> At 22:03 06/02/97 -0500, Reed wrote:
>
> >>Not at all. Indeed and truly no. Free memes are... unstable and senseless
> >>memes. "Vacuum-packed Klondyke homeopaths". That's a meme freed of selection
> >>pressures. In fact, probably without heavy selection pressures to drive
> >>them, we'd never even be able to develop memes to distinguish between our
> >>parents' faces.
> >
> >Recognizing parent's faces? You're getting close to the line where I ask
> >how you differentiate between a meme and a reflex or a heritable encoded
> >process.
>
> I don't think that recognising your parent's faces is reflex behaviour,
> because I can't imagine a workable way in which facial-appearance genes
> passed on by parents could wire offspring's brains to recognise their
> expression in the parent's appearance. I think it's learned behaviour, but
> is NOT based on memes (cultural information) per se.
Careful. Even if recognising your parents' faces is learned, perhaps
*learning* whose faces those are *is* reflex.
Bootstrapping one's first language is another example[?] of "reflex
learning". This procedure can convert pidgins into languages -- cf.
Nicaragua's school for the deaf, where the children under seven took the
pidgin the older children were using, and *converted* it to a language
[suddenly the instructors must learn the language, or else they can't teach!]
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/ Towards the conversion of data into information....
/
/ Kenneth Boyd
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