Cultural Acquisition, Evolution, and Ethology: The Perceptual Control Hypothesis (DRAFT)

Dear colleagues,

I’m preparing a statement
(draft copy attached) directed toward anthropologists and memeticists, putting
forth the hypothesis that PCT illuminates the “meme”, the unit of
culture and of cultural evolution.

To illustrate and support my
contention, I plan to perform a complete makeover of the “Cultural
Ethology Experiment #1” PowerPoint, purifying it from the standpoint of
PCT (no cues), stressing the meme concept, and emphasizing that a cultural control
system is a “memotype” for the behavioral phenotype it directs.
I’ll also improve the presentation cosmetically, of course.

Before writing this, I’ve
been catching up on developments in PCT since I last looked into it about 33
years ago. I’ve re-read B:CP in part; figure 15.3 is definitive for my
contention. I’ve read Plooij on the baby chimps, and several essays from
the American Scientist special issue. I also read the Bourbon et al
article in Perceptual and Motor Skills.

One issue I keep coming back
al seems to be an attempt at that. It convinces me, of course, but I was
already singing in the choir. Of course the maze-swimming rats should
have been enough long ago.

Is psychology perhaps too
tightly packed to get our lever into? If Don Campbell, as Pres of the
APA, couldn’t make them listen, who could?

Morgan’s Canon could be our
guide; work with an animal that has just the amount of complexity that we
absolutely need for our critical experiment. How about one of the
orb-weaving spiders? Is a spider’s web-making behavior simply going
through the motions, or is she actually trying to approximate a set of
reference standards implanted in her by evolution? Perhaps the logic of
such an experiment could be found in Konrad Lorenz’s deprivation experiment
idea (Evolution and Modification of Behavior, Ch. 7), adapted of course to
suit. (One might have to snip off a foot or two but not to worry, she’ll
grow them back in no time.)

Nevertheless, I think
cultural anthropology might be another good place to work, because trying to
envision a cultural tradition based on imitation in the usual sense (or lack
thereof) has never gotten anywhere.

So: I would welcome any
comments, suggestions, or questions you may have concerning the above or the
attachment or the current version of CEE #1.

Pertinent references would
be especially welcome; I’d particularly like to know if anyone has anticipated
me in this program.

With best regards,

Ted

Hypothesis.pdf (11.8 KB)

···

to: Is there a critical experiment that establishes PCT? Bourbon et

Ted Cloak
(2007.04.26)]
[From Bill Powers (2007.04.26.1420 MDT)]

I’m preparing a statement (draft
copy attached) directed toward anthropologists and memeticists, putting
forth the hypothesis that PCT illuminates the “meme”, the unit
of culture and of cultural evolution.

I think this has to be done very carefully to avoid reducing PCT to the
status of a metaphor. To keep this on the level of a literal physical
model, one has to answer some basic questions:

  1. Where does a meme exist before or after it has been
    transmitted?

  2. What is (are) the physical mechanism(s) for transmitting a
    meme?

  3. Is a meme something with independent existence, so it’s the same for
    everyone?

  4. To what extent does a meme depend for its existence on individuals
    knowing about it?

  5. Are memes to be found outside of brains?

These are all really variations on a single question: does culture exist
outside of individual human brains?

Best,

Bill P.

[From Bjorn Simonsen (2007.04.27,11:10 EUST)]

From Bill Powers (2007.04.26.1420 MDT)

Ted Cloak (2007.04.26)]

I'm preparing a statement (draft copy attached) directed
toward anthropologists and memeticists, putting forth the
hypothesis that PCT illuminates the "meme", the unit of
culture and of cultural evolution.

I think this has to be done very carefully to avoid reducing
PCT to the status of a metaphor.

If I don't misunderstand what you are saying, I don't think we shall be
afraid for metaphors. They permeate the language, the thoughts and the
actions people perform. And we use metaphors at the CSG list in a fair-sized
extent. I think you use metaphors yourself when you say (e.g.): "By lowering
the gain on parallel control tasks, (if necessary lowering it to near zero),
those tasks would not compete for output degrees of freedom in lower level
control loops, & thereby increase the degree of control for this other more
central task." I think upon: lowering, compete, degrees of freedom and lower
level control loops, and maybe more.

We can't live without metaphors And I think we use and will continue to use
metaphors without answering your hard questions.

These are all really variations on a single question: does culture
exist outside of individual human brains?

