Message-Id: <3.0.3.32.19980709142042.007a7770@pop.netaddress.com>
Date: Thu, 09 Jul 1998 14:20:42 +0200
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
From: Josip Pajk <j.p.pajk@usa.net>
Subject: Re: Wilden Memetics
In-Reply-To: <35A35D5F.5114@cc.emu.edu.tr>
Does this Epistemological Fundaments from:
H.Maturana, J.Mpodozis and J.C.Letelier
"Brain, Language and the Origin of Human Mental Functions"
http://www.informatik.umu.se/~rwhit/MatMpo&Let(1995).html
relate in any sense with memetics (as a science), and in particular with
what have been said lately on this list?
-----------------------
>What we do as scientists is to explain our experience in the implicit
understanding that experience is which we distinguish as happening to us as
observers in our living. In doing that, we use our experience and the
coherence of our experience to propose generative mechanisms for our
experience in the context of the satisfaction of the criterion of
validation of scientific explanations (Maturana, 1990). Even when we speak
of phenomena as if we were talking about something independent from us that
appears in our perceptual space, we are distinguishing experience that
happens to us in our living. We believe that the fundamental difficulty
that we face in the process of explaining mind and self-consciousness as
phenomena, is to fully accept that they are that, phenomena, experience.
The claims that they are entities, or reflections of the operation of some
kind of entity inside or outside the brain, or epiphenomena, or nothing a
all, are manners of explaining the experience that we connote when speaking
of self-consciousness and mind.
>
>A scientific explanation consists in the proposition of a generative
mechanism, that is, a mechanism or process that if allowed to operate gives
rise, as a result of its operation, to the phenomena that one wants to
explain (Maturana, 1990). Scientific explanations do not constitute
phenomenal reductions, that is, they do not consist in expressing the
phenomena of one domain in terms of the phenomena of another domain which
is considered more basic. Quite on the contrary, a scientific explanation
consists in showing a generative relation between phenomenal domains that
do not intersect, and doing so by showing how the phenomena in one domain
result as a consequence of the processes that take place in the other
phenomenal domain. It is for this reason that an explanation does not
replace the phenomenon explained, and it is nonsensical to ask about the
interaction between the result and the process that gives origin to it, as
would be the case if one were to ask about mind and body interactions after
showing that the mind is a result of the operation of the body.
-----------------------
Enlightening, isn't it?
Josip
http://members.tripod.com/~THREENITY/index.html
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