>On Wed, 19 Feb 1997, Dave Pape wrote:
>
>> In fact, I still want a fight about level 3!
>Levels, levels, levels... How come we can talk with such profundity about
>"meta-systems" and yet when the word "level" enters the fray (to mean the
>same damn thing!) everyone gets all hot and itchy about their nether
>regions?
I... don't think that level 3 and my stuff mean the same thing. I'm talking
about every iteration of an idea (meme, personal idea, whatever) emerging
from the interaction of other ideas as constituting a level. As such, my
concept "CD Remote Control unit" might arise from interaction between
1 x 15-iteration meme
2 x 12-iteration personal ideas
14 x 6-iteration perceptual ideas
20 x 3 or 4-iteration motor neural patterns...
And THAT example's gotta be a gross over-simplification. So what "level" is
that meme at? Here's where the seething-ocean thing comes in... because your
memespace at any one time is bucking and rolling with all sorts of ideas at
all sorts of numbers of emergence iterations...
This is why I can't think of memetic processes in terms of levels. I liked
point:
>it's MHO that segmentation of such ramp-like operations like consciousness
>is a vast over-simplification, but a handy model for a quick explanation.
I think it's like teaching kids the chemical equation:
Ca(OH)2 + CO2 -> CaCO3 + H2O
(Huge apologies if this is balanced wrong, I'm old and vague)
This equation is okay as an approximate explanation, but doesn't reflect
what actually goes on in a test tube (and certainly not what'd happen in the
seas of pre-life Earth, where effectively you'd be dealing with a huge,
worldwide dynamic chemical equilibrium which still hasn't settled).
Dave Pape
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