Re: Study shows brain can learn without really trying

From: Robin Faichney (robin@ii01.org)
Date: Sun Nov 25 2001 - 11:43:18 GMT

  • Next message: Robin Faichney: "Re: Study shows brain can learn without really trying" 

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Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2001 11:43:18 +0000
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Study shows brain can learn without really trying
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From: Robin Faichney <robin@ii01.org>
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    On Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 12:25:08AM -0500, Scott Chase wrote:
    >
    > If cultural effects have a neural basis within individual people, the
    > causative neural traces could be quite different but the cultural effects
    > quite the same. OTOH similar traces could result in different cultural
    > effects depending on the context, like association with other traces.
    >
    > If cultural effects have a neural basis, so what? What use is it to reduce
    > the effect to *a* trace? What if there's no isomorphism between the traces
    > in different people subject to similar cultural effects?

    I'm not particularly interested in neural traces. Dennett argues in
    Darwin's Dangerous Idea that memes have to be semantic rather than
    syntactic. I don't think that distinction is entirely clear, but it
    is clear to me that memetics does *not* require similarity of neural
    encoding, only similarity of what's encoded. Which is demonstrated
    by similarity of behaviour. 

    -- 
Robin Faichney
"One person's mess is another's complexity"
inside information -- http://www.ii01.org/

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