Doesn't this question depend on who's brain we are talking about. I, most
often, talk about culture and I know that what I say are thoughts in my
brain.

bjorn

I’m attaching an update of the
hypothesis draft with the paragraphs numbered so we can discuss them more
easily.

Each of my replies is inserted below the
pertinent question.

I’m a bit concerned that my original
message of this title has become lost except for your quotation of the first
paragraph, below. Perhaps I should re-send it later.

Ted

[From Bill Powers (2007.04.26.1420 MDT)]

Ted Cloak (2007.04.26)]

I’m preparing a statement (draft copy attached)
directed toward anthropologists and memeticists, putting forth the hypothesis
that PCT illuminates the “meme”, the unit of culture and of cultural
evolution.

I think this has to be done very carefully to avoid reducing PCT to the status
of a metaphor. To keep this on the level of a literal physical model, one has
to answer some basic questions:

I think your concern is
unnecessary. I was very careful in writing the draft. If a stored
perception/reference standard is literally physically real, so is a meme.

  1. Where does a meme exist before or after it has been transmitted?

n Being a stored perception/reference standard (¶ 2, 4), it
exists in memory (cf. Powers 1973, Ch. 15).

  1. 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.

  1. Is a meme something with independent existence, so it’s the same for
    everyone?

n No. It’s “the same for
everyone” only as explained in ¶ 3.

  1. 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.

  1. Are memes to be found outside of brains?

n No.

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.

Hypothesis1.pdf (11.8 KB)

CEP.pdf (371 KB)

[From Bjorn Simonsen (2207.04.27,22:25 EUST)]
from Bill Powers (2007.04.27.0708 MDT)

I concur with your reply to Bjorn.

Not I. Maybe I need some help from Bruce Nevin?

Metaphors and analogies are interesting to think of in terms of the PCT

model
OK

These are all really variations on a single question: does culture
exist outside of individual human brains?

Bjorn Simonsen (2007.04.27,11:10 EUST)]

Doesn't this question depend on who's brain we are talking about. I, most
often, talk about culture and I know that what I say are thoughts in my
brain.

This is worded in a vague way. I mean culture are perceptions. many
perceptions become thoughts).

To Bjorn: I was asking if culture exists outside of ANY human brain;
"no" means that it is a kind of perception, not something external to
any individual.

This is the way also I see it.

If he were still alive I'd probably have to admit he is --
well, partly -- right.

If I stress "partly" very hard, also I agree he is correct. But I am sure he
is not correct in the way he liked to talk about the "memes". But I may be
wrong.

However, I would still maintain that without human perception,
such artifacts are meaningless, so human perception still plays
a central role. And that means that each individual must learn from
scratch the cultural significance of any cultural artifact and that
what it means is neither more nor less than what individuals come
to think it means in terms of their own private experiences.

Absolutely. We must learn cultural significance from scratch in the same way
we must learn physics and biology and PCT.

To Martin: The question can be taken in the context of epistemology,
but it wasn't meant that way. In the current discussion I assume that
the models we use are correct, and my meanings all refer to those
models. I'm assuming that legal and financial systems, written words,
buildings, and so forth exist outside the individual. So what I say
depends on the epistemological correctness of the models.

I will express your last sentence some different. I will say: "I am assuming
that legal and financial systems, written words, buildings, and so forth are
perceptions, and so forth exist inside the brain". These perceptions are
representations for something outside the individual. And this something
outside the individual we will never, in my days, perceive directly.
Let me repeat. There is something outside the individual we don't know what
is. But there exists a kind of conformity that through evolution has come
into being between the physical objects and the organism's perceptions of
them. And because we are very much biological equal it is obvious that our
perceptions represent the objects out there in an analogous way. Most people
think so. But actually nobody perceive the world out there directly.

Now back to the PCT model. There are Objects, out there, we don't know what
is. But the model is constructed in a way where the objects become very near
our theories about the objects. And if we make simulations, we say that the
objects out there are analogous to our theories about them.

Our theories are defective, not nature.

I liked to read your reflections about the old men.

bjorn

Ted Cloak (2007.04.27)

  1. What is (are) the physical
    mechanism(s) for transmitting a meme?
    [From Bill Powers (2007.04.28.0617 MDT)]

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?
Incidentally, in your outline you speak of reference standards as
directing 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. Your
footnote does not make this plain. 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?

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

Best.

Bill P.

