RE: virus: KMO quotes Plato

Jason McVean (jmcvean@acs.ucalgary.ca)
Fri, 1 Nov 96 16:15:04 MST


Richard Brodie wrote:
> You would be collapsing an important distinction. The Level-2 mind sees
> his world view converging on Absolute Truth which ever more accurately
> maps Objective Reality. The Level-3 mind sees her memetic programming as
> a collection of different, possibly conflicting ways to map Objective
> Reality (if she chooses to use that distinction-meme).

Does one have to exclude the other? Can a person collect
information in an effort to accurately map OR while at the same
time view hir memetic programming as something to be controlled
and altered to suit hir purposes?

If I have two genuinely conflicting ways of mapping reality, I'm
incline to say that one of them is wrong. I know, that's very
level-2, but hear me out:
I'm thinking about two conflicting ideas like "Joe is
10 feet tall" and "Joe is 6 feet tall". The former isn't
literally correct if you can only think about it from the right
point of view. It is simply wrong. (Just to head off a possible
objecting, I'll include the fact that the ruler is in the same
frame of reference as Joe.) There can be other types of
conflicting ideas but I think that most of the time, these ideas
only *appear* to be conflicting because they are not sufficiently
well-defined. The statements "my favorite colour is blue" and "my
favorite colour is green" appear to be in conflict but if you
understand that when I said the first thing I was speaking of
clothing and when I said the second thing I was speaking of
abstract art, then suddenly it is clear that these weren't really
conflicting ideas. I think that most "conflicting ways to map OR"
fall into this category.

Jason

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Dept. of Physics and Astronomy University of Calgary
jmcvean@acs.ucalgary.ca http://www.ucalgary.ca/~jmcvean

"And it would have worked if it weren't for those meddling kids."
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