Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id KAA13483 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 20 Feb 2001 10:17:25 GMT Message-id: <fc.005b8ff100b19e7e3b9aca00cfaa22e1.b19ebc@amazon.shu.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 10:07:07 +0000 Subject: Re: memetics-digest V1 #553 To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk From: "Ilfryn PRICE(SED)" <I.Price@shu.ac.uk> References: <200102200905.JAA13034@alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: <200102200905.JAA13034@alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk> Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
John Wilkins writing
>
>More like we're born with a geology of hard and soft substrates, and
>where and how long the water flows determines where the riverbeds are...
prompts the following extract (from Price and Shaw, 1998)
>
A geological metaphor provides an image of the physiology and psychology of perception. Imagine a
landscape, eroded over time to provide streams, rivulets, and rivers interspersed between higher
plateaux. It provides a simple example of a self-organising, locked-in, system. If one can imagine
the virgin landscape as being relatively flat, perhaps gently undulating, then as rain falls so it
tends to find the paths of least resistance: the soft rocks and minor depressions of the undulating
territory. Over time accumulations of rainfall carve out stream and river beds and settle into
pools and lakes. Any new rainfall will no longer find its own way but will rather take, and
reinforce, the already sculpted way. Though the falling rain may be evenly distributed across the
landscape, in its collection and flow across the land, it will tend towards a predetermined route,
one taken by previous rainfalls.
Just as the rainfall follows established routes, so perception follows established ways of
seeing. Technically, even if the light sources which perturb the back of the retina are
identical, what will be noticed from all that could be seen, will depend on the perceptual lens
through which we view the world. The optimists half-full glass is the pessimists half-empty one!
What is there is not independent of the viewer, as experts in quantum physics will acknowledge.
What is there is what we have been trained (or conditioned or have learnt) to see. Our training
in terms of our maps and our lenses means that we will not see certain other things which do not
fit with the map or lens we carry. We may discard, indeed we can be blind to, anomalies that do not
fit. The self-organised pattern which we call our thinking grants a particular perceptual blindness
and rigidity to our perceptions of the world - the very foundation of such things as stereotypes
and prejudices - common to all human experience and found, for example in the way one department in
a company may view another.
What holds for light waves perturbing the retina, holds equally for acoustic perturbances of the
eardrum. Exploring the analogy further we could say that an idea, a single thought, an utterance, a
meme in fact, is like the single raindrop. It falls with others upon a pre-formed perceptual
landscape. Isolated thoughts gather together in a string - a pattern of co-existing memes - which
we might compare to a few drops congregating together in a splash of water. With sufficient mass
the splash of water starts to flow into streams and rivers which are, if we like, the connectors
between the raindrops and the pools and lakes, if not the oceans, of our thoughts. The pools and
lakes we may view as concept pools and theory lakes. Thus a self-organising system is inherited and
developed in which the flow of perception takes a certain course, it follows a certain pattern, a
largely given paradigm.
Patterns in the brain influence seeing (or more accurately perceiving). Patterns, and seeing
influence behaviour so that behaviour follows certain patterns. It may be argued that we see the
world less as it is and more as we are, and that we act perfectly consistent with how we see the
world. There is a certain alignment with our thinking, our perceptions and our
actions-in-the-world. Thinking, seeing, and behaving tend to follow pre-existing patterns.
Well-established patterns become social and cultural norms and preserve and replicate themselves
through their influence on peoples ongoing perception of the world. The cultural tradition is
passed on by the language and perceptual habits acquired by succeeding generations and by that
which we inherit through the cultural artefacts of previous generations, for example their temples,
books, theories, myths and legends, as well as through our own processes of informal and formal
education. These may take the form of individual units of cultural transmission - memes - or the
broader patterns of thinking which Kuhn dubbed paradigms.
What this amounts to is the assertion that our perceptions of the world provide for our very
relatedness to the world before us - both in terms of what is seen or noticed, and the meaning or
interpretation we grant to what is noticed. Perception grants what may be termed our
Being-in-the-world (An expression first coined by Heidegger in the term Dasein). If we can
interrupt the pattern of thinking, eschew our memetic and paradigmatic inheritance so as to think,
and see, newly, then behaviours may naturally follow. To achieve such a difference in thinking and
seeing we may need to create a different language.
______________________________________________________________
If Price
Facilities Management Graduate Centre
Sheffield Hallam University
Unit 7, Science Park, Sheffield S1 1WB
P +44 [0]114 225 4032
F +44 [0]114 225 4038
http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/urs/fmgc
http://members.aol.com/ifprice/ifresch.html
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