Date: Wed, 07 Apr 1999 14:49:30 +0100
From: Chris Lees <chrislees@easynet.co.uk>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: A more
> By the way, Chris, I love the chairs!
The sun is shining, the sky is blue, the birds are singing, lambs are
frolicing in the fields...and someone loves my chairs..Must be Spring, at last !
£700 a piece, ten percent discount to memeticists ;-)
> I was at the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition in Glasgow on Saturday, and I
> wonder if you are influenced by him....?
I have studied all the art and design I could discover in the world, so
it's probably impossible to for me to untangle specific influences. That's
what critics are for, isn't it ? I'm probably trying for something slightly
more 'romantic' than F.L.W. Bit of William Morris,bit of Bernard Leach, bit
of this'n that...but this is going way off topic, even if the topic is as
delightfully vague, open-ended and surreal as 'A More'.
> But back to memetics: aside from Zen etc., there is a strand of scientific
> psychology which casts doubt on the unitary nature of the self, and that is
> the study of multiple personality cases. William Benzon gives some
> references to this in his paper 'The Evolution of Narrative and the Self',
> which was readable on http:\\www.newsavanna.com until it closed recently for
> maintenance. It is also in J. Soc. Evol. Sys. in about 1996 (if I remember
> rightly).
Yes, I have read William's work, and everything else I could find that
may be relevant.
> The other root of this trend lies in Hume of course....., not my favourite
> philosopher but Dennett seems to like him. In the last chapters of
> Consciousness Explained, Dennett seems to be arguing for a position which
> Sue takes up more forceably in her own book.
>
> There is also some input from post-structuralism (but not in Sue's case, I
> think I can confidently say).
>
> So the anti-self camp stakes out its claims on a combination of:
>
> Zen and/or other Buddhisms
> Multiple personality psychology
> Hume via Dennett
> some deconstructionists
>
> not necessarily in that order.
A neat summation. I look forward to hearing people's comments on it.
Thanks for the compliment, Derek.
Chris.
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