Glen -
In the spirit of succinctness (succinctity?) my intuition aligns with
your argument here about the relevance/utility of flex/slop... I think
this is a corollary to Deacon's "absential" but to pursue it more
formally would puncture the walls of my aspired /succintity/.
At the risk of (over) tangenting... your invocation of Semon's Engram
seems to reference Mountcastle's Cortical Columns as considered in
Hawkin's work (1000 Brains
<https://www.numenta.com/resources/books/a-thousand-brains-by-jeff-hawkins/>).
I didn't dive down that rabbit hole (yet)...
Your recent (and repeated) specific brush-back of Dawkin's /Meme/s and
the modern variant (often deployed/weaponized by the right with "woke")
of "mind virus" feels to be a good example of what you gesture at here?
It (/memetics/) was *such* a compelling/powerful concept when it was
coined (no matter how misbegotten?) that it has held (and developed) a
life of it's own over the ensuing decades (near half-century?). It
feels as if the very "excess meaning" (or sloppy meaning?) you
?disparage? in cognitive metaphor is, in fact, what makes them so
"powerful". To the extent the point of "powerful speech" or "powerful
thoughts" might be to jump over the threshold/saddle from one attractor
to another, this makes sense (for better and worse)...
- Steve
As usual, there's too much in your post for me to follow a thread. But
I can cherry-pick this one: affect - or what it is to be about/for
something. An option is to think in terms of soft types such that the
lower order objects over which the higher order operators ... uh,
operate, have some "flex and slop", allowing the higher order
operators to become schema and the lower order objects to constitute
(nearly? ... quasi?) equivalence classes.
The ontological status "engrams"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_(neuropsychology)> came up
recently in another context. I'm told they're quite *specific*. But
I'm not convinced. I think they can be specific (e.g. the efficacy of
things like a Memory Palace). But I also think they can be
accidentally invoked in non-specific or specific, but various ways.
The non-specificity might provide for variation in stimulus (memory
triggered by something different, different part of the body, smell vs
taste, etc.) or components (memory of a visual scene versus that of a
somatic context).
All my speculation is subject to falsifying or validating data, of
which I have none. But whatever. My point, here, is that overly simple
hypotheses for the spread of (largely) cultural or psychological
behaviors are so impoverished that they feel like just-so stories to
me. E.g. Dawkin's memes ... or Hanson's "innovation" ... or the
nihilistic mode-switching facility of cult-members.
Deutsch's "hard to vary" constraint for good scientific theories comes
to mind, I guess. Call me contrarian if you want. But in order for a
"theory" to convolve into all the other "theories" wallowing out there
in the ambience, it has to percolate into the unoccupied interstitial
spaces left blank by the others. And that requires them to have a
little flex and slop, allowing them to "be about" or "be for" things
other than what you might think they're about or for.
Abuse seems to be the norm, not the exception.
On 10/6/23 09:28, Steve Smith wrote:
Another fancy word I've come to like is /"Ententional"/ which
combines the ideas of what something is "about" with what it is "for".
This leads me around to Deacon's "Teleodynamics" which might be
obliquely related to your invocation recently of a physics
"Lagrangian vs Eulerian" rather than the Anthropological "Emic vs
Etic" axis of understanding first-third person,
reductionist-holistic, nominal-real perspectives? This also leads
me back around to the (nearly) ineffable discussion of Stationary
Action revisited from time to time here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary-action_principle#Disputes_about_possible_teleological_aspects
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