Thursday, September 14, 2006
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.
# posted by Dalibor @ 8:50 AM 
