(Meanwhile, I am rereading Aristotle on Dreams....)
Wade T. Smith
Wade,
Not too riled. I just wonder, if the symbolic doesn't apply to
memes...won't you find that it EXACTLY applies to dreams (what then?):
"Another way to get a handle on the notion of encoding is to think about the
content of certain mental images that we may have. For example, take the
content of my mental image of Mark Twain. In my image, Twain is wearing a
white western suit, with bowtie, and sports a walrus moustache. Now, we can
ask, what is the relationship between the content of my mental image and the
property of having a walrus moustache? The property of having a walrus
moustache is essential to the content of that particular image---without
that property, the content would be the content of some other mental image.
Further, the property of having a walrus moustache characterizes the content
image in some important way. However, the content of the image doesn't
exemplify having a walrus moustache; rather Mark Twain himself exemplifies
this property. We may say, however, that the content of the image encodes
this property.
When we dream about a monster, there is no object that exemplifies the
property of being a monster (for such monsters don't exist). Nevertheless,
we can accurately report our experience by saying that we dreamed about an
object of a certain kind, and that the object was, in some sense, a monster,
otherwise why did we wake up screaming in the middle of the night? We can
therefore explain our experience of fear if there is some mode of
predication, some way of having a property, and some sense of `is' by which
the dream object `is' a monster. Encoding is this mode of predication.
English sentences of the form `x is F ' are therefore ambiguous. They can be
formally represented as either `Fx' (x exemplifies F) or as `xF' (x encodes F)."
(http://mally.stanford.edu/distinction.html)
Brett
Returning,
rBERTS%n
http://www.tctc.com/~unameit/makepage.htm
Faith is the quality that enables you to eat blackberry jam
on a picnic without looking to see whether the seeds move.