Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id VAA25928 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 2 Aug 2001 21:16:20 +0100 From: <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 15:20:09 -0500 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Macguffin Message-ID: <3B696FA9.31266.13A5BE7@localhost> In-reply-to: <3B6985F4.9A808CC1@pacbell.net> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On 2 Aug 2001, at 9:55, Bill Spight wrote:
> Dear Joe and Vincent,
>
> > > Was there a "self" in the primordial soup? Isn't self a
> > > macguffin
> > > (Blackmore thinks it's a memetic macguffin, or more accurately
> > > concurs with Dennett's notion of the self as a benign user
> > > illusion).
> > >
> > > Vincent
> > >
> > Self is no macguffin; nether is it an illusion
>
> The sense of self arises from the formation of the Self-Other
> distinction. If it is memetic, then chimpanzees have memes, since they
> can recognize themselves in a mirror.
>
As would orangutans, gorillas and bonobos.
>
> But illusions of self do arise with thoughts such as "I might have
> been a giraffe." The "I" in that sentence is just a pronoun, not a
> self. ;-)
>
Neither is the word "giraffe" really a tall, long-necked, four-legged,
leaf-eating african denizen, but the word stands for, that is,
symbolically represents, its referent, as does the personal pronoun.
To confuse a term and its referent would be a category error, but
both exist, and one refers to the other. Self-conscious awareness,
that is, the posession of the self-aware decision capable cognitive
environment that has evolutionarily emerged in us, is not itself a
meme, but that which, along with the intentionality, free choice and
symbolicity that depend upon such self-awareness, makes willful
memetic evolution possible, in that we may consciously engineer
our memes, that is, think about and creatively tinker with them -
consciously directed, rather than random, mutation, and those
exposed to them may subsequently choose to, for well or ill-
considered reasons, accept or reject, or to propagate or refuse to
propagate, the memes they come into contact with, that is, they
may intentionally, rather than naturally (or blindly) select them.
When this activity is pursued logically, rationally and reasonably,
with appeal to evidence repeatable under conditions controlled for
variables, we call it science. This is not to say that accidental
mutation or inadvertent selection do not happen, just that, with the
advent of self-conscious awareness, such selection is far from the
entire story.
>
> Best,
>
> Bill
>
> ===============================================================
> 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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