-----Original Message-----
From: BMSDGATH <BMSDGATH@livjm.ac.uk>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Date: Tuesday, August 25, 1998 4:23 AM
Subject: Re: Structure of facts and opinions
>>It is not until the meme is instantiated in the mind of the host
>>that something like structure becomes involved.In the mind of the
>>host the meme is placed in a psychological context....
>
>The notion of a meme being somehow instantiated in a human mind/brain
>is commonplace in memetics, but is highly problematic. I've argued in
>many previous posts that memes are best considered as external to the
>mind, but I won't repeat those arguments all over again. The question
>is: if you believe that memes are somehow instantiated in minds, then
>how? I'm not disputing the reality of mental events and states, what I
>am saying is that it is not mental events and states which are the
>replicators in cultural evolution.
>
>Take the following passage from Johnson (1991, p.184), in which George
>Johnson rounds off a review of the current state of play (or the early
>90s state of play) in cognitive neurosciences. I substitute the word
>'memes' for Johnson's original 'engrams':
>
>"One of the most perplexing things about neural networks continues to
>be this problem of just what the [memes] look like.....Once they emerge
>they are difficult to interpret.......with distributed representations
>it is hard to know just what the activation of an individual neuron
>means. Say you have a network trained to recognise one hundred
>objects. Through careful study you notice that a single neuron lights
>up each time ten of these objects are presented. There is something
>all these things have in common, though it is not necessarily a quality
>we have a word for."
>
>Memeticists, by contrast, almost always refer to 'memes for...' things,
>entities or qualities we have words for. We are making the mistake of
>assuming that something like a statement of fact or an opinion will
>necessarily have some neural correlate. But statements of facts and
>opinions are mostly constituted as linguistic behaviour (or textual
>artefacts if they get written down). Speaking or writing or reading do
>of course require neural activity, but to place the neural activity and
>linguistic objects in a one-to-one correspondence is a mistake. As a
>colleague of mine said the other day, language is a fairly digital
>means of encoding information, but there is no empirical reason to
>assume that the brain encodes information digitally at all. Therefore,
>whatever the difference in the logical structure of facts and opinions,
>the issue of mental structure remains open.
>
>So regarding your statement:
>
>>It is not until the meme is instantiated in the mind of the host
>>that something like structure becomes involved.
>
>I would say precisely the opposite. It is only once the neural
>events have 'emerged' (Johnson's word) as external behaviour that we
>can start to talk about structure. And I would say that it is only
>then that we see our memes, not before.
>
>Johnson G (1991) In the Palaces of Memory: How We Build the World
>Inside Our Heads. Grafton, London.
>
>
>
>===============================================================
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