virus: Re: sociological change

Ken Pantheists (kenpan@axionet.com)
Mon, 30 Dec 1996 02:53:17 +0000


Alex wrote:
I guarantee you, if you spend some time on the Cherokee Indian
Reservation in Cherokee, NC, you'll quickly begin to understand that
even your `enlightened' understanding of `how things really are' is
frighteningly, terribly wrong.
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I don't recall claiming to have an enlightened point of view-- only
cultural texts which, by your own arguement, are variable.

I also understand that my going there will "enlighten me" only to the
the way the Cherokee "really are" but will tell me little about my Haida
and Mountain Cree friends. Those experiences are different.

Alex:
Once you've raised a few million generations of lizards in your
recently purchased Terrarium State of Arizona, provided for their
survival and seen to it that their environment favours the development
of social groups for survival benefits, we'll talk.
********************************************************************
Because that's when a lizard will have it's first meme? Well... that's
kind of my point alex. Animals don't have memes now. So you can't study
them now.

Alex:
Describe how what you do every day is /not/ just `recognizing and
reacting'?

I don't do anything that isn't a reaction to what I recognize. But I
recognize things that are invisible and imaginary and abstract-- like
democracy, what I think someone else thinks of me and what I think other
people are thinking even though I have never met them or even seen them.
I recognize these and react to them.

Alex:We don't /know/ that the `landscape of canine ideas' is.

So how can you trace individual memes when you can't even find the
landscape to which it belongs?

Alex:
We don't even, fully, know what the landscape of each other's ideas
are. Even one to another we are black boxes, where recognitions go in
one side and reactions come out the other.
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How can I retort to that when that has been my arguement?

Alex:
One does not have to have memetics to have memes.
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Well, they kind of do. or to be more accurate- you have to have a body
of information vast enough, rapidly repeating enough and accessible
enough,that the only way you can iunderstand it fully is to think of it
as a mess o' germs flying around and infecting your brain.

Alex:
Are we going to back around and around until you end up
saying `I just don't feel that humans are natural animals' and the
discussion be effectively over?
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I never said that you are not a natural animal period. We share common
characteristics withh all creatures, with all life... we just don't
share memetics with them.. like we don't share clothes or alkaline
batteries. That makes us very different from animals.

Alex: On my view of chinese philosophy.
Now this /is/ religious thinking and, as such, has no place in logical
disputation.
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Then read the quote in my previous post. If you don't see the parallel
then... i don't know what to say... I'll find another quote... I don't
think it's religious thinking-- it's philosphical thinking.

You have made me feel bickery by your prejudice. I could say that you
are the one who is religious: ascribing human qualities to animals.

Alex:
Is `being black in America' a behaviour or is it a /state/? I'd say
the latter and, as such, asking for rules that describe it mixes
apples and oranges. `Flocking' is a behaviour and, as such, reducable
to certain impetuouses and reactions. Memetics is often about
describing those building-blocks of behaviour and may, <snip>
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Again you use my arguement. Except that I would say apples=memetics
oranges=behaviour.

BTW memetics is not a study of behaviour. It is a study of information.

Information is a technology spawned by bhaviour. Cars are made of metal
but metalurgists don't necessarily study cars.

Alex:
you can make a `good enough' model of your
room in the dark to find the door with only a barked shin not a broken
leg.
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I don't know how to respond to this. I can't see your point-- you can't
see mine. So the only way to advance is to drop the arguement or just
say" fine-- there are animal memes".

So what dog discourses do you want to bring to the list? I'm assuming
your canine cultural informant can't type so the text will have to be
mediated by you.

BTW could you please try to avoid that double edged sword you were
mentioning earlier?

-- 
Regards
+--------------------------------------------------------+
  Ken Pantheists         http://www.lucifer.com/~kenpan 

"The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also true."

-Niels Bohr +--------------------------------------------------------+