Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id JAA22312 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 24 Jan 2002 09:42:58 GMT Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 01:38:38 -0800 Message-Id: <200201240938.g0O9ccF06382@mail24.bigmailbox.com> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary X-Mailer: MIME-tools 4.104 (Entity 4.116) X-Originating-Ip: [65.80.160.36] From: "Joe Dees" <joedees@addall.com> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: necessity of mental memes Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk('binary' encoding is not supported, stored as-is)
> "Philip Jonkers" <philipjonkers@prodigy.net> <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Re: necessity of mental memesDate: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 23:10:12 -0900
>Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>
>Keith:
>> >So you can look back and state with confidence that everything that
>> >happened including any memes you picked up were either caused or
>> >random. You can even say that the future is the same way. But it makes
>no
>> >difference in the operation sense because you will always feel you have
>choice.
>
>Joe:
>> this view reduced humans to conduits, totally bereft of any causal
>efficacy of their own whatsoever. And also, in contradiction to what you
>have previously asserted, choice and responsibility for the consequences of
>those choices are logically correlative. If we have no choices, then we own
>no responsibility for the consequences of our actions, for we could not have
>chosen another course.
>> I consider it patently absurd to assert that every flickering thought and
>every crystal pattern on every snowflake, every wind current and the
>topography of every grain of sand was written in the fabric of the universe
>one Planck instant after the Big Bang. Even the three-body problem is
>theoretically unsolveable in physics, due to the complex interrelations of
>feedback and feedforward between multiple components of a complex system.
>> But all this does not matter to the acolyte at the superdeterminist altar;
>they believe that they have no choice to believe as they do, and that should
>they change their belief, that they had no choice but to do that, also; thus
>they have locked themselves in a cognitive trap. But there is a
>counter-trap that even trumps that one, and that indeed is logically
>necessary for it to be proferred. And this is the irrefuteable point that
>no one can noncontradictorally argue for such a position as
>superdeterminism, for to do so presupposes an exercise of the verty free
>will which the contention denies. In other words, their arguments (or
>anything else they say) are not their own; they are marionettes on strings,
>mouthing syllables that likewise were inscribed in the very fabric of the
>Big Bang. This reduces their arguments to meanoinglessness, and
>irretrieveably removes even the status of argument from them, for if their
>contentions are indeed correct, they can not logically ev!
>> en be truly meant by their proponents..
>
>Good point Joe. I believe the answer lies somewhere in the middle of a
>abstract pure
>free will and will imposed by already acquired memes. An unpredicatable
>factor
>may be the type of emotion or mood the host has at time of potential
>adoption. By the
>the complexity of the human body mood is untractable as it is but by being
>also a
>function of the environment (other humans) it makes it even more
>unpredicatable.
>I don't know how this unpredictability extends to average behavior though.
>
The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in refuting Sartre's conception of the absolute freedonm of the individual, did not embrace the correlative opposite of absolute superdeterministic puppet slavery, but stated that our freedom is not opposed to our environing or internal situations, but instead gears itself to them and creatively engages them. I consider him substantially correct on this point.
>
>Philip.
>
>
>
>
>===============================================================
>This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
>Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
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>see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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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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