[FRIAM] natalism

[Steve Smith]

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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