Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id BAA06485 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 27 Aug 2001 01:11:55 +0100 X-Originating-IP: [209.240.220.151] From: "Scott Chase" <ecphoric@hotmail.com> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: Shaggy Dog vs. Psychic Dog Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 20:09:19 -0400 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Message-ID: <F17Vwzjf9XU8hA3PfFy000128a8@hotmail.com> X-OriginalArrivalTime: 27 Aug 2001 00:09:20.0177 (UTC) FILETIME=[84D27A10:01C12E8C] Sender: fmb-bounces@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>From: "Dace" <edace@earthlink.net>
>Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
>Subject: Re: Shaggy Dog vs. Psychic Dog
>Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 13:30:53 -0700
>
(snip)
>
>Sheldrake isn't denying the importance of standard research. He's just
>putting it in a different context, one that can explain things like life,
>organic wholes, and memory on their own terms.
>
>
Well, not only does it seem to me, unversed in such things as I am, that
Sheldrake hyperextends the morphogenetic field concept, generalizing it as a
morphic field good for not only development of vertebrate limbs and eyes but
also for the phenomena of culture and individual behavior, but he likewise
hypertextends memory whereby formative causation and inherent memory account
not only for my ability to recollect whatever I can at this moment of
Sheldrake's two books I own, but the ability of proteins to fold and the
ability of crystals to form. IMO this takes things a tad too far. His
becomes a hyperextended hyperexplanation for everything under the sun which
vibrates, has form and communicates with its past states, unconstrained by
any possibility of attenuation by an inverse square law, a spooky
non-energic action at a distance across space and time. No fading out over
distance.
I'm not much for invoking the razor, but though Sheldrake wants to add
something complementary to gene action and the tenuous developmentalist
concept of the morphogenetic field, he is multiplying entities or
explanatory principles well beyond necessity, which I can't see having been
established for either morphic resonance or formative causation. This
doesn't detrct from the fun factor in reading Sheldrake's books. I wouldn't
consider them as candididates for burning at all, just interesting
speculations to shelve next to Jung and Teilhard on my bookcase.
Like the morphogenetic field notion, the meme is too tenuous to handle the
stress imposed upon it by something as shaky as morphic resonance, though
there may be a distant and indirect affinity in respect to the mnemic
analogy of memory and heredity.
So...when I was a wee embryo and developed so-called gill-slits was I
remembering a time when an ancestor way back when was a fish? Was I
resonating with this ancestral water dweller? When Sheldrake (in _The
Presence of the Past_, last page of chapter 4) brings up these gill slits he
refers to a figure in chapter 1 which is basically Haeckel's highly stylized
drawings of vertebrate embryos. Would Sheldrake's formative causation or
morphic resonance be any more valid than Haeckel's mnemic analogy of
perigenesis and plastidules in this regard? As an aside Sheldrake, when
taking about the "tree of life" uses a figure depicting Haeckel's tree of
life (aka Stammbaum?).
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