<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>Glen -</p>
<p>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 <i>succintity</i>.</p>
<p>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 (<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.numenta.com/resources/books/a-thousand-brains-by-jeff-hawkins/">1000
Brains</a>). I didn't dive down that rabbit hole (yet)...<br>
</p>
<p>Your recent (and repeated) specific brush-back of Dawkin's <i>Meme</i>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 (<i>memetics</i>) 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)...</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:c90e7e60-e6f9-4c1c-94fc-676209d7d396@gmail.com">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.
<br>
<br>
The ontological status "engrams"
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_(neuropsychology)"><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_(neuropsychology)></a>
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).
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
Abuse seems to be the norm, not the exception.
<br>
<br>
On 10/6/23 09:28, Steve Smith wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Another fancy word I've come to like is
/"Ententional"/ which combines the ideas of what something is
"about" with what it is "for".
<br>
<br>
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?
<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary-action_principle#Disputes_about_possible_teleological_aspects">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary-action_principle#Disputes_about_possible_teleological_aspects</a><br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>