Friday, September 15, 2006
The second evolution and Danny Vendramini
This is only a small remark and links to Danny Vendramini, Australian author, who suggests highly interesting new ideas on inheritance and evolution. I think he is right, but I also think his system is only one –or maximally two-level system, whereas I think that the system must be multi-level one. I have been working on this idea for more than 2 years, steadily refining the concept, taking new ideas from many researchers and thinkers from all over the world. When I succeed in expressing and explaining this idea in writing I will post it here for everyone.
Here only the links to Danny Vendramini Origin of a big idea - In Depth - theage.com.au and to the page with his 5 main writings in pdf Second Evolution-5papers
Here only the links to Danny Vendramini Origin of a big idea - In Depth - theage.com.au and to the page with his 5 main writings in pdf Second Evolution-5papers
Thursday, September 14, 2006
MY IDEAS ON EVOLUTION
Small ideas on evolution and is beginnings
Many authors have different words and different concepts to the topic of evolution, there are different theories and different hypothesis. Most probably we are not developed enough to be able to understand, and sometime in the future we will know that for sure.
I believe that in order to understand the possible concepts of evolution we must take into consideration the results from many sciences. There are researcher who believe memes were the second part of evolution, so called cultural evolution, other deny this idea and came up with the theory of contextual concepts.
All these theories however beautiful they may be do not explain the evolution and its beginning. Mostly they do not take into consideration facts from semiotics. If someone understands what semiotics is about, he will necessarily come to conclusion that communication of whatever type of living organism with its environment happens through signals which the outside world constantly emits; be it noise in atmosphere, or the waves of sound spread through solid material, earth itself, e.g. by volcano explosion, raindrops, falling tree etc. The next type of waves that from the point of view of life on earth had always been here are the waves of light.
So, at least these two types of waves were here for sure at the very beginning of life on earth. These waves are only the carrier of messages, signals that the life can code and decode. Most probably there was another type of communication at the very beginning of evolution, the transmission of smell.
Evolution must have happened on the base of these transmission possibilities. It would make no sense at all to construct some kind of life that cannot understand the signals of its own environment. Such life would have to be surely sentenced to death.
The influence of the environment was, has been and will be huge, upon the life in what ever of its forms. I believe that the environment helped life to come to existence, and only the forms of life as we know it now are the product of our environment.
Many researchers argue that there were two different evolutions, the evolution of biological life and that of cultural life. Today everybody agrees on the theory of the evolution of biological life, not so simple is this problem when we speak about cultural evolution, and especially about the beginnings of the both.
So life had to and really it did develop in the frame of conditions on the earth some 3 to 4 billion years ago. What can we be sure of that it really did function at that time? I would say it’s physics and chemistry with all their laws, of which we already know some. For sure it was light here, as our Sun existed before the Earth, and was emitting light. So did function one more phenomenon, the transmission of waves of sound. Before there was atmosphere on Earth, these waves just spread through Earth itself.
The absolutely first type of life, but it is highly questionable if it really was life as we see it today, might have been started by these waves, maybe in water or in some other kind of liquid material. This liquid may function as catalyst because of its ability to react in a certain way to waves.
Water, if brought to swinging by some kind of waves, sound waves e.g., shows fantastic pictures brought about by the inner traits of water. These reactions may have functioned as catalyst.
There is a new word standing for a new process, teemosis. This could be the first stage of epigenetics, and this goes in the direction that I suggested earlier: that inheritance occurs in many stages, and genetics is the last one, according to the present knowledge, and that there are several stages before genetics, one of them might be epigenetics and the one before might be teemosis. There is still a large probability that there will be more stages found.
In some of my previous writings I suggested that the outside world has influence upon the living creature, this influence can become impact if repeated many times over many generations, if this really happens then this influence will be set onto the next level of inheritance system, and this will happen several times before the influence comes to be coded in genes. Genes itself are viewed upon by scientists as something unchangeable, which,of course, is false. Genes do change too, they develop, but they do in such a long time span that they seem to us unchangeable.
Many authors have different words and different concepts to the topic of evolution, there are different theories and different hypothesis. Most probably we are not developed enough to be able to understand, and sometime in the future we will know that for sure.
I believe that in order to understand the possible concepts of evolution we must take into consideration the results from many sciences. There are researcher who believe memes were the second part of evolution, so called cultural evolution, other deny this idea and came up with the theory of contextual concepts.
All these theories however beautiful they may be do not explain the evolution and its beginning. Mostly they do not take into consideration facts from semiotics. If someone understands what semiotics is about, he will necessarily come to conclusion that communication of whatever type of living organism with its environment happens through signals which the outside world constantly emits; be it noise in atmosphere, or the waves of sound spread through solid material, earth itself, e.g. by volcano explosion, raindrops, falling tree etc. The next type of waves that from the point of view of life on earth had always been here are the waves of light.
So, at least these two types of waves were here for sure at the very beginning of life on earth. These waves are only the carrier of messages, signals that the life can code and decode. Most probably there was another type of communication at the very beginning of evolution, the transmission of smell.
Evolution must have happened on the base of these transmission possibilities. It would make no sense at all to construct some kind of life that cannot understand the signals of its own environment. Such life would have to be surely sentenced to death.
The influence of the environment was, has been and will be huge, upon the life in what ever of its forms. I believe that the environment helped life to come to existence, and only the forms of life as we know it now are the product of our environment.
Many researchers argue that there were two different evolutions, the evolution of biological life and that of cultural life. Today everybody agrees on the theory of the evolution of biological life, not so simple is this problem when we speak about cultural evolution, and especially about the beginnings of the both.
So life had to and really it did develop in the frame of conditions on the earth some 3 to 4 billion years ago. What can we be sure of that it really did function at that time? I would say it’s physics and chemistry with all their laws, of which we already know some. For sure it was light here, as our Sun existed before the Earth, and was emitting light. So did function one more phenomenon, the transmission of waves of sound. Before there was atmosphere on Earth, these waves just spread through Earth itself.
The absolutely first type of life, but it is highly questionable if it really was life as we see it today, might have been started by these waves, maybe in water or in some other kind of liquid material. This liquid may function as catalyst because of its ability to react in a certain way to waves.
Water, if brought to swinging by some kind of waves, sound waves e.g., shows fantastic pictures brought about by the inner traits of water. These reactions may have functioned as catalyst.
There is a new word standing for a new process, teemosis. This could be the first stage of epigenetics, and this goes in the direction that I suggested earlier: that inheritance occurs in many stages, and genetics is the last one, according to the present knowledge, and that there are several stages before genetics, one of them might be epigenetics and the one before might be teemosis. There is still a large probability that there will be more stages found.
In some of my previous writings I suggested that the outside world has influence upon the living creature, this influence can become impact if repeated many times over many generations, if this really happens then this influence will be set onto the next level of inheritance system, and this will happen several times before the influence comes to be coded in genes. Genes itself are viewed upon by scientists as something unchangeable, which,of course, is false. Genes do change too, they develop, but they do in such a long time span that they seem to us unchangeable.
MY COMMENTS TO LIANE´S WORK
Liane Gabora’s thesis
Chapter 5
Each
“One could take this idea even further and say that if, say, a diary or tape recording can function as an externalized form of memory, then perhaps we each function as an externalized form of memory for each other”. /what is marked red I do not understand/
5.1.
Exemplar theories, A might simply remind B
Thinking developed from only mere and simple reaction to some stimulus; as I have written earlier. A certain sound, or certain colour was for some reason perceived as positive, e.g. sound of water presenting the possibility to drink, some sounds might have been perceived as negative; some other sounds might have during evolution change their meaning or have both, positive and negative, depending on some other factor, e.g. the sound of fire. The intensity of sound of fire might be such a factor; if the sound of fire is too intense, it might mean danger, if less intense, it might mean warmth, warm meal, light etc.
This “A reminding B” might be of high importance.
Shocking, I have just written this example and on the next page in your thesis you have extremely similar example with Mary and John; Mary showing water fountain to John and he takes a drink…..I will get mad…sometimes we think extremely similar
5.2.2
Chunking is a great idea…corresponds with my experiences
5.4.2
Content addressability
this seems true to me too, or feasible, BUT there must be some biases, it happens too often that we can remember the film, the total content of the film, names of three actors, the whole plot but we cannot recall the name of the actor playing the main character, spite we like him/ her, and we know that we know the name, but just cannot recall…so there must be a kind of pitfall to the hypercube, at least from time to time, sometimes it must be so that the activation of nerves does not function properly, but why??
