LenKen
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Mi caca es su caca.
  
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Re:Virian versus Virion
« Reply #15 on: 2004-06-19 02:45:04 » |
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Quote:[Walter Watts] My CoV jail term has forced me to look at the old magazines in my cell.
I like this LenKen person. Very funny. |
Thank you, kind sir. I’ve been in jail for a couple of days before—you have to remain positive. And, speaking of optimism: At least in the CoV jail, you don’t have to worry about dropping the soap.
Quote:| [David Lucifer] The "cerebral code" is an interesting suggestion, though technically not a word. But from the description it looks like it describes a pattern in the brain rather than the mind. Would you say that two people infected with the same meme (e.g. baseball) have the same cerebral code for baseball or different codes? |
As I understand it, the cerebral code is the committee of neurons that any particular item of memory is comprised of. So it’s probably too specific—and varies too much from individual to individual—to use in the general sense that I was originally hoping for. (Maybe my neureme has a chance, after all.)
As William Calvin says, in the excerpt below (from the dust jacket of The Cerebral Code), “the cerebral code representing an object or idea [is] the cortical-level equivalent of a gene or meme.”
Quote:The Cerebral Code proposes a bold new theory for how Darwin’s evolutionary process could operate in the brain, improving ideas on the time scale of thought and action. Jung said that dreaming goes on continuously but you can’t see it when you’re awake, just as you can’t see the stars in the daylight because it is too bright. Calvin’s is a theory for what goes on, hidden from view by the glare of waking mental operations, that produces our peculiarly human consciousness and versatile intelligence.
Shuffled memories, no better than the jumble of our nighttime dreams, can evolve subconsciously into something of quality, such as a sentence to speak aloud. The “interoffice mail” circuits of the cerebral cortex are nicely suited for this job because they’re good copying machines, able to clone the firing pattern within a hundred-element hexagonal column. That pattern, Calvin says, is the cerebral code representing an object or idea, the cortical-level equivalent of a gene or meme. |
His concept of the cerebral code may not be what we were looking for to begin with, but, as you can see, it’s bound to have significant repercussions in meme theory. I’m genuinely surprised more memeticists don’t mention it. But the millennium is still young. 
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