Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id SAA29302 (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 18:39:51 GMT Message-Id: <200101181842.NAA23241@mail1.lig.bellsouth.net> From: "Joe E. Dees" <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 12:42:58 -0600 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: DNA Culture .... Trivia? In-reply-to: <20010118105921.C433@reborntechnology.co.uk> References: <200101172019.PAA25505@mail1.lig.bellsouth.net>; from joedees@bellsouth.net on Wed, Jan 17, 2001 at 02:18:44PM -0600 X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.01b) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Date sent: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 10:59:21 +0000
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: DNA Culture .... Trivia?
From: Robin Faichney <robin@reborntechnology.co.uk>
Send 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 destoryed?
>
It emerged along with self-reference, as the structure of its
manifestation. It did not exist until entities capable of signification
evolved. It ain't your Uncarved Block or Original Face.
>
> 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.
>
Actually, before we evolved, there WAS no structure of
signification. Kill us all, anf there won't be, again. It is the
structure of our minds' interaction with the meaningful world
surrounding them. Without our minds, there is no structure of
signification. You can't have a sign without a signifier (the person
to whom the sign refers to something) and a signified (the sign's
referent), you can't have a signifier without a sign (or he's not
signifying) and a signified (or there's nothing for the sign to signify),
and you can't have a signified without a sign (which signifies the
signified) and a signifier (who relates the sign to the signified). If
you can think of ANY CASE where this is not true, PLEASE POST
IT; otherwise admit that all you can do is impotently grouse and
search for irrelevant potshots, because you have no
counterexamples with which to refute it.
>
> > > 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 no one 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.
>
Do not confuse structure, which, since it is not random, is an
information analogue (can be compressed symbolically) with
meaning. Not all structure is, or has to be, meaningful. A quartz
crystal has a symbolically compressible structure, which is
significant to a geologist, but the New Age freaks who claim that
such a thing is a "recordkeeper" and that they can read an
"Akashic record" in it are bonkers. All it means, when symbolized,
is that silicon molecules have certain ways of interlocking and
iterating, just as H2O snowflakes, another type of crystalline
structure, do. Plastics are strung in ropelike megamolecules
which chemistry can symbolize and describe in formulae. Even
the lead in the carbon used to write a letter has its own humble
place in the periodic table, and the periodic table means something
to chemists. But the configuration of the markings one makes with
it on that paper, are meaningful by mutual human convention, and
refer to a language which itself refers to the world. The
configurational pattern of the writing is meaningful because we have
imposed meanings upon that configuration, and others resembling
it. There should be no confusion between the molecular
significance we can grant to the structure of a material (or an
energy) and the communicational significance we impose upon
certain configurations or patterns of one substance or another.
There isn't with me.
>
> > > 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
> revulsion 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.
>
Phenomenology, both existential and hermeneutic, is the most
human of philosophical disciplines. Heidegger begins with Dasein,
or Being-in-the-World, maintaining not only can we not exist
without an environing world, but also that the world, as a
meaningful entity, does not exist without us, just brute facticity
devoid of all significance.
> --
> 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
>
>
===============================================================
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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