Yesterday I had an idea, instead of this cube, I would make a comparison to a absorbent paper /blotting paper, tablet or sinking paper – which ever of these words is still used/ . Imagine this paper standing for our memory and the ink blot as the “meme”, the cultural information, if we get two or more pieces of CI then, the paper can take up all inks of different color, and they are overlapping sometimes and sometimes not, but there is the total information stored.
In order to make it a bit more three-dimensional, compared to the paper, nearly only two-dimensional, it might be a sponge, instead of absorbent paper, and I would come pretty much closer to your hypercube, but sponge is easier to understand.
This uncertainty aspect of memory reminds me of quantum physics “unschärfe”, and it might slightly correspond with the ideas of Prof. Hameroff. This is really a good idea!
5.4.3
“It seems reasonable that the surviving subset of the M possible inputs to each neural pathway is determined by biological and cultural selective pressures, instead of at random.” Perfect!!!! This is what I have said already before about sounds and light signals, waves, perceiving stimuli through our senses, actually our senses have developed in order to be able to perceive that type of signals which is normal here. Out of which there would be one really interesting conclusion: anywhere in the universe, if the laws of physics are the same there as here / which as far as I know must be so / the “creatures” organisms living there / if any / must function on the same basis as here on earth.
We have our senses, say hearing and seeing, limited to certain waves which can be perceived; somewhere in the universe there might be organisms capable of perceiving waves which we do not. Or, the second possibility, we do perceive all the wave spectrum, BUT unconsciously, we do not know it and cannot work with such information being transmitted to us in the wave lengths we are not capable of working with,
5.5.1
Liane you are great! I had similar ideas some 18 years ago, about parents. I came up with the following idea: Whatever parents do while teaching their child is wrong, only sometimes it can happen that they “hit” the proper point in the child’s mind. The problem is that we do not know what all information are stored in the brain of a child when it is born, then we do not know, and cannot know, what will happen when the child has some experience and how through the mixture of inherited stuff and experienced stuff the “worldview” develops, therefore we cannot properly take care of our children.
“Actions influence culture by affecting other individuals directly, as in dance or displays of affection or aggression, or indirectly, via artefacts such as buildings or art.”
Here I do not agree fully, I believe that any kind of communication is INDIRECT, there is always a kind of coding involved, and this coding can be made responsible for some interference, misunderstandings. The only DIRECT communication which I can imagine would be telepathy, and even that might appear later as indirect way of communication, most probably. Maybe the direct communication does not exist at all or maybe only inside of each single organism. And maybe even this would be indirect.
There are different ways of communication coding, some permit for higher bias and some are more precise, nevertheless, even these codes permit for misinterpretation: Word, language as a system of communication permits for extremely high bias, pictures for less and picture sequences, videos for even less.
It would be interesting to find out how many errors in communication happen e.g. in our immune system, or somewhere else, in our body.
5.5.2
“One’s conceptual network is in an ongoing process of responding and adapting to the world around it, and these changes in turn affect the impact it has back on the world.”
Only one comment here: extremely perfect!!
I only understand this also from the evolutionary perspective; this is also the “drive” or the way how we have developed, or as everything has developed.
“The correlation between the relativity concept of one instant and the tiger perception-concept of the next instant would be almost zero. Since bodily protection is higher on the hierarchy of needs at that instant than the need to continue with the theory of relativity, his momentous conceptual lineage would come to a screeching halt. But would it be lost forever? No. Sooner or later, once the tiger situation was taken care of, the relativity stream of thought would inevitably resume itself.”
Well, here I have some problems, to accept this without at least a small protest. I think that this can but does not have to happen. The reason again is the coding. If we have an idea in our head in words and someone disturbs, it can really happen that you will never get back onto the absolutely same train of thoughts…similar ...ok maybe but the good idea is lost, and I think in your brain then forever, some other brain might overtake the job some time later while reading your ideas and based upon them create “NEW OWN” idea that is exactly the one you lost some time ago.
The reason is according to my thinking that the “feeling”, the “perfect emotion” is lost.
What do you think of this??
Actually you confirm this a bit in the next subchapter
5.5.3
“Even the recollection of a previous episode is a construction event. Heraclitus said ‘You never step into the same stream twice’, and this applies to streams of experience as well as streams of water.”
Strange, I wanted to quote him too, in order to support my slight protest above.
5.5.4
This activation threshold you write about, is only another way of a system permitting for misinterpretation, because it is again only a different kind of coding
Any time we must apply some kind of coding it permits for misinterpretation, and we code basically everything and in “multi-level-coding” system, Thus our whole system of cultural communication consist of many subsequent coding systems depending on each other, and each of them permits for errors and misinterpretations.
Gosh, you bring me to unbelievable heights in my brain activity performance.
6.1
I am not sure but that what you write here - “In other words, when it comes to creativity, how your ‘beer cans’ are connected together is as important as how many of them there are.”- reminds me of the relation of quantity and quality in philosophy.
6.1.3
This example of yours, about noticing blue and torn book, and the boy who did not notice that at all, and the fact that then later the girl need not consciously recall that the other girl was sloppy /as you said/, is in fact that what I call emotions, the girl will be careful in giving things to the other girl, WITHOUT knowing why. BUT she will try to give a logical answer when asked, and this logical answer can be absolutely MADE UP; made up based on feelings, emotions which were stored together with the blue and torn book.
6.1.4
Here I found information that I did not know; the correlation of intelligence and creativity being correlated up to IQ of 120 and by higher IQ they are not correlated anymore. It is shocking for me. I tell you why. Without knowing this I maintain that the voting right can be given to people with higher IQ than 120 plus passing a test.
I feel that democracy today means that the majority that means people with less creativity and less intelligence decide about the future of those who are remarkably better.
6.1.5
Extremely interesting idea, I think it fits with my observation in economics and some others too; basically, if I understand you well, it says, the smarter you are, the deeper and the more complex your abstractions are, the MORE of new ones you can make. In simply words, the smarter you are, the faster your development will be, relatively to others.
This is also valid for an economy; the stronger an economy is, the faster it can grow compared to other economies in the world, typically US economy compared to other economies in the world, if there is a free trade.
Such “evolutionary” behavior or development can also be explained in even simpler example: a man who is strong and is using his strength at work and even in his leisure will constantly gain strength, / or will not loose it with progressing age / compared to a man who is not so strong and therefore cannot work so hard, and with the age he will loose his strength.
6.2.1 and on
Your example with the “Beer” in Goosehead Breweries is absolutely excellent, our creativity really depends on whether there is or not something within the reach in our brain; this wording is really good.
Liane, this is absolutely the best thing I have ever read about this topic, perfect, perfect, perfect. !!!
6.4.4
“The fact that ideas are not independently self-replicating like genes does not prevent them from proliferating.”
Here I have my problems. I believe genes also do not independently self-replicate. We only think they do because our knowledge is too poor. For sure there will be a system behind that, but a system that we do not know of now, and of course we do not know how such system works.
I would assume that there will be a sort of “outside” influence on stirring up all genes and creating new set of them, similar as the one about ideas.
From evolutionary point of view there must be some possibility for genes to evolve, to develop. This might be done by several “epigenetic” steps, multi-level coding of important information.
“Our worldviews overlap to the extent that similar experiences and genetic make-ups cause our brains to process information similarly. But they don’t overlap perfectly; each individual’s train of thought traces out a unique trajectory through conceptual space. It can be useful to think in terms of not only the worldview of an individual, but also the worldview of a group or even human society at large, wherein all frontiers of human endeavour are incorporated.”
This is in other words what drives me to understand this topic, the worldviews of different societies, nations, where the language builds up the relative border between geographically neighbouring nations. There is a funny thing to think of: there are no problems of mixing genes among members of neighbouring nations, but there are huge problems in accepting “MEMES” of the neighbour, mostly. Pretty often this incapability is blended over by seemingly proper behaviour, but mostly it is only about economic advantage. Basic examples of this is Mexico and the USA, or The Czech Republic and Germany / meaning only former West Germany, as former East Germans are about the same as Czechs, but they have the advantage of language./ Next example might be North and South Korea, and there might be other examples unknown to me, or where the difference is so subtle that we do not perceive these differences.
There is one more interesting phenomenon that I can see: since the unification of the two German states, it seems to me that the traits, memes, ideas of easterners / East Germans/ infects the minds of West Germans and not vice versa It might be explained by the fact that the eastern ideas are somewhat better for getting the survival advantage over the other. They are more comfortable, one does not have to strive too much, just only steal or betray, and the result comes fast, one does not have to wait.
It is a bit like destroying a car, where you see the result of your action immediately, but it takes hell of a time to construct one yourself. Some people need this fast “REWARD” for their actions Therefore, also there are extremely many people who start to learn a foreign language, but only few go through that, most of them drop that goal pretty soon; reason being it takes too long to learn a language.
