Dan- I did read the rest of your posting- and it was a good posting. I
reckon that the development of information transmission and storage in the
Total Nervous System has been effectively proceeding ever since nervous
animals started interacting with each other. What's happened with human
beings is, that interaction's got richer, and more ambitious in geographical
scope. EG, the memetic structure "all ideas about Coca Cola" is now encoded
across all 5 continents.
The big interesting points for me are:
1 The one you're posting: developing technology accelerates and
intensifies the tendency of information to be memetically encoded across
more and more brains.
2 The way that bigger and bigger memetic structures, and
metastructures, form over historical time, like (I believe) bigger and
bigger (meta)groups of neural linkages form in individual brains over
ontological time. I mean that in young brains, there's lots of ideas that
are fairly limited in scope (limited in their ability to guide that person's
actions), and over time, these ideas interact and give rise to broader, more
useful, meta-ideas. Just like species interact to give rise to emergents we
call ecologies; just like little ecologies interact to give rise to big
ecologies.
Here it is again: elements in a system interacting, and from that system a
metasystem emerging.
But what I'm saying is that all your cognitive development is a process of
metasystems emerging. And... I suppose, memetically speaking, I'm saying
that the future process that you're proposing (and I think your prediction
could be close to what happens) is nothing qualitatively new... it'll just
be the natural extension of a process that has its roots back when nerved-up
animals first started to learn about and from each other.
Dave Pape
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