Krim, Memes ? Not so much brain activity, as the communication and sharing of those patterns (of information). They don't have to be understood or even interpreted to be replicated by communication - think of a parrot or a computer virus or e-mail spam.
Causation ? The jury is out anyway, whether you are talking about brains, memes or Newtonian billiard balls for that matter. The mechanisms involving memes are pretty straightforward. The only serious doubt is whether the name "meme" adds much to the name "idea" - I think it does, for the reason noted, but I often have to debate that point. Half-second-delay ? The Libet effect is grossly mis-represented, if you think about free-will and causation too simply, too common-sensically. Better if you think about free-will rather as free-won't, and think of delegation in a multi-layered supervisory control system, with many sub-routines pre-programmed and ready to go, waiting for a permissive signal to remove an anticipated back-stop, then the Libet effect is no mystery. Think of a top-class tennis player retuning the serve of another top-class tennis player. Think about the anticipation, reaction and decision-making times involved and how it is possible ever to return a serve. Ask yourself who is this who, who is making the decisions, separate from the who who is acting - there is no homunculus. As Dennett says, you can always externalise everything if you make yourself small enough - in reality "you" are spread out over many patterns / systems. I found Daniel Wegner very good on this, or Adam Zeman, or in fact Libet himself in the original - much clearer than so much other second hand reporting of this effect, which I think tends to be motivated by people grasping at straws, not wanting to believe in free will (and misunderstanding causation itself, which is the real root problem). You yourself are spreading the Libet-effect meme ;-) Hope that helps, Ian On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 6:57 PM, Krimel <[email protected]> wrote: >> [Krimel] >> Memes are reoccurring patterns of brain activity. > > [KO] > they tend to instigate an action, and they register as an experience. > > [Krimel] > The causal status of memes is the subject of ongoing debate. There is very > good evidence that our awareness of our conscious decisions to act are > preceded by almost a half a second by preparation to begin acting. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