6.6.
“To return to the Bob and Doug MacKenzie parlance, culture may have begun with the emergence of a ‘plastic thingy’—a hierarchical network of abstractions that unifies memories into an interconnected web.”
The beginning of culture in this sense according to my understanding of evolution is actually the first kind of a protocell that was capable of perceiving some kind of coding, even without knowing what information that coding carries; waves of sound or some similar waves, as that coding was the drive for the protocell to develop something to decode the signals.
7. and 8.
It seems to me that the problem of OOL and OOC could be solved by the law of change in quantity changing into new quality, German philosophers.
MY REMARKS
Here I believe I start to understand your autocatalytic systems. I believe I had similar idea but another approach. I just imagined something whatever, might be some of polymers e.g., in the unpleasant environment on earth at that time, and found out that already there interaction between this polymer and the outside world had to happen, and it was possible only respecting and making use of the laws of physics, basically waves; waves of light and waves of sound.
As far as passing on the information from one generation to another, I found out that it is not only this “hard heritage”, but also the “soft” one; soft heritage standing for epigenetics. Then I realized the system substance of the whole problem, any organism is a system, it must permit for development but also it must provide for stability, these is valid basically for all systems, in economics too. So gene provide hard heritage, thus taking care of the stability of the system. Epigenetics stores and passes over information which can cause changes.
I even believe that this must be multi-level system, only genes and “epigenes” would be too little for me. There must be more stages, maybe 4 or 5 or even more. A new impact of the outside world upon the living system must prove in time that it makes sense to code it “hard” into genes in many levels. I also believe that in humans and maybe in some animals too, the “soft” heritage contains also the mental information.
If this were true it might become the explanation for the well-known recalling of one’s past live. Actually these people do not recall THEIR past live but they recall the stored mental information passed on them by all their predecessors.
Links:
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=fd13d82d-ac11-40f4-a856-44a7bbe18f56
Text of the link
'Second genetic code' shakes heredity theory
OTTAWA -- Arturas Petronis and Moshe Szyf know a little something about the fads of science. As pioneers in the budding field of study known as epigenetics, they took their share of abuse for supporting scientific theories that, for many years, were considered heresy by most scientists.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=49112
http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/7408.html
There is a lot of new information on epigenetics. Extremely interesting and it highly supports my thinking, I hope at least.
I have also a section of epigenetics in my blog, about one year old, but I have not written too much on epigenetics.
Now I am somewhere in the middle of chapter 8, you are great, I like your way of thinking.
Chapter 10
“Physicists too are interested in how micro-physical entities change, and describe it as a process of either collapse or dynamical evolution. Is there anything all these supposed evolutionary processes have in common? Perhaps not. On the other hand, perhaps the time is ripe for a more general framework for evolution, of which biological, cultural, and physical evolution are but different manifestations.”
I would say you are absolutely right here, I have come to the sane idea, only I word that slightly differently; I say that evolution is always based on the same principle, only slightly modified by the system in which it is active.
What I mean is the following: people must communicate, they have different languages to use for communication, and these languages do differ but in a sense they are the same; they represent a code, a code with certain rules which one must apply, but the codes did develop in a different types of codes. So the base is the same, but the obvious part of it is different.
Directed mutation
This is excellent thought, I am used to say that there can be some randomness but also some kind of guided evolution, only we do not understand the rules of it, and therefore it appears to us as random: basically it is like the tow famous mistakes in statistics, the first one: we accept a theory that is wrong, and second, we deny theory that is ok, because there is no chance to know, right now. Maybe in future we will be able to understand the rules and then we will know that evolution is only a certain reaction of “something” in feedback to its surroundings.
As I see it this is also the way how senses were created, they are only a reaction to the surrounding; if there is a possibility of transporting sound by pressed air, some kind of sense will develop to catch these waves and decode the signal they carry, etc.
Page 153
“Since acquired traits are not heritable, the only contextual interactions that exert much of an effect on evolution are those that affect survival or the procurement of a mate.”
Well, this is what I do not believe, “acquired traits” must be heritable, as they are they are the expression of adaptation of the organism on its environment, and thus improving the chances of the next generations. I think that this happens in multi-level-transmission, one of the levels being epigenetics, or maybe epigenetics itself is multi-level system. So the heritage of traits might show up in the 5th or 10th generation, so that we cannot check on it, but it is in the logic of evolution and systems, the traits are passed over in steps, multi-level transmission system.
A trait is already obvious reaction to the environment, but before it becomes “visible” it must go through several stages, levels of information transmission, fro the outside world into the first level. If the signal of the environment keeps working, then it is moved one level higher, etc, until it gets into genes. It is only how information is passed over from the outside world into the genetic substance in order to get better adjusted to the environment.
If acquired traits were not heritable there would not be evolution “directed” by the environment. The problem is we do not see it properly. But some evidence is interesting: dogs can pass “the lid test”, cats cannot, cats can count up to four, minimum, like small children, dogs understand human signs, as pointing with the arm and finger somewhere, chimps cannot, and, even small puppies can understand human pointing with hand, it seems that this is inherited.
Most probably the problem is what you exactly call “traits”. Walking on our feet is a trait, to be equipped with the potential to learn a language is a trait specific for humans, animals do not have it, or on a much lower level of coding, and all these traits are inherited.
The sentence that acquired traits are not heritable can be viewed as true when we consider only one, two or three generations, but what when we will take into account 200 or 500 generations or 5000?? Ok, we live too short time to be able to take this really into account, but there is logic in it, I would say. Therefore I do not agree that acquired traits are not heritable, they must be heritable.
Chapter 5
Each
“One could take this idea even further and say that if, say, a diary or tape recording can function as an externalized form of memory, then perhaps we each function as an externalized form of memory for each other”. /what is marked red I do not understand/
5.1.
Exemplar theories, A might simply remind B
Thinking developed from only mere and simple reaction to some stimulus; as I have written earlier. A certain sound, or certain colour was for some reason perceived as positive, e.g. sound of water presenting the possibility to drink, some sounds might have been perceived as negative; some other sounds might have during evolution change their meaning or have both, positive and negative, depending on some other factor, e.g. the sound of fire. The intensity of sound of fire might be such a factor; if the sound of fire is too intense, it might mean danger, if less intense, it might mean warmth, warm meal, light etc.
This “A reminding B” might be of high importance.
Shocking, I have just written this example and on the next page in your thesis you have extremely similar example with Mary and John; Mary showing water fountain to John and he takes a drink…..I will get mad…sometimes we think extremely similar
5.2.2
Chunking is a great idea…corresponds with my experiences
5.4.2
Content addressability
this seems true to me too, or feasible, BUT there must be some biases, it happens too often that we can remember the film, the total content of the film, names of three actors, the whole plot but we cannot recall the name of the actor playing the main character, spite we like him/ her, and we know that we know the name, but just cannot recall…so there must be a kind of pitfall to the hypercube, at least from time to time, sometimes it must be so that the activation of nerves does not function properly, but why??
Yesterday I had an idea, instead of this cube, I would make a comparison to a absorbent paper /blotting paper, tablet or sinking paper – which ever of these words is still used/ . Imagine this paper standing for our memory and the ink blot as the “meme”, the cultural information, if we get two or more pieces of CI then, the paper can take up all inks of different color, and they are overlapping sometimes and sometimes not, but there is the total information stored.
In order to make it a bit more three-dimensional, compared to the paper, nearly only two-dimensional, it might be a sponge, instead of absorbent paper, and I would come pretty much closer to your hypercube, but sponge is easier to understand.
This uncertainty aspect of memory reminds me of quantum physics “unschärfe”, and it might slightly correspond with the ideas of Prof. Hameroff. This is really a good idea!
5.4.3
“It seems reasonable that the surviving subset of the M possible inputs to each neural pathway is determined by biological and cultural selective pressures, instead of at random.” Perfect!!!! This is what I have said already before about sounds and light signals, waves, perceiving stimuli through our senses, actually our senses have developed in order to be able to perceive that type of signals which is normal here. Out of which there would be one really interesting conclusion: anywhere in the universe, if the laws of physics are the same there as here / which as far as I know must be so / the “creatures” organisms living there / if any / must function on the same basis as here on earth.
