Glen -
I'm definitely not the one to educate you (or anyone) on this. Following
your allusion to Szaszian anti-psychology, what I'm seeking is common
ground on whether there is even a valid question which the ideas of
cultural evolution and more pointedly, memetics purports to answer (or
"structure usefully" perhaps in your terms?).
I'm intuitive at my root, so if a set of heuristics, metaphors,
rules-of-thumb, semi-formal analogies, notional models, seem to be
failing in some significant way, I am happy to back off to a more
fundamental level and seek fresh experiential bedrock to rebuild my
house of cards upon.
May I ask how you DO structure your thinking around the *apparent* (or
is this an illusion) structured "progress" of human
knowledge/behaviour/culture/society/civilization??? Naturally many
see our current state on the brink of (apparently) climate disaster,
collapse of capitalism, fizzling out of representative democracy,
possibility of a (regional?) nuclear exchange, etc. as evidence that
"we have not evolved!", but I would claim that is a gross
misapprehension of the term "evolved". I'd say we HAVE evolved to the
state we are in (collectively).
For the sake of discussion, I'm happy to drop the attempt of the term
"meme" to be a strong analogy to a "gene", but I'm guessing that is not
enough to help you with the specifics of your skepticism? I'm poking
AT the perimeters of your skepticism NOT to pry it off of you, but
rather to understand if there is something specifically useful (to me)
in that crust for my own skepticism (or even my pollyanna).
- Sieve
On 8/13/17 12:17 PM, gepr ⛧ wrote:
Well like I said in response to Frank's suggestion about self psychology, I
tend towards a Szaszian perspective on talk therapy and psychology. But even
that constellation of ideas, I think, has more structural truth to it than
memetics.
Of course my ignorance may be getting in my way here. So I'm relatively open to
being educated on any of these subjects. But there is a pretty high skeptical
hurdle that I have to leap over in order for any such education to take root.
On August 13, 2017 9:56:16 AM PDT, Steven A Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote:
Is there an alternate way of thinking/talking about the *apparent*
encoding of human/social/cultural artifacts in language units,
including
what appears to be something a lot like "mutation and drift" across
this
space?
Or have I already (re)transgressed?
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