Hi Platt and all,
Platt, I appreciate your taking the time to follow up on this.
PLATT:
<<<I stand corrected and appreciate your steering me to the Journal of
Memetics web site. I learned a lot from reading the Report on the
Conference "Do Memes Account for Culture?" held at Kings
College, Cambridge in June 99. ...
[snip]
If a meme has self "interests," i.e., purposes, goals, intentions,
ambitions, etc., then choices and values are implied.>>>
This may all be red herring and tautology. If it is in the nature of a
meme or any other pattern to perpetuate, then it tends to perpetuate.
IMO it is largely semantic whether you call that an ambition, purpose,
or just a tendency (that is what my "causality" essay is about).
>PIRSIG:
>But after reading it Phaedrus wrote on one of his slips, "It seems
>clear that no mechanistic pattern exists toward which life is
>heading, but has the question been taken up of whether life is
>heading away from mechanistic patterns?"
>
Platt, I've said before in this forum that Pirsig may have overlooked
this aspect of Darwinism, which proposed that random (directionless)
change is one major cornerstone of evolution. Random change means that
it isn't directed in any specific direction, but rather AWAY from
whatever existed before. The other major cornerstone is selection, which
"chooses" certain random changes over other random changes. It appears
to me that Pirsig hadn't thought this through enough to realise that his
question was one that Darwin dealt with a century before.
This evolution AWAY vs. evolution TOWARDS is essentially Darwin vs.
Lemarck.
PLATT:
>The idea that the way to look at evolution is as movement away
>from mechanisms seems to me a much more challenging and
>interesting idea than extending biological, genetic-like
>mechanisms to explain the social level. . . .
I see no contradiction. The only problem with trying to do it all via
genetics and other well developed mechanistic theories is severalfold:
1. Genetics isn't a "primary" theory but relies on undelying chemistry .
2. Trying to explain society via genetics is simpler than doing it via
quantum theory, but probably still much too complicated.
3. As a derivative that "summarises" deeper mechanistic theories, some
important aspects may have been lost in the editing i.e. genetics leads
to approximations that may occasionally be fallible.
My own view (as someone very familiar with genetics) is that
higher-level patterns might provide more useful for understanding the
social level. The memetics movement has started to try and define such
patterns, but has yet to show how we can usefully work with them.
PLATT:
[snip]
<<<So using memes with their close affinity to genes to explain the
social level as it's described in the MOQ seems to me a futile
exercise unless memes can be shown to have their own
independent self-interests as suggested above and can respond
to DQ. Pirsig claims only an individual human being can respond
to DQ, so I doubt if memes can "make things happen." But since
I've a lot more to learn, my mind remains open on the subject.
Those memes may get me yet. (-: >>>
IMO, defining the "self interest" of patterns is the same as defining
their "tendency". If we want to understand memes, we have to understand
and predict how they behave. Without this, memetics is futile. As far as
DQ, I don't agree with your interpretation of Pirsig. Surely memes can
respond and change, and this "makes things happen", or rather, it *is*
things happening.
PLATT:
<<<Finally, I still haven't seen in the meme literature any explanation
of why memes act the way they do. I know the argument that
memes help social groups survive. But as Pirsig asks, "Why
survive?"
PIRSIG:
This is the sort of irrelevant-sounding question that seems minor
at first, and the mind looks for a quick answer to dismiss it. It
sounds like one of those hostile, ignorant questions some
fundamentalist preacher might think up. But why do the fittest
survive? Why does any life survive? It's illogical. It's self-
contradictory that life should survive. >>>
No reason, but then the things that don't survive won't be around to ask
the same question about. The quick answer is that the question is a red
herring. It's like the priest asking the few people in church "Why are
you the only ones here?", when the answer is obvious - nobody else came!
A shorter answer is MU.
PLATT:
<<<Until you begin to tackle basic 'why' questions, the world's best
theories, scientific or otherwise, come up short. Also in the meme
literature there's a stunning lack of recognition of the role of
morality in the world other than a rather self-serving declaration
that morals are an example of memes. That's fine, but I haven't yet
run across anything that explains the difference between a good
meme and a bad one, nor the logical basis by which one could
decide.>>>
That's the same question. You can only ask that question about memes
that are good enough to survive, because the bad ones didn't.
Platt, I'm not trying to be offensive, cute or funny. I am deadly
serious in questioning your questions, though there is an element of
humour involved. I hope that I'm not the only one who sees it.
Jonathan
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