We have our senses, say hearing and seeing, limited to certain waves which can be perceived; somewhere in the universe there might be organisms capable of perceiving waves which we do not. Or, the second possibility, we do perceive all the wave spectrum, BUT unconsciously, we do not know it and cannot work with such information being transmitted to us in the wave lengths we are not capable of working with,
5.5.1
Liane you are great! I had similar ideas some 18 years ago, about parents. I came up with the following idea: Whatever parents do while teaching their child is wrong, only sometimes it can happen that they “hit” the proper point in the child’s mind. The problem is that we do not know what all information are stored in the brain of a child when it is born, then we do not know, and cannot know, what will happen when the child has some experience and how through the mixture of inherited stuff and experienced stuff the “worldview” develops, therefore we cannot properly take care of our children.
“Actions influence culture by affecting other individuals directly, as in dance or displays of affection or aggression, or indirectly, via artefacts such as buildings or art.”
Here I do not agree fully, I believe that any kind of communication is INDIRECT, there is always a kind of coding involved, and this coding can be made responsible for some interference, misunderstandings. The only DIRECT communication which I can imagine would be telepathy, and even that might appear later as indirect way of communication, most probably. Maybe the direct communication does not exist at all or maybe only inside of each single organism. And maybe even this would be indirect.
There are different ways of communication coding, some permit for higher bias and some are more precise, nevertheless, even these codes permit for misinterpretation: Word, language as a system of communication permits for extremely high bias, pictures for less and picture sequences, videos for even less.
It would be interesting to find out how many errors in communication happen e.g. in our immune system, or somewhere else, in our body.
5.5.2
“One’s conceptual network is in an ongoing process of responding and adapting to the world around it, and these changes in turn affect the impact it has back on the world.”
Only one comment here: extremely perfect!!
I only understand this also from the evolutionary perspective; this is also the “drive” or the way how we have developed, or as everything has developed.
“The correlation between the relativity concept of one instant and the tiger perception-concept of the next instant would be almost zero. Since bodily protection is higher on the hierarchy of needs at that instant than the need to continue with the theory of relativity, his momentous conceptual lineage would come to a screeching halt. But would it be lost forever? No. Sooner or later, once the tiger situation was taken care of, the relativity stream of thought would inevitably resume itself.”
Well, here I have some problems, to accept this without at least a small protest. I think that this can but does not have to happen. The reason again is the coding. If we have an idea in our head in words and someone disturbs, it can really happen that you will never get back onto the absolutely same train of thoughts…similar ...ok maybe but the good idea is lost, and I think in your brain then forever, some other brain might overtake the job some time later while reading your ideas and based upon them create “NEW OWN” idea that is exactly the one you lost some time ago.
The reason is according to my thinking that the “feeling”, the “perfect emotion” is lost.
What do you think of this??
Actually you confirm this a bit in the next subchapter
5.5.3
“Even the recollection of a previous episode is a construction event. Heraclitus said ‘You never step into the same stream twice’, and this applies to streams of experience as well as streams of water.”
Strange, I wanted to quote him too, in order to support my slight protest above.
5.5.4
This activation threshold you write about, is only another way of a system permitting for misinterpretation, because it is again only a different kind of coding
Any time we must apply some kind of coding it permits for misinterpretation, and we code basically everything and in “multi-level-coding” system, Thus our whole system of cultural communication consist of many subsequent coding systems depending on each other, and each of them permits for errors and misinterpretations.
Gosh, you bring me to unbelievable heights in my brain activity performance.
6.1
I am not sure but that what you write here - “In other words, when it comes to creativity, how your ‘beer cans’ are connected together is as important as how many of them there are.”- reminds me of the relation of quantity and quality in philosophy.
6.1.3
This example of yours, about noticing blue and torn book, and the boy who did not notice that at all, and the fact that then later the girl need not consciously recall that the other girl was sloppy /as you said/, is in fact that what I call emotions, the girl will be careful in giving things to the other girl, WITHOUT knowing why. BUT she will try to give a logical answer when asked, and this logical answer can be absolutely MADE UP; made up based on feelings, emotions which were stored together with the blue and torn book.
6.1.4
Here I found information that I did not know; the correlation of intelligence and creativity being correlated up to IQ of 120 and by higher IQ they are not correlated anymore. It is shocking for me. I tell you why. Without knowing this I maintain that the voting right can be given to people with higher IQ than 120 plus passing a test.
I feel that democracy today means that the majority that means people with less creativity and less intelligence decide about the future of those who are remarkably better.
6.1.5
Extremely interesting idea, I think it fits with my observation in economics and some others too; basically, if I understand you well, it says, the smarter you are, the deeper and the more complex your abstractions are, the MORE of new ones you can make. In simply words, the smarter you are, the faster your development will be, relatively to others.
This is also valid for an economy; the stronger an economy is, the faster it can grow compared to other economies in the world, typically US economy compared to other economies in the world, if there is a free trade.
Such “evolutionary” behavior or development can also be explained in even simpler example: a man who is strong and is using his strength at work and even in his leisure will constantly gain strength, / or will not loose it with progressing age / compared to a man who is not so strong and therefore cannot work so hard, and with the age he will loose his strength.
6.2.1 and on
Your example with the “Beer” in Goosehead Breweries is absolutely excellent, our creativity really depends on whether there is or not something within the reach in our brain; this wording is really good.
Liane, this is absolutely the best thing I have ever read about this topic, perfect, perfect, perfect. !!!
6.4.4
“The fact that ideas are not independently self-replicating like genes does not prevent them from proliferating.”
Here I have my problems. I believe genes also do not independently self-replicate. We only think they do because our knowledge is too poor. For sure there will be a system behind that, but a system that we do not know of now, and of course we do not know how such system works.
I would assume that there will be a sort of “outside” influence on stirring up all genes and creating new set of them, similar as the one about ideas.
From evolutionary point of view there must be some possibility for genes to evolve, to develop. This might be done by several “epigenetic” steps, multi-level coding of important information.
“Our worldviews overlap to the extent that similar experiences and genetic make-ups cause our brains to process information similarly. But they don’t overlap perfectly; each individual’s train of thought traces out a unique trajectory through conceptual space. It can be useful to think in terms of not only the worldview of an individual, but also the worldview of a group or even human society at large, wherein all frontiers of human endeavour are incorporated.”
This is in other words what drives me to understand this topic, the worldviews of different societies, nations, where the language builds up the relative border between geographically neighbouring nations. There is a funny thing to think of: there are no problems of mixing genes among members of neighbouring nations, but there are huge problems in accepting “MEMES” of the neighbour, mostly. Pretty often this incapability is blended over by seemingly proper behaviour, but mostly it is only about economic advantage. Basic examples of this is Mexico and the USA, or The Czech Republic and Germany / meaning only former West Germany, as former East Germans are about the same as Czechs, but they have the advantage of language./ Next example might be North and South Korea, and there might be other examples unknown to me, or where the difference is so subtle that we do not perceive these differences.
There is one more interesting phenomenon that I can see: since the unification of the two German states, it seems to me that the traits, memes, ideas of easterners / East Germans/ infects the minds of West Germans and not vice versa It might be explained by the fact that the eastern ideas are somewhat better for getting the survival advantage over the other. They are more comfortable, one does not have to strive too much, just only steal or betray, and the result comes fast, one does not have to wait.
It is a bit like destroying a car, where you see the result of your action immediately, but it takes hell of a time to construct one yourself. Some people need this fast “REWARD” for their actions Therefore, also there are extremely many people who start to learn a foreign language, but only few go through that, most of them drop that goal pretty soon; reason being it takes too long to learn a language.
6.6.
“To return to the Bob and Doug MacKenzie parlance, culture may have begun with the emergence of a ‘plastic thingy’—a hierarchical network of abstractions that unifies memories into an interconnected web.”
The beginning of culture in this sense according to my understanding of evolution is actually the first kind of a protocell that was capable of perceiving some kind of coding, even without knowing what information that coding carries; waves of sound or some similar waves, as that coding was the drive for the protocell to develop something to decode the signals.
7. and 8.
It seems to me that the problem of OOL and OOC could be solved by the law of change in quantity changing into new quality, German philosophers.
MY REMARKS
Here I believe I start to understand your autocatalytic systems. I believe I had similar idea but another approach. I just imagined something whatever, might be some of polymers e.g., in the unpleasant environment on earth at that time, and found out that already there interaction between this polymer and the outside world had to happen, and it was possible only respecting and making use of the laws of physics, basically waves; waves of light and waves of sound.
As far as passing on the information from one generation to another, I found out that it is not only this “hard heritage”, but also the “soft” one; soft heritage standing for epigenetics. Then I realized the system substance of the whole problem, any organism is a system, it must permit for development but also it must provide for stability, these is valid basically for all systems, in economics too. So gene provide hard heritage, thus taking care of the stability of the system. Epigenetics stores and passes over information which can cause changes.
