Re: virus: Sign memes & Chomsky
Corey A. Cook (COOKCORE@esuvm.emporia.edu)
Wed, 09 Apr 97 11:35:06 CT
Tony wrote:
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Starting from brains which could not communicate between one
another, these brains would each create thier individual pidgeon inner
thought languages. Common experiences of elements of objective reality
would have as many different internal representations as there were
people. When a meme spontaniously arises by chance which is able to make
a copy of itself in some other brain it will begin to spread. I imagine
innitially the only replicatable Memes would have concrete external
anchoring points eg Tiger, food-animal. The Meme that spread would
simply be the best comunicatable sound that mutually brought to mind
"Tiger" or whatever. This suggests an intuitively reasonable order of
evolution of Memes from concrete to abstract. A process of evolution
then begins to furnish all brains with "more and more evolved" memes. I
reckon we could in principle measure the amount of consciousness a brain
has by measuring the complexity of the evolved memecologies. Like Dennet
I see no limit to this process of evolution of consciousness.
Anyway this is just an early attempt at comunicating my thoughts
to all, I reckon some of you out there probably would agree with this
general resumee (if we could get past the language barrier). Comments?
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Disagreement. I reflect that communication between individuals arose
prior to consious thought. There really is no way to prove this one
way or another, it's just my own personal quirk. This would mean that
memes arose before minds, and minds might be the emergent property of
memes.
A number of netizens have put forward the idea that self-awareness was
the result of ancient man's use of psychoactives. The following site:
http://www.hempbc.com/magazine/apr95/smoke_in_my_i.html
contains an article postulating that the main ingredient was cannibis,
but I personally reckon that fungus is more likely, being more potent
and more widespread.
However, this is not the venue to discuss such theories. If you wish
to continue along those lines, contact me off-list.
Corey A. Cook
cookcore@esuvm.emporia.edu
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* The One Universal Truth: *
* Sometimes, you're wrong. *
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