From: "Chris Lofting" <ddiamond@ozemail.com.au>
To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Dawkins' Mutation Test for Replicators
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1999 13:40:41 +1000
-----Original Message-----
From: Gatherer, D. (Derek) <D.Gatherer@organon.nhe.akzonobel.nl>
To: 'memetics@mmu.ac.uk' <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Date: Thursday, 2 September 1999 1:20
Subject: RE: Dawkins' Mutation Test for Replicators
>Chris:
>Go to a day care center and you will hear
>expressions such "this tastes red!".
>
>Derek:
>Pardon my skepticism, but isn't that just because the kiddies haven't quite
>grasped the meaning of 'red'? eg. they may think that all red apples taste
>red, so anything tasting of apples tastes red.
>
the meaning is linked to a sense. the 'correct' meaning of 'red' is tied to
a colour. what you are suggesting here is that synesthesia does not exist
but in your readings you know that it does...! Synesthesia WILL cause these
sorts of expressions.
I know of singers who when they sing see colours; they 'paint' their song.
What is the connection of colour to music? harmonics, colour is the harmonic
of white light just as chords manifest auditory harmonics. These people are
'bypassing' the sense differentiation. Our brain does that in that the
elicitation of refined emotions is linked to our responses to
frequency/wavelengths of EITHER sense; there is a generalisation to
'harmonics'. It is these emotions that let us transpose auditory feelings
into visual and vica-versa. This process is thus creative but also reflects
a lack of sensory differentiation in that the singers cannot express things
in a context of 'pure' auditory harmonics.
See some of my comments at:
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~ddiamond/emote.html
>Chris:
>Adults encourage the differentiation
>(and so to some degree reduce creativity in doing so making it more
>adaptive, within context, than innovative, a novel context).
>
>Derek:
>No, adults just teach the correct meaning of red, that's all.
>
and that means linking 'red' with a sense and so 'forbidding' the use of the
experience of, the feeling of, 'red' in an auditory context. As yuo can see
from my comments above, this 'correction' is false in that you CAN have a
link.
Words reflect the summing of emotional patterns that are elicited from
sensory inputs. We do not have a language specific for vision or for
audition, we have a language that is based on the entanglement of senses.
Our insistance on using the 'correct' word is based on our 'need' to enable
communication and so to set standards but this can ignore what people
actually experience; the child does experience a 'taste' of redness which
cannot be described using normal gustatory-biased words since there IS an
entanglement of harmonics processing 'in here'. For most this is
disentangled over time, for some it remains entangled.
>Chris:
>Add to Stein and Merideth the interdigitations we see in frontal lobe areas
>(that develop after we are born) and we seem to be witnessing a process of
>moving from a genetically 'pure' whole that goes through differentiation of
>parts to then be re-integrated through education; we refine the 'pure'
>genetic elements with nurture experience. The neuron culling process at
>about age 10-12 seems to be a function of this in that once you have the
>early experiences so 'customisation' takes place to make things more
>efficient.
>
>Derek:
>Genetic 'purity' or otherwise is irrelevant to this. What we see is brain
>development, that's all.
>
When a child is born they reflect a complete program genetically. Exposure
to context then refines this and forces phenotypal processes. this reflects
the entanglement of the nature/nurture dichotomy.
Chris.
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