[From Bill Powers (2007.04.28.0720 MDT)]

Ted Cloak (2007.04.26)

···

Some added thoughts:

The overall idea behind cultural ethology appears to be that individuals
observe the behavior of others, along with their products, and from those
observations acquire a set of instructions (reference signals) of their
own. Overall, this implies that no individual has any control over his
own actions and products of action: that the surrounding culture
determines those things.

Another thing that I noticed in the CEP paper. The implication is that
the cultural ethologist sees what is actually there in the environment,
and can identify cultural features when he sees them. If a cultural
ethologist can do this, this implies there is a level of organization
higher than culture, at least in these special individuals. But if that’s
true, it follows that a person can not only perceive cultural features,
but select reference levels relative to them, and decide for higher
reasons whether to go along with culture or deviate from it. PCT allows,
therefore, for nonconformists, which is a good thing for me.

I think cultural ethology would benefit from the idea that culture is not
only a perception at a certain level in the human hierarchy, but that its
details do not exist at the highest level of perception and control (the
idea of culture itself is a system concept, but cultural features exist
at a lower level).

I hope that we can agree that the pre-PCT concepts in the CEP paper can
be discarded now – the idea of the neurotransmitters being dumped as a
result of incoming stimuli, for example, which is a vast
oversimplification of what we now understand to go on in the
brain.

Best,

Bill P.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Ted Cloak
(2007.04.28.1730 MDT)]

I think these are fundamental stipulations
that any sort of scientist or would-be scientist must make while at work:

  1.  There is a natural
    

world out there.

  1.  The methods of
    

science are necessary, and helpful, for the understanding of that world. (So
there must be other scientists, with minds, for us to argue with.)

  1.  There are no
    

absolute causes; every phenomenon has a myriad of determinants.

Moreover, neither Cultural Ethology nor
PCT is exempt from the necessity of those stipulations.

More, interlinearly, below.

I’ll get to your earlier message
from this morning tomorrow, I hope.

Regards,

Ted

[From Bill Powers (2007.04.28.0720 MDT)]
Ted Cloak (2007.04.26) –
Some added thoughts:
The overall idea behind cultural ethology appears to be that individuals
observe the behavior of others, along with their products, and from those
observations acquire a set of similar instructions
(reference signals) of their own. Yes! But only
after a great deal of perceiving, parsing, processing, filtering, etc.

In what
I think is an important sense, the CE researcher attempts to recapitulate and
articulate (part of) the process by which the subject acquired the bit of
culture under discussion. I now realize that that is what I did in CEE#1,
rather poorly, and what I hope to do somewhat better in CEE#1A (working title).

Overall, this implies that no individual has any control over his own
actions and products of action: that the surrounding culture determines those
things. No! It implies no such thing. There are of course many sources of
reference standards. Every natural phenomenon has multiple causation.
(But I do think that individuals have a lot less control than they generally
believe.)

Another thing that I noticed in the CEP paper. The implication is that the
cultural ethologist sees what is actually there in the environment, and can
identify cultural features when he sees them. Well, yes, if he’s
trained to do so and follows certain clues.

If a cultural ethologist can do this, this implies there is a level of
organization higher than culture, at least in these special individuals. But if
that’s true, it follows that a person can not only perceive cultural features,
but select reference levels relative to them, and decide for higher reasons
whether to go along with culture or deviate from it. PCT allows, therefore, for
nonconformists, which is a good thing for me. ** Well,
sure, sometimes. Maybe 10% of the people 10% of the time. But remember
that most culture is acquired in the first few years of life; kids are just
cultural sponges. And before making such decisions, even as an adult, one
has to realize, and admit, that one is hooked on culture. “I’m
Ted, and I’m culture-bound.” **
I think cultural ethology would benefit from the idea that culture is not only
a perception at a certain level in the human hierarchy, but that its details do
not exist at the highest level of perception and control (the idea of culture
itself is a system concept, but cultural features exist at a lower level). Just among
us CSGers, sure. But until he converts them, the missionary
shouldn’t involve the cannibals in discussions of church doctrine, should
he?

I hope that we can agree that the pre-PCT concepts in the CEP paper can be
discarded now – the idea of the neurotransmitters being dumped as a result of
incoming stimuli, for example, which is a vast oversimplification of what we
now understand to go on in the brain.
Yes, of course, absolutely.

  •  [From Ted Cloak
    
    (2007.04.29.1030 MDT)]

[From Bill Powers (2007.04.28.0617 MDT)]

Ted Cloak (2007.04.27) –

  1. 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?

