PUZZLED ELEPHANT TO RIFF (dkm):
Riff wrote:
>> Riff's TWO BYTES/MISC. MUSINGS...
>>
>> ROG:
>> PPS...And they [memes] don't have to be stored in "people" they can be
>> stored in computers, web sites, books, physical models, records,etc...
>>
>> RIFF:
>> ...memo pads, in/out boxes, trash cans, garbage trucks, landfills...
>> ...abandoned buildings, "subway walls/tenement halls"(P.Simon)...
>> ...DEMOLISHED buildings, the "Conceptually Unknown"(Pirsig, 1995)...
>> ...the metaphysical reality of non-actuality [(PzEph--am I getting Murdoch
>> right?),i.e.,just as hiccups need not be re-invented merely because, for an
>> instant, everyone stopped hiccupping, so, memes need not be in a state of
>> actual transmission/assimilation or residence (even in an unobserved
>> physical medium, such as a slip of paper at the bottom of a trash can on an
>> uninhabited planet) to have reality. Their potentiality is as real, in its
>> way, as any actuality (PzEph? y/n?)]...(Rog? "pseudo-sci"? y/n?)
ELEPHANT:
Yes, I think you have grasped one point about what Murdoch is saying, namely
that the ideas people have are just as real, and real in just the same way,
as what some people approvingly call 'facts'. This kind of psychological
realism is unusual in Philosophy to day, Prisig excepted, but much less so,
perhaps, in the better kind of novelist. However, it should not be
forgotten that in Murdochian Platonism there are degree's of reality, and
that the upshot of our creative imaginings are, whether father christmas or
electrons, less real than the resources with which they are constructed.
The important point is simply that the standard kind of objection "but
you're just imagining that!" is really senseless here: not a way of
discriminating between created pictures, but the unrealisable demand that we
abandon picture making altogether. The distinction between the Coca-cola
clad white-beard and items of atomic structure is not whether they are
imagined or not, but how constructive and useful it is to imagine them,
which ofcourse depends on your specific purposes, and your general world
view. For more on this see my paper on Murdoch at
http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol4/index.html (it's the last in this volume of
Minerva).
As to what Murdoch's attitude would be to talk of our imaginative notions as
'memes' - I'm not so sure. I'm a bit concerned at the idea, which is
suggested in the term 'meme', that we can trace the existence of a concept
independant of those who hold it (that's what a 'gene' is all about, after
all). I'm reminded of Neitzsche's rather frightening thought that most
people are only capable of having other peoples ideas, and that in any
generation there are very few people who actually do any thinking as such,
their thoughs then being borrowed and shared out amoungst the masses. It
seems like the 'meme' picture is headed this way. If so, I think that's
wrong, and not something Murdoch could assent to: she thinks creativity is
involved at every level, and that anyone who even mentions a word is in some
way making an idea their own. They may not in every case have the power or
inclination to play around with the result very much, or very successfully
(i.e. don't start asking me about general relativity), but still their
having an idea is not just the possession of a common self-perpetuating
meme, or a Neitzschean thought borrowed from someone else. That's how it
looks to me, anyway.
Also, it seems that we can't talk about idea's as being 'stored': they
belong in consciousness and nowhere else. This might seem anachronistic in
the infomation age, and even refuted by the existence of Papyri, for that
matter. But still, I maintain that such physical objects are just variously
more or less sophisticated versions of the 'aide memoire', like knotting a
handkercheif. We have become practised in interpreting the knots in the
handkercheif, but it is the continuation of this practice (over thousands of
years) which permits us to 'retreive' Plato's Republic. Imagine that
reading (O.K., chuck in 'readers' like Acrobat and Internet Explorer) just
died out: in what sense would Prisig's ideas then be 'stored' anywhere? It
isn't the knot in the handkercheif, or the writing on the subway wall, that
is the idea or what you want to call 'meme': It's what's made possible by
our practice of interpreting - that's my point.
Does this make any kind of sense?
PzEph
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