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[From Ted Cloak
(2007.04.29.1030 MDT)]
[From Bill Powers (2007.04.28.0617 MDT)]
Ted Cloak (2007.04.27) –
- What is (are) the physical mechanism(s) for transmitting a meme?
n
I don’t think memes are
transmitted, properly speaking. The pertinent activity takes place on the
part of the recipient, so it’s better to call it acquisition as per ¶ 2 &3. The
“mechanisms for perceiving, parsing, processing and storing” are of
course Input Function(s) as per, e.g., B:CP Figure 15.3.
How does it get from one person’s memory into another’s? I agree with your use
of the term “acquisition,” but acquisition from what? We obviously
don’t have access to anyone’s memory but our own, so the question of physical
mechanisms is still relevant.And where is the meme such that one person can
perceive it and store it in memory? In short, “mechanisms for perceiving,
parsing, processing, and storing” WHAT?
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Perceiving the actions of
others, and parsing, processing, and storing said perceptions as reference
standards; i.e., as memes. See ¶ 2.
Incidentally, in your outline you speak of reference standards as
directing actions.
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No, I don’t. In ¶ 2, I
speak of “…reference standards for neural control systems
directing …actions.” In ¶ 3, I speak of “…
reference standards used in directing the actions …”
In PCT, actions are jointly determined by disturbances, reference
signals, and the nature of the external feedback connection. What the reference
signal uniquely specifies is the perception
that is desired; there is no general way to predict what action will be needed
to produce that amount of perception.
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In science, “to
direct”, “to determine”, “to cause”, etc.,
always presupposes that there are other determinants involved. And
prediction, therefore, is always, at best , stochastic. Absolute
causality is a folk-concept.
Your footnote does not make this plain.
- To which footnote do you refer?
If it did, you would then have to address the question of just what
one person observes of other people and the shared world that gets recorded as
a meme. For example, do we observe what we take to be both other people’s
purposes and other people’s means of achieving them?
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Yes, if by
“observe” you include not only “perceive” but also
“parse”, “process”, and perhaps I should add
“filter”, I guess your “what we take to be”
covers that. So the evolved human input functions include something like
empathy, it would seem.
- To what extent does a meme depend for its existence on individuals
knowing about it?
n
Not at all. Many –
probably most – memes are acquired and stored and carried completely out
of awareness, often well below the program level.
But we can be aware of perceptions at every level from intensities to system
concepts – why should memes “below the program level” not be in
consciousness? Perhaps you’re speaking of the high-level perception that something is culturally determined. So your inclusion of
driving a nail as an unconscious meme makes sense if the person doesn’t realize
that this is just one way, learned from others, of “fastening boards
together” (itself another meme). But again, that fits my Unified Theory of
Social Science: some do, the rest don’t. You would always have to quality
statements of this sort by saying they are true only of some people. Unless you
can say which people, this rather
weakens any theory.
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No, that isn’t what I was
talking about. Suppose little Jimmy, watching his father, acquires the
memes for driving a nail. Of course, he now knows that he knows how to
drive a nail. He will probably tell everybody around that he knows how to
drive a nail. He probably doesn’t know, however, that he’s
also learned how to grip the hammer, how to pick up a nail between thumb
and forefinger, and many other little details. Yet he’s acquired
the memes for those behaviors along with the one of which he is
consciously aware.
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Since a meme does not
“depend for its existence” on its carrier’s conscious
awareness of it, I see no reason why the theory should be required to
predict such awareness.
- Are memes to be found outside of brains?
n
No.
Then memes are constructed from perceptions of things that are not memes?
These are all really variations on a single question: does culture
exist outside of individual human brains?
n
Memes don’t. Cultural
features do. This is the essential difference between
“i-culture” and “m-culture” that I noted in “Is a
cultural ethology possible” and that was acknowledged by Dawkins in 1982,
in the references cited in the draft. I’ll attach a copy of the
former.
I see. This answers my question above: cultural features, it is asserted, exist
outside of individuals, in their environments, while memes exist inside them.
CEP, I’m sure you recognize, was written from a pre-PCT point of view, in fact
from the old stimulus-response model. You say:
an observable behavior
is the product of threeinstructions behaving serially: (1) a sensory instruction: cue, an
observable event
in the animal’s environment; behavior, the dumping of neurotransmitter
substance
(NTS) into certain synapses; (2) an interneural instruction: cue, the
receipt of NTS from the sensory instruction; behavior, again a release of NTS;
(3) a motor instruction: cue, receipt of NTS from the interneural instruction;
behavior, observable change in relationships of material structures of animal
and/or environment.
In this view, stimuli have objective physical existence and are
simply detected and converted into behavior by a chain of neural and motor
responses. A cultural feature has objective existence apart from the perceiver,
thus allowing it to exist externally while the meme representing it exists
internally. This makes the perceptual input functions of the control systems
involved into recognizers rather
than creators of perceptual
patterns: the patterns already exist outside of us and we need only learn to
perceive them.
No doubt you can see the issues here.
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Yes , I do, and that’s
why I’m seeking the help of the CSG first, to avoid mistakes and
second, to make PCT clear and, especially, credible, to the
anthropologists and memeticists that I hope to be informing about my hypothesis.
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So please, guys, help me on
this. Take another look at the first posting in this thread.
Regards to all,
Ted