I even believe that this must be multi-level system, only genes and “epigenes” would be too little for me. There must be more stages, maybe 4 or 5 or even more. A new impact of the outside world upon the living system must prove in time that it makes sense to code it “hard” into genes in many levels. I also believe that in humans and maybe in some animals too, the “soft” heritage contains also the mental information.
If this were true it might become the explanation for the well-known recalling of one’s past live. Actually these people do not recall THEIR past live but they recall the stored mental information passed on them by all their predecessors.
Links:
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=fd13d82d-ac11-40f4-a856-44a7bbe18f56
Text of the link
'Second genetic code' shakes heredity theory
OTTAWA -- Arturas Petronis and Moshe Szyf know a little something about the fads of science. As pioneers in the budding field of study known as epigenetics, they took their share of abuse for supporting scientific theories that, for many years, were considered heresy by most scientists.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=49112
http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/7408.html
There is a lot of new information on epigenetics. Extremely interesting and it highly supports my thinking, I hope at least.
I have also a section of epigenetics in my blog, about one year old, but I have not written too much on epigenetics.
Now I am somewhere in the middle of chapter 8, you are great, I like your way of thinking.
Chapter 10
“Physicists too are interested in how micro-physical entities change, and describe it as a process of either collapse or dynamical evolution. Is there anything all these supposed evolutionary processes have in common? Perhaps not. On the other hand, perhaps the time is ripe for a more general framework for evolution, of which biological, cultural, and physical evolution are but different manifestations.”
I would say you are absolutely right here, I have come to the sane idea, only I word that slightly differently; I say that evolution is always based on the same principle, only slightly modified by the system in which it is active.
What I mean is the following: people must communicate, they have different languages to use for communication, and these languages do differ but in a sense they are the same; they represent a code, a code with certain rules which one must apply, but the codes did develop in a different types of codes. So the base is the same, but the obvious part of it is different.
Directed mutation
This is excellent thought, I am used to say that there can be some randomness but also some kind of guided evolution, only we do not understand the rules of it, and therefore it appears to us as random: basically it is like the tow famous mistakes in statistics, the first one: we accept a theory that is wrong, and second, we deny theory that is ok, because there is no chance to know, right now. Maybe in future we will be able to understand the rules and then we will know that evolution is only a certain reaction of “something” in feedback to its surroundings.
As I see it this is also the way how senses were created, they are only a reaction to the surrounding; if there is a possibility of transporting sound by pressed air, some kind of sense will develop to catch these waves and decode the signal they carry, etc.
Page 153
“Since acquired traits are not heritable, the only contextual interactions that exert much of an effect on evolution are those that affect survival or the procurement of a mate.”
Well, this is what I do not believe, “acquired traits” must be heritable, as they are they are the expression of adaptation of the organism on its environment, and thus improving the chances of the next generations. I think that this happens in multi-level-transmission, one of the levels being epigenetics, or maybe epigenetics itself is multi-level system. So the heritage of traits might show up in the 5th or 10th generation, so that we cannot check on it, but it is in the logic of evolution and systems, the traits are passed over in steps, multi-level transmission system.
A trait is already obvious reaction to the environment, but before it becomes “visible” it must go through several stages, levels of information transmission, fro the outside world into the first level. If the signal of the environment keeps working, then it is moved one level higher, etc, until it gets into genes. It is only how information is passed over from the outside world into the genetic substance in order to get better adjusted to the environment.
If acquired traits were not heritable there would not be evolution “directed” by the environment. The problem is we do not see it properly. But some evidence is interesting: dogs can pass “the lid test”, cats cannot, cats can count up to four, minimum, like small children, dogs understand human signs, as pointing with the arm and finger somewhere, chimps cannot, and, even small puppies can understand human pointing with hand, it seems that this is inherited.
Most probably the problem is what you exactly call “traits”. Walking on our feet is a trait, to be equipped with the potential to learn a language is a trait specific for humans, animals do not have it, or on a much lower level of coding, and all these traits are inherited.
The sentence that acquired traits are not heritable can be viewed as true when we consider only one, two or three generations, but what when we will take into account 200 or 500 generations or 5000?? Ok, we live too short time to be able to take this really into account, but there is logic in it, I would say. Therefore I do not agree that acquired traits are not heritable, they must be heritable.
MY COMMENTS TO LIANE´S IDEAS
Hi Liane,
This is just only to show you that I really know what you mean; I only do not express myself as precisely as it would be necessary.
Susan Blackmore writes that a piece of music is a meme, and according to her a meme must replicate itself, well, this does not function. It depends how we humans can perceive music. I see it in two basic ways, either written on a piece of paper, or we can hear it. In first case, it would mean that the piece of paper would get copied by itself, or even mutate!!! Which would mean a different piece of music would have to come out. This is obviously nonsense. The second case shows the same sort of nonsense: a piece of music humans can hear is actually only pressed air, and it for sure cannot copy itself. At least it really does not seem to be able to do so. So the only one who can replicate music is a human being, well and not every single one, e.g. I am not a musician at all, and I cannot sing. So only some human beings are capable of copying a piece of music. If you let music play in a place where there are no people or no minds at all, so the music (a meme) cannot get replicated, it will “die” in the air because it will not get into any host, any mind. A meme without human mind exists but cannot be copied.
But there might be exceptions in some animals, some birds are told to copy and INVENT songs. Maybe some other animals can do that too, but we just still do not know
This should not be a problem though, as animals have minds too, not our type of minds but some kind of. And it might be enough to be able to copy some sound. Parrot,e.g.
One must apply information from different sciences, just recently I heard that humans have 25% of genes as plants, 50% as flies, 75% as dogs, and they differ only by 1.5% from the DNA of chimps.
I still call the piece of music a meme, but not seen as puritanical as Susan does; for me it is a good name for information which can be processed in our brain, and I like the word “meme”.
I think I understand how memes, or information or ideas are transported. I say by signs, and I refer to semiotics, but again not in puritanical way, what I actually mean is a kind of signal, such a signal which our senses can perceive.
It can easily be explained on visual stimuli. Our eyes can see only certain type of light, what is below and above that we just do not see, at least not consciously. The same is with sound.
But I believe our senses I mean human senses have got adapted to our needs. We see better than a dog, but worse than an eagle. Here one might task a question; do we see better than humans 2000 years ago? I believe we do. Once I read something about Homer, and they wrote there that his description of colours might be the evidence that he could not differentiate colours as we do now.
I think that we must understand how our senses come to being. I think it was pure necessity. Let’s consider sound. The nature without any kinds of animals is not quiet. There are thunderstorms, a lightning hits a tree and the tree falls down and it all makes sounds, falling raindrops make sound, waterfalls make sounds etc. These different sounds are only waves of pressed air / gas /, but they are signals for danger, or for something pleasant, possibility to drink e.g.
I think these signals, signs, just because they existed brought about also systems of perceiving them, eyes and ears. These two senses perceive waves, waves of light or waves of pressed air.
Other senses are not so easy for me to grasp and explain. We sometimes smell things we actually do not realize smelling them, pheromones, e.g.
I am not hundred per cent sure that the basic unit of cultural information should not be discrete as you say. I think it could, but I am not too much sure, this idea of yours is pretty new to me.
Let me make a parallel: a pc today can master operations which do not appear as discrete, like painting or websites in flash, I mean flash video sequences, but actually they are at the lowest level of coding, it is only a binary code, 0 and 1, absolutely discrete.
But in order to make a video sequence out of 0´s and 1´s we need an information how to put these two signs one after another to make some sense.
An electron is also discrete, but many electrons and many neutrons and protons make up a system which is not discrete at all, the universe.
So I think that cultural information consists of discrete parts, which can be transmitted, coded and decoded, but they gain their real meaning in minds, and there they appear as not discrete, they appear as complex information.
Take space shuttle, it is cultural entity, and there is information how to build it again, but it is not one single information, but many of them for each part of the space shuttle; and basically you can break the “how-to-build-space-shuttle-information” in as many pieces of information as you please. The last one will be 0´s and 1´s in a pc or words, and words you can break down to letters or basic sounds, and sounds you can bring down to waves of air.
Your thesis
Chapter 3.1.2
You write there that the .....“....the spontaneous
verbal explanation of an idea is an expression, whereas the text version of it is a representation.“
Whereas I believe that regardless the way of demonstrating the idea, it is always the same, as the only difference in your example here - according to my understanding - is the medium in which it is coded; when speaking it is coded in words, which in turn are coded in waves of pressed air, and if it is written, the idea is again coded in words, but the sound of the words is transcribed into signs - letters. In first case the message is perceived by ears, in the second by eyes, that is all which I can see as difference; different medium, different coding for different receptors.
