Re: Wilkins on the meme:engram relation

From: AaronLynch@aol.com
Date: Mon Dec 03 2001 - 01:51:03 GMT

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    Subject: Re: Wilkins on the meme:engram relation
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    In a message dated 12/2/2001 5:16:14 PM Central Standard Time, Scott Chase
    <ecphoric@hotmail.com> writes:

    > Lynch may have. Here I am struggling with pinning down all the terminology
    > and he goes and drops it altogether. I was probably premature in tackling
    > his concept as his was more of an abstraction, suiting his purposes.
    > >
    > >The many-many mapping from lower level
    > >to higher is a problem in genetics and in memetics that needs to be
    > >addressed.
    > >
    > It seemed you were touching on something which I couldn't quite
    articulate,
    > along the lines of bridging the memory/culture divide and how memory units
    > would relate to cultural units. I've been hoping to delve deeper into
    > Gatherer's, Lynch's and your articles, when my time budget allows. Lynch
    has
    > changed his a couple times now. The Cloak stuff is much
    > appreciated...something else needing more delving on my part.

    Hi Scott.

    My apologies for leading you to spend time on my "mnemon" neologism and then
    dropping it. I had already been thinking of dropping it, but your recent post
    and John Wilkins's comments helped convince me that the word was simply not
    serving the objective of good communication. A neologism, it seems, can loom
    as a big distraction in the middle of a text, drawing attention away from
    what is new in the thesis of a paper and toward the idea of a new entity or
    structure being proposed to go with the new word. With both the word "meme"
    and "mnemon" gone from the main text of my paper, the idea of a new structure
    or mental entity might not come to mind and distract readers any more. I view
    responsibility for good communication as falling primarily on the author of
    an article, so I did not like to see you struggling to pin down a small piece
    of terminology if it could be avoided. I also realized that if you were
    struggling with my neologism, then surely many other intelligent readers
    would also struggle.

    --Aaron Lynch

    http://www.thougthcontagion.com

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