Re: virus: Metasystem Transition

Dave Pape (davepape@dial.pipex.com)
Thu, 30 Jan 1997 20:51:50 GMT

At 16:53 29/01/97 -0800, you wrote:
>At 04:22 PM 1/28/97 -0800, Lior Golgher wrote:
>>I excerpted:
>>> > control of position = movement
>>> > control of movement = irritability (simple reflex)
>>> > control of irritability = (complex) reflex
>>> > control of reflex = associating (conditional reflex)
>>> > control of associating = human thinking
>>> > control of human thinking = culture
>>
>>And Dave replied:
>>> Everyone check this out. They're NEARLY right...
>>
>>As far as I understand, they posted it as a vague model intended to
>>exemplify the concept of metasystems. 'THE right model of life' is a
>>crown they've never claimed. But the third and the fourth step seem
>>especially logical. What do you aim by 'nearly'? What's your view of it?
>>
>
>Maybe he meant it's not complete. Here, I'll fill it in:
>
>control of (human) culture = THE METAMIND..IND..ind..ind..ind
> ^
> |
> (God-like baritone echo) -------------|
>
>An interesting concept though, isn't it? I mean, sure, you could
>probably challenge the metasystem transition history postulated
>above on the basis of strict paleobiological consistency, but it
>seems correct to me in essence. Basically, it attempts to highlight
>the already established principles of progressively complex
>heirarchial structures, and associated emergent properties (a la
>cellular automata) implicit in the memetics approach to understanding
>human culture within the context of the ubiquitous and inexorable
>process of evolution.
>
>Even more interesting is speculating on how the "next step" would
>manifest itself. Why don't we inject some life into this group and
>try one out:
>
>Scenario:
>The year is 2050. The pace of scientific and technological progression
>has accelerated unabated. Almost everyone on the planet making more
>than Cdn$30.00 per year has some sort of connectivity to the Net, the
>hardware, software and bandwidth of which is highly sophisticated,
>unobtrusive, and costs pennies a month. Most people in developed countries
>actually carry the Net around with them, completely independant of any
>infrastructure.

Dan- I did read the rest of your posting- and it was a good posting. I
reckon that the development of information transmission and storage in the
Total Nervous System has been effectively proceeding ever since nervous
animals started interacting with each other. What's happened with human
beings is, that interaction's got richer, and more ambitious in geographical
scope. EG, the memetic structure "all ideas about Coca Cola" is now encoded
across all 5 continents.

The big interesting points for me are:

1 The one you're posting: developing technology accelerates and
intensifies the tendency of information to be memetically encoded across
more and more brains.

2 The way that bigger and bigger memetic structures, and
metastructures, form over historical time, like (I believe) bigger and
bigger (meta)groups of neural linkages form in individual brains over
ontological time. I mean that in young brains, there's lots of ideas that
are fairly limited in scope (limited in their ability to guide that person's
actions), and over time, these ideas interact and give rise to broader, more
useful, meta-ideas. Just like species interact to give rise to emergents we
call ecologies; just like little ecologies interact to give rise to big
ecologies.

Here it is again: elements in a system interacting, and from that system a
metasystem emerging.

But what I'm saying is that all your cognitive development is a process of
metasystems emerging. And... I suppose, memetically speaking, I'm saying
that the future process that you're proposing (and I think your prediction
could be close to what happens) is nothing qualitatively new... it'll just
be the natural extension of a process that has its roots back when nerved-up
animals first started to learn about and from each other.

Dave Pape
===============================================================================
The memetic equivalent of a G3 bullpup-design assault rifle blowing a full
clip at my opponent. (Alex Williams 1996)

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