Chapter 3.1.3
Sperber...he says that.........“cultural information is transformed every time it is
transmitted to such an extent that an analogy with biological reproduction or replication is
inappropriate” [Sperber 1994].
This is nonsense, no „MEME“, no cultural information can be transformed in the time it is being transported in the sense of cultural evolution; the transformation happens in the „MIND“, in the brain, when the „incoming MEME“ , or „incoming cultural information“ is processed in the brain by other information already having been stored there that have created a kind of a „FILTER“ for testing the new incoming information.
Basically, it is the difference between the content, „The MEME“ or just the „CI“ / cultural information / and its transcript for transport, be it spoken word, or written word or whatever other type of sign, e.g. the „hand-language“ used by deaf and other handicapped people..
Sometimes it can happen that the CI is really sort of modified on its way from the broadcaster to the recipient, compare a radio interference waves, but this has mostly nothing to do with the evolution.
There is a game which might represent an exceptional possibility, the game where many people are only allowed to whisper, one word or a sentence to the neighbour, and he to his neighbour, etc, mostly at the and of the line , the last person will say something absolutely different than the word given to the first person.
But this happens only because of bias during transportation of the CI; that means WRONG coding of it.
Another problem which I see / maybe I do not understand that fully / are terms „the expression or representation“. And what is the CI „broadcasted“in sign language??????
And what would be then this? I thing about a problem in German, I write it in Czech to my blog, and then I tell you that idea in English in spoken words????? This CI has been coded several times, and actually it was first a representation and then expression of that representation???? Well, well, I have my problems with this.
The last sentence in this subchapter is ok for me only to 50%; cultural entities GET changed only when they are assimilated, that’s absolutely correct, but NOT when transmitted. They cannot be changed by the evolutionary process, they can only get biased. I think I am right here, I believe we must go as down as to the physics, the word is coded into the waves of pressed air. These waves of pressed air can be biased, interfered with some other waves of pressed air, let’s say, thunder, or the noise of some huge engine. But such interference is NOT a change of the cultural entity itself, what gets changed is the CODING of the entity.
Chapter 3.2.1
The problem of spatial information, the information obtained from reading the map!?, Well, there is a mistake in the word „READING A MAP“, we do not read maps; maps have no words, the coding of the cultural information is different, no words but sort of pictures, signs, to be interpreted in a certain way, but for sure not as words, therefore I believe we cannot speak of reading a map. It is just misleading expression used in normal language, but completely wrong. There is no reading whatsoever in studying the signs in a map.
There are only names of towns or rivers in a map, which makes that a bit complicated, but the information about rivers lakes etc is „read“, perceived in colours etc. A highway in a map is not read; it is seen, just as a tree, lake or waterfalls in real life. It is seen as represented by a sign, semiotics.
Imitation
Think of this: certain information can be imitated, like using a hammer and hitting the nail, some other information, like your thesis, are prohibited to imitate, to copy. It might mean that the imitation occurs at „lower“ levels of our culture and „higher“ levels of cultural entities are not imitated but sort of “processed”. Take car driving, when a person learns how to drive a car, it copies and imitates, but later, based upon imitated information own way of driving corresponding with the other „MEMES“ or CI already in the brain of the new driver develops. If it were not so, everybody would have to drive the same way, which is obviously not the case. So the imitated „basic“ information of how to drive is then adjusted, processed and CHANGED, though only a bit.
There is a shocking case about driving, if you drive a car with a gear shift, and then you get a car with automatic transmission, you DO NOT NEED TO IMITATE anything, you just drive!!!! Which could mean a certain train of thoughts being started with the KNOWING of having a car with automatic gear changing, one could say we know in such a case that we do not have to use one pedal, and we do not have to use the gear stick, the automatic is doing that for us, but we do not IMITATE. We process certain information.
Chapter 3.2.3
Perfect sentence at the beginning of this chapter, this is exactly what I thing too, especially when one recalls what Susan’s favourite topic was some time ago; the phenomenon of near death experience. She picks up topics easy to cash on; which is also a piece of culture.
Now let’s take the case with the garden frog. I am not quite sure but I believe that even this kind of frog has “ITS” culture. It is only our problem that we do not recognize that. I think that here the time of development of new ideas by a frog and time of human life is too different. If a frog can get a new idea and manifest that in 5000 years, how would we, humans, get that? We do not live long enough to see that. I think that at least every kind of animal living in any kind of group MUST have “SOME” kind of culture. We are only too narcissistic to believe our culture is THE CULTURE and some other cultures are not cultures at all. Actually many wars among different humans have been waged exactly because of this reason.
Chapter 3.3
Your term “catchy memes” is absolutely correct; that’s why I like the word. Now it is necessary to analyze why we like something. I think there are some reasons for perceiving something as pleasant or catchy. It is a combination of many “Traits” hidden or coded into the term. It is short, it is similar to something else, and we believe to be able to understand that and many more “traits”. The similarity to something else is very important. About 350 years ago Comenius wrote about teaching and postulated the most basic procedure of teaching: going from simple to more difficult and from known to unknown.
Creativity
Creativity can be “collective affair” or “team work”, because it comes from a certain exchange of ideas, reading your thesis makes me think more, and combine all I have ever heard or read. Thus I use somebody else’s ideas to develop new ideas, but sometimes it is possible to make this kind of collective brain storming just alone. Sometimes I think of a problem in one language, say in English, then I try to express the same idea in German, using words I like; and because words are loaded with emotions sometimes the mere fact of expressing the same idea in different languages brings me to completely new idea, because I use different words. So I would say the creativity is a kind of process of joining ideas which no one has ever tried to join before, regardless if I do it in collective, or if I do it alone in my head. On the other hand it might be extremely difficult to find out which ideas are purely mine, gained by solely my activity and which are copied. Most probably all of them mix and interact, so that we do not know if a certain idea was really only mine or mine as a reaction on idea of somebody else.
“…the complex web of assumptions, beliefs, motives, and attitudes of each person…”
this all is a MEME for me, well actually the complex of it is a memplex. And what I call emotions, they might be as well created by a set of assumptions, motives and attitudes…
Liane,
What you write here is really extremely good, and I feel absolutely confirmed in my thoughts. The only thing which might be a problem is just the way how we express our thoughts, the words we use.
Important for me
How do you differentiate between discrete and particulate? For me, it is the same, which confuses me; if it were the same, some of the ideas here I would not get properly, so these two words must mean something different…but where is the difference??
Chapter 3.5.1
What you refer to as heuristic search has been especially proven by chess players versus pc playing chess. Anyway I believe there is a random part in cultural evolution, be it a tiny one, a small percentage of cases of evolving new ideas.
Remark
You write in better words what I have written here earlier…you are good, excellent…I like what you write, as it is that what I see too.
I am really shocked…you gave here an example with white and black colours, well I have “evolved” this “meme” some time ago, but with many colours, not only black and white, When I tried to explain what happens when a new idea, a meme, will get into a mind filter of somebody else…It will be always processed in a bit different way; in one brain it will be pink, in the other one purple, green or yellow, and even of different intensity.
Chapter 3.6.2
Your example of that girl Natalie going to the voting booth and either having an accident caused by other driver or getting a speeding ticket which has two different outcomes for her voting, this is what I call randomness I evolution. The state of her mind, or the “MEME” such mind creates is caused by accidental event which no one can predict, the third possibility for that young lady and her mind would be, when none of the events mentioned above happens, then, she must do some other sort of decision making. And this third one would not be random. So in cultural evolution as you say it is absolutely necessary to have aimed “thinking”, this mulling over an idea in one’s head, or having a conversation with someone else, or it can happen in random, and it goes pretty well together with my idea of feelings. This is also true, I think for the next example you give here: the reaction to the question: “Are you angry?”, depending on the voice.
In Australian English they have a sentence:”Are you all right?” This can have two absolutely different meanings according to the tone of voice and situation in which the question is asked. One case would be a salesperson asking you this question and meaning if you need some help. The second is the case when this same question is asked in an angry tone of voice, then meaning:”Aren’t you silly?”, “Are you ok in your head”?
This again refers to the complexity of human communication and coding of the meme into different codes. Especially this example with Australian English shows how we communicate, NOT only through words, but also through feelings, which in turn are expressed, coded in some tone or facial expression, which Susan totally denied in one of her emails to me. The coding of our communication is extremely important to understand and we rely on and depend on them heavily.