  •  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.

  •  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.

  •  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?

  •  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.
  1. 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.

  •  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.

  •  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.

  1. Are memes to be found outside of brains?

n
No.

Then memes are constructed from perceptions of things that are not memes?

  •  Yes, perceptions of things that
    
    are not memes but which were constructed by control systems employing
    memes, as a rule. (You have to make an exception for the first case of a
    novel behavior being picked up as a meme.)

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.

  •  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.

  •  So please, guys, help me on
    

    this. Take another look at the first posting in this thread.

Regards to all,

Ted

[From Bill Powers (2007.04.29.1755
MDT)]

  • Ted Cloak (2007.04.29.1030
    MDT)]
  • 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.
    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 …”

A small point here, but control systems don’t direct their actions. They
vary their actions as required to make the consequences of the actions
(as perceived) match the reference standards.

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.

  • 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.
    Well, not so much when you speak of control systems controlling
    perceptions. You’re speaking here of open-loop systems in which multiple
    causes act and the result is simply the vector sum of the influences. But
    when a control system is involved, the action of the system varies in
    such a way that the vector sum of all influences is controlled. It is
    made to match the reference signal by varying the one influence that the
    control system can exert, to make up for changes in all the other
    influences that act independently. As long as the control system
    functions properly, it’s pretty certain that the net result will match
    the reference condition.

Your footnote does not
make this plain.

  • To which footnote do you
    refer?
    This one:
    3
    In PCT terms, his
    control systems will continually adjust his subsequent actions to make
    his then-current perceptions
    more closely approximate his now-stored perceptions/reference standards.
    Behavior, in the final analysis, is the control
    of perception.
    Unfortunately, this footnote is contradicted in the paragraph
    following the reference to it:
    that an observer’s stored
    perceptions/reference standards may approach functional identity to
    the
    reference standards used in directing the actions he
    observed.4
    But actions are still not what control systems control. I think
    what you want to say is that other people have caused certain things to
    exist in the environment which we learn to perceive, and to control for
    ourselves. The actions we produce in order to control these things are
    not, in general , predictable; what is predictable are the outcomes that
    we will bring into being.
    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.
  • 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.
    These are all controlled outcomes of actions; at this level, the
    actions consists of altering muscle tensions and controlling joint
    angles. In part I’m just quibbling about the widespread tendency to give
    behavior-names to things that are really consequences of behavior, a
    habit that isn’t going to go away soon. But we should try to remain pure
    about this, because there’s enough confusion about behavior in existence
    already and we shouldn’t make it worse.

I still maintain that “little Jimmy” is a statistical artifact
and a way of making a low probability fact seem to have a high
probability. Remember that in the social sciences (as Gary Cziko once
reported), the average correlation found in published papers was 0.29.
That implies that there are a lot of very low-quality facts in those
disciplines. But I’m not arguing against your basic thesis here.

I’m sure there are many aspects of what we learn to do that we are not
conscious of at a given time, but I’m also sure that Little Jimmy could
easily describe how he holds a hammer and picks up a nail, if asked.
These are not actions that are so difficult to do that the only way to
learn them is to watch someone else doing them. I’m not saying that an
adult can’t help a child use a hammer more effectively; I remember
(vaguely) being shown how to grasp the handle near its end and “let
the hammer do the work”, by my dad. I’m also sure that I did not, at
the time, say to myself “I am now acquiring a skill from my
culture,” so I didn’t know that some day, someone would apply that
description to what was happening. In that sense, the acquisition was
unconscious. But it was unconscious only at one level. It was perfectly
conscious at the level of acquiring control of grasping, lifting, and
swinging.

  • 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.
  • So please, guys, help me on this. Take another look at the
    first posting in this thread.
    No doubt you can
    see the issues here.

OK. I recommend watching your terms carefully simply to show the
right way to describe actions and controlled consequences in PCT. Some
people will understand. I’m not crazy about this concept of a
“meme” because it rather skips over the whole theory of
learning in PCT and implies what seems to me too close a parallel between
evolutionary processes and the reorganizing processes of a single
lifetime. But it’s your paper and I won’t try to tell you what to write
(not before it’s published, anyhow). I’m sure that there must be emergent
laws of memetics, even though the underlying PCT model is very different
(as thermodynamics expresses emergent laws that look very different from
the underlying kinetic theory). I wish you luck!

Best,

Bill P.