of its type. Significances may be public or private, but
> they cannot occur in the absence of a signifier. The three-legged
> stool of signification (signifier, sign, signified) requires all three legs
> to stand.
So how did the stool first come into existence? Was it just created,
complete? Or is this the eternal stool, that was never created and
will never be destoyed?
You are obviously reluctant to see your stool deconstructed, presumably
because that would mean facing up to the original stoollessness of
the universe. But your tripartition has exactly the same problems as,
and is no better than, Cartesian dualism. Whereas my view encompasses
the (necessarily linked) emergence of consciousness and meaning from
mere matter.
> > And don't tell me to read some book to answer that question. I know that
> > many, many people have written about such stuff. I also know, with as
> > much certainty as is possible in such things, that noone has taken my
> > approach to it, noone has answered precisely the questions I'm asking,
> > which (obviously) require more than one paragraph to fully describe.
> >
> Don't be so sure in the absence of checking that such questions
> have not been asked and answered. Such as the above, which is
> not original with me, but is a consideration of both continental and
> analytic epistemology.
OK, consider this:
<open quote>
It is tempting to suppose that some concept of _information_ could
serve eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory.
<close quote>
From Intentionality, Daniel C. Dennett and John Haugeland, in The Oxford
Companion to the Mind, ed. Richard Gregory, 1987 (emphasis in the
original).
<open quote>
During a meeting on memetics---an evolutionary approach to
culture---hosted by Kings College, Cambridge in June, 1999, a philosopher
of biology called David Hull held up a piece of paper and suggested
that we might make real progress if we could understand the difference
between the sort of information printed on the surface of that sheet,
and the information inherent in its structure. Daniel Dennett, one
of the best-known of contemporary philosophers, who was also present,
when it came his turn to speak ducked the issue, saying that we did not
need to address it in order to move forward in memetics. But it rang
bells in my mind. I already suspected that information was extremely
important, for a much wider range of issues than just memetics. During
the following months I realised that it was, in fact, the foundation
I needed to underpin the ideas I'd been working on for twenty years.
Then I came across the quote above, and saw that Dennett was also aware
of the significance of information. I realised that, given the state
of the art, he'd been right to steer that meeting away from it.
<close quote>
From my work in progress
What I'm doing is to prove Dennett's supposition, in the first quote,
correct. Now tell me that's already been done.
> > That's a start (if it's anything). Is it worth going on? Even if
> > so, there are many possible directions to take, and it might well be
> > impossible to get anywhere, along any of them, within the space of one
> > email. But specific questions, if any, I'll try to answer. (But I do
> > mean _specific_ questions, not vague ones, because they're too difficult,
> > unless you have the time and energy to woffle, which I don't.)
> >
> Actually, I have no question to ask of you. I know where you stand
> on the concrete and pragmatic existence of selves in the world,
> and disagree with you on that point.
You don't begin to understand my views, as proven by your next sentence:
> You cannot eliminate
> significance without eliminating the signifier, and vice-versa.
I don't want to eliminate these, just to explain them. You seem to assume
that to explain is necessarily to "explain away", but it is not. I use
the word "I" all the time, I use the concept of the self, in the real
world, every day, perhaps every waking hour. I feel an almost visceral
revultion towards the sort of eliminativist drivel spewed by the likes
of Pat Churchland, and my original motivation in getting into philosophy
of mind was to save consciousness from the mechanistic materialists.
My favourite philosophical paper has always been Nagel's What is it like
to be a bat? For gawd's sake! I no longer see consciousness in quite
the same way I did, but at the most basic level my motivation remains the
same as it always was: the humanisation of Western academic philosophy.
-- Robin Faichney robin@reborntechnology.co.uk=============================================================== 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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