Take ICQ or any other IM program, or telephone, always some part of human communication is missing and it will, THROUGH evolution of the particular system of communication, be substituted by something else, using telephone we miss the facial expression and we substitute it by the tone of voice or we explain more in depth what we mean, using ICQ emoticons were developed to state the state of mind in which we type, to enable better understanding.
Another good idea of yours: quantum logic, A piece of music and whether you have or have not the potential to be emotionally moved by that music, this shows that emotions, feelings are important for communication, and that the communication is really only a way of coding the “MEME” / well meme in my sense of the word, not that of Susan/. I am not sure if the term quantum logic is ok, it could be…but it corresponds with my ideas of logical and emotional memory, I think that at least.
And now music as such, I believe the following: music is only a more developed noise, and we have inherited the potential to distinguish between nice and bad noises. I think it comes from the total world evolution, there were noises meaning something good, like waterfalls might have stood for possibility to drink. There can be some similarity in the waves of pressed air and therefore we perceive some tones as pleasant and some as not so much pleasant and some we can decode as danger.
3.7
“Acquired characteristics can be inherited.” Well for sure, and not only bodily characteristics, but also mental characteristics. This fact brings me to epigenetics as I see it.
I see it so: genes provide for stability of the body, but there must be some system which permits for evolution, and it might be epigenetics, it even could be multilevel epigenetics. Anything which an organism experiences is stored at one level of memory in order to test whether this experience is of high importance, if so, that means this experience repeats several times, then it will be transferred to the next higher level of memory. Maybe already so that it will be inherited but there will be no demonstration of this inherited information. If the same experience happens even in the next offspring and maybe in a row of following offsprings then this information might be transferred to the next higher level of memory. Then, if it repeats again for a long time in many generations it might get to the level of genes. And then it will be inherited HARD. I have found an article on soft and hard inheritance that as I believe supports my ideas. The system is pretty much similar to learning foreign languages as adult person. One remembers the words which appear more frequently. At first a new word is put into a short time memory, when repeated many times it shifts to long time memory. When using the language more than only at school, speaking to natives, reading books etc, there is the next level of understanding the foreign language, the level of emotional knowledge of that language. This can be acquired by TV, watching films, as there is the connection between the words used and the “overall-situation” of the person using the words. And that in turn is actually your Contextual approach. It is excellent. Everything seems to fit.
This is just only to show you that I really know what you mean; I only do not express myself as precisely as it would be necessary.
Susan Blackmore writes that a piece of music is a meme, and according to her a meme must replicate itself, well, this does not function. It depends how we humans can perceive music. I see it in two basic ways, either written on a piece of paper, or we can hear it. In first case, it would mean that the piece of paper would get copied by itself, or even mutate!!! Which would mean a different piece of music would have to come out. This is obviously nonsense. The second case shows the same sort of nonsense: a piece of music humans can hear is actually only pressed air, and it for sure cannot copy itself. At least it really does not seem to be able to do so. So the only one who can replicate music is a human being, well and not every single one, e.g. I am not a musician at all, and I cannot sing. So only some human beings are capable of copying a piece of music. If you let music play in a place where there are no people or no minds at all, so the music (a meme) cannot get replicated, it will “die” in the air because it will not get into any host, any mind. A meme without human mind exists but cannot be copied.
But there might be exceptions in some animals, some birds are told to copy and INVENT songs. Maybe some other animals can do that too, but we just still do not know
This should not be a problem though, as animals have minds too, not our type of minds but some kind of. And it might be enough to be able to copy some sound. Parrot,e.g.
One must apply information from different sciences, just recently I heard that humans have 25% of genes as plants, 50% as flies, 75% as dogs, and they differ only by 1.5% from the DNA of chimps.
I still call the piece of music a meme, but not seen as puritanical as Susan does; for me it is a good name for information which can be processed in our brain, and I like the word “meme”.
I think I understand how memes, or information or ideas are transported. I say by signs, and I refer to semiotics, but again not in puritanical way, what I actually mean is a kind of signal, such a signal which our senses can perceive.
It can easily be explained on visual stimuli. Our eyes can see only certain type of light, what is below and above that we just do not see, at least not consciously. The same is with sound.
But I believe our senses I mean human senses have got adapted to our needs. We see better than a dog, but worse than an eagle. Here one might task a question; do we see better than humans 2000 years ago? I believe we do. Once I read something about Homer, and they wrote there that his description of colours might be the evidence that he could not differentiate colours as we do now.
I think that we must understand how our senses come to being. I think it was pure necessity. Let’s consider sound. The nature without any kinds of animals is not quiet. There are thunderstorms, a lightning hits a tree and the tree falls down and it all makes sounds, falling raindrops make sound, waterfalls make sounds etc. These different sounds are only waves of pressed air / gas /, but they are signals for danger, or for something pleasant, possibility to drink e.g.
I think these signals, signs, just because they existed brought about also systems of perceiving them, eyes and ears. These two senses perceive waves, waves of light or waves of pressed air.
Other senses are not so easy for me to grasp and explain. We sometimes smell things we actually do not realize smelling them, pheromones, e.g.
I am not hundred per cent sure that the basic unit of cultural information should not be discrete as you say. I think it could, but I am not too much sure, this idea of yours is pretty new to me.
Let me make a parallel: a pc today can master operations which do not appear as discrete, like painting or websites in flash, I mean flash video sequences, but actually they are at the lowest level of coding, it is only a binary code, 0 and 1, absolutely discrete.
But in order to make a video sequence out of 0´s and 1´s we need an information how to put these two signs one after another to make some sense.
An electron is also discrete, but many electrons and many neutrons and protons make up a system which is not discrete at all, the universe.
So I think that cultural information consists of discrete parts, which can be transmitted, coded and decoded, but they gain their real meaning in minds, and there they appear as not discrete, they appear as complex information.
Take space shuttle, it is cultural entity, and there is information how to build it again, but it is not one single information, but many of them for each part of the space shuttle; and basically you can break the “how-to-build-space-shuttle-information” in as many pieces of information as you please. The last one will be 0´s and 1´s in a pc or words, and words you can break down to letters or basic sounds, and sounds you can bring down to waves of air.
Your thesis
Chapter 3.1.2
You write there that the .....“....the spontaneous
verbal explanation of an idea is an expression, whereas the text version of it is a representation.“
Whereas I believe that regardless the way of demonstrating the idea, it is always the same, as the only difference in your example here - according to my understanding - is the medium in which it is coded; when speaking it is coded in words, which in turn are coded in waves of pressed air, and if it is written, the idea is again coded in words, but the sound of the words is transcribed into signs - letters. In first case the message is perceived by ears, in the second by eyes, that is all which I can see as difference; different medium, different coding for different receptors.
Chapter 3.1.3
Sperber...he says that.........“cultural information is transformed every time it is
transmitted to such an extent that an analogy with biological reproduction or replication is
inappropriate” [Sperber 1994].
This is nonsense, no „MEME“, no cultural information can be transformed in the time it is being transported in the sense of cultural evolution; the transformation happens in the „MIND“, in the brain, when the „incoming MEME“ , or „incoming cultural information“ is processed in the brain by other information already having been stored there that have created a kind of a „FILTER“ for testing the new incoming information.
Basically, it is the difference between the content, „The MEME“ or just the „CI“ / cultural information / and its transcript for transport, be it spoken word, or written word or whatever other type of sign, e.g. the „hand-language“ used by deaf and other handicapped people..
Sometimes it can happen that the CI is really sort of modified on its way from the broadcaster to the recipient, compare a radio interference waves, but this has mostly nothing to do with the evolution.
There is a game which might represent an exceptional possibility, the game where many people are only allowed to whisper, one word or a sentence to the neighbour, and he to his neighbour, etc, mostly at the and of the line , the last person will say something absolutely different than the word given to the first person.
But this happens only because of bias during transportation of the CI; that means WRONG coding of it.
Another problem which I see / maybe I do not understand that fully / are terms „the expression or representation“. And what is the CI „broadcasted“in sign language??????
And what would be then this? I thing about a problem in German, I write it in Czech to my blog, and then I tell you that idea in English in spoken words????? This CI has been coded several times, and actually it was first a representation and then expression of that representation???? Well, well, I have my problems with this.
The last sentence in this subchapter is ok for me only to 50%; cultural entities GET changed only when they are assimilated, that’s absolutely correct, but NOT when transmitted. They cannot be changed by the evolutionary process, they can only get biased. I think I am right here, I believe we must go as down as to the physics, the word is coded into the waves of pressed air. These waves of pressed air can be biased, interfered with some other waves of pressed air, let’s say, thunder, or the noise of some huge engine. But such interference is NOT a change of the cultural entity itself, what gets changed is the CODING of the entity.
Chapter 3.2.1
The problem of spatial information, the information obtained from reading the map!?, Well, there is a mistake in the word „READING A MAP“, we do not read maps; maps have no words, the coding of the cultural information is different, no words but sort of pictures, signs, to be interpreted in a certain way, but for sure not as words, therefore I believe we cannot speak of reading a map. It is just misleading expression used in normal language, but completely wrong. There is no reading whatsoever in studying the signs in a map.
There are only names of towns or rivers in a map, which makes that a bit complicated, but the information about rivers lakes etc is „read“, perceived in colours etc. A highway in a map is not read; it is seen, just as a tree, lake or waterfalls in real life. It is seen as represented by a sign, semiotics.
Imitation
Think of this: certain information can be imitated, like using a hammer and hitting the nail, some other information, like your thesis, are prohibited to imitate, to copy. It might mean that the imitation occurs at „lower“ levels of our culture and „higher“ levels of cultural entities are not imitated but sort of “processed”. Take car driving, when a person learns how to drive a car, it copies and imitates, but later, based upon imitated information own way of driving corresponding with the other „MEMES“ or CI already in the brain of the new driver develops. If it were not so, everybody would have to drive the same way, which is obviously not the case. So the imitated „basic“ information of how to drive is then adjusted, processed and CHANGED, though only a bit.
There is a shocking case about driving, if you drive a car with a gear shift, and then you get a car with automatic transmission, you DO NOT NEED TO IMITATE anything, you just drive!!!! Which could mean a certain train of thoughts being started with the KNOWING of having a car with automatic gear changing, one could say we know in such a case that we do not have to use one pedal, and we do not have to use the gear stick, the automatic is doing that for us, but we do not IMITATE. We process certain information.
Chapter 3.2.3
Perfect sentence at the beginning of this chapter, this is exactly what I thing too, especially when one recalls what Susan’s favourite topic was some time ago; the phenomenon of near death experience. She picks up topics easy to cash on; which is also a piece of culture.
Now let’s take the case with the garden frog. I am not quite sure but I believe that even this kind of frog has “ITS” culture. It is only our problem that we do not recognize that. I think that here the time of development of new ideas by a frog and time of human life is too different. If a frog can get a new idea and manifest that in 5000 years, how would we, humans, get that? We do not live long enough to see that. I think that at least every kind of animal living in any kind of group MUST have “SOME” kind of culture. We are only too narcissistic to believe our culture is THE CULTURE and some other cultures are not cultures at all. Actually many wars among different humans have been waged exactly because of this reason.
Chapter 3.3
Your term “catchy memes” is absolutely correct; that’s why I like the word. Now it is necessary to analyze why we like something. I think there are some reasons for perceiving something as pleasant or catchy. It is a combination of many “Traits” hidden or coded into the term. It is short, it is similar to something else, and we believe to be able to understand that and many more “traits”. The similarity to something else is very important. About 350 years ago Comenius wrote about teaching and postulated the most basic procedure of teaching: going from simple to more difficult and from known to unknown.
Creativity
Creativity can be “collective affair” or “team work”, because it comes from a certain exchange of ideas, reading your thesis makes me think more, and combine all I have ever heard or read. Thus I use somebody else’s ideas to develop new ideas, but sometimes it is possible to make this kind of collective brain storming just alone. Sometimes I think of a problem in one language, say in English, then I try to express the same idea in German, using words I like; and because words are loaded with emotions sometimes the mere fact of expressing the same idea in different languages brings me to completely new idea, because I use different words. So I would say the creativity is a kind of process of joining ideas which no one has ever tried to join before, regardless if I do it in collective, or if I do it alone in my head. On the other hand it might be extremely difficult to find out which ideas are purely mine, gained by solely my activity and which are copied. Most probably all of them mix and interact, so that we do not know if a certain idea was really only mine or mine as a reaction on idea of somebody else.
“…the complex web of assumptions, beliefs, motives, and attitudes of each person…”
this all is a MEME for me, well actually the complex of it is a memplex. And what I call emotions, they might be as well created by a set of assumptions, motives and attitudes…
Liane,
What you write here is really extremely good, and I feel absolutely confirmed in my thoughts. The only thing which might be a problem is just the way how we express our thoughts, the words we use.
Important for me
How do you differentiate between discrete and particulate? For me, it is the same, which confuses me; if it were the same, some of the ideas here I would not get properly, so these two words must mean something different…but where is the difference??
Chapter 3.5.1
What you refer to as heuristic search has been especially proven by chess players versus pc playing chess. Anyway I believe there is a random part in cultural evolution, be it a tiny one, a small percentage of cases of evolving new ideas.
Remark
You write in better words what I have written here earlier…you are good, excellent…I like what you write, as it is that what I see too.
I am really shocked…you gave here an example with white and black colours, well I have “evolved” this “meme” some time ago, but with many colours, not only black and white, When I tried to explain what happens when a new idea, a meme, will get into a mind filter of somebody else…It will be always processed in a bit different way; in one brain it will be pink, in the other one purple, green or yellow, and even of different intensity.
Chapter 3.6.2
Your example of that girl Natalie going to the voting booth and either having an accident caused by other driver or getting a speeding ticket which has two different outcomes for her voting, this is what I call randomness I evolution. The state of her mind, or the “MEME” such mind creates is caused by accidental event which no one can predict, the third possibility for that young lady and her mind would be, when none of the events mentioned above happens, then, she must do some other sort of decision making. And this third one would not be random. So in cultural evolution as you say it is absolutely necessary to have aimed “thinking”, this mulling over an idea in one’s head, or having a conversation with someone else, or it can happen in random, and it goes pretty well together with my idea of feelings. This is also true, I think for the next example you give here: the reaction to the question: “Are you angry?”, depending on the voice.
In Australian English they have a sentence:”Are you all right?” This can have two absolutely different meanings according to the tone of voice and situation in which the question is asked. One case would be a salesperson asking you this question and meaning if you need some help. The second is the case when this same question is asked in an angry tone of voice, then meaning:”Aren’t you silly?”, “Are you ok in your head”?
This again refers to the complexity of human communication and coding of the meme into different codes. Especially this example with Australian English shows how we communicate, NOT only through words, but also through feelings, which in turn are expressed, coded in some tone or facial expression, which Susan totally denied in one of her emails to me. The coding of our communication is extremely important to understand and we rely on and depend on them heavily.
Take ICQ or any other IM program, or telephone, always some part of human communication is missing and it will, THROUGH evolution of the particular system of communication, be substituted by something else, using telephone we miss the facial expression and we substitute it by the tone of voice or we explain more in depth what we mean, using ICQ emoticons were developed to state the state of mind in which we type, to enable better understanding.
Another good idea of yours: quantum logic, A piece of music and whether you have or have not the potential to be emotionally moved by that music, this shows that emotions, feelings are important for communication, and that the communication is really only a way of coding the “MEME” / well meme in my sense of the word, not that of Susan/. I am not sure if the term quantum logic is ok, it could be…but it corresponds with my ideas of logical and emotional memory, I think that at least.
And now music as such, I believe the following: music is only a more developed noise, and we have inherited the potential to distinguish between nice and bad noises. I think it comes from the total world evolution, there were noises meaning something good, like waterfalls might have stood for possibility to drink. There can be some similarity in the waves of pressed air and therefore we perceive some tones as pleasant and some as not so much pleasant and some we can decode as danger.
3.7
“Acquired characteristics can be inherited.” Well for sure, and not only bodily characteristics, but also mental characteristics. This fact brings me to epigenetics as I see it.
I see it so: genes provide for stability of the body, but there must be some system which permits for evolution, and it might be epigenetics, it even could be multilevel epigenetics. Anything which an organism experiences is stored at one level of memory in order to test whether this experience is of high importance, if so, that means this experience repeats several times, then it will be transferred to the next higher level of memory. Maybe already so that it will be inherited but there will be no demonstration of this inherited information. If the same experience happens even in the next offspring and maybe in a row of following offsprings then this information might be transferred to the next higher level of memory. Then, if it repeats again for a long time in many generations it might get to the level of genes. And then it will be inherited HARD. I have found an article on soft and hard inheritance that as I believe supports my ideas. The system is pretty much similar to learning foreign languages as adult person. One remembers the words which appear more frequently. At first a new word is put into a short time memory, when repeated many times it shifts to long time memory. When using the language more than only at school, speaking to natives, reading books etc, there is the next level of understanding the foreign language, the level of emotional knowledge of that language. This can be acquired by TV, watching films, as there is the connection between the words used and the “overall-situation” of the person using the words. And that in turn is actually your Contextual approach. It is excellent. Everything seems to fit.
