Hi Lawry:
> Yes, I think this is true. The emergence of these concepts and realities
> has more to do with our cognitive and social evolution than physical
> evolution. There have been some interesting attempts to link the physical
> processes of evolution with a teleological perspective. The best that I
> know of is Teilhard de Chardin, an anthropologist and Jesuit priest, and,
> as far as I am concerned, a great and important thinker, whether one agrees
> with the teleological argument or not. At its root, is the thought that
> evolution, on the whole, produces organisms that reflect qualities like
> greater manipulating capacity, ability to think, social organization, etc.
> One could say that Darwin's imperatives create a bias toward these kinds of
> qualities, still without imputing purpose to the process, and that these
> qualities give us our capacity for pursuing even higher values. It is an
> interesting but difficult argument, well worth-while examining. His
> PHENONMENON OF MAN is probably his most accessible writing, most of which
> was suppressed by the Catholic church into the fifties..
Teihard de Chardin is an impressive thinker and makes a good case for
direction in evolution towards ever increasing consciousness. He was
one of the founding fathers of teleology. Some have gone so far as to
claim that the internet represents Chardin's "noosphere," the unified
consciousness of humanity. That's a bit of grandiose wishful thinking on
the part of the Digiworld clan don't you think?
> The classical teleological POV has simply been examined for
> centuries, and found wanting. Its most recent resurrection, around the
> issue of complexity and chaos, has been found to be untenable upon
> examination (see the Glieck book that I mentioned in an earlier post for a
> summary of some parts of the examination, or any of Stuart Kauffman's
> books).
The teleological POV has been resurrected as "intelligent design" and
has been found tenable by several highly credentialed biologists. Books
of possible interest along this line are "Evolution: A Theory in Crises"
by Michael Denton and "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael J. Behe.
> The oscilloscope only creates a representation of the tone, not the tone
> itself. The trace of a meme lies in the language and actions of people and
> organizations. These can readily be traced, and so the movement of a meme
> identified with precision. So the instrument of detection of a meme is
> listening to what people say, and watching what they do. You seem to have
> something against the concept of memes ("fertile imagination...acolytes").
> Can you say more about why?
Happy to. My quarrel is with using words like "precision" to suggest that
the concept of memes is as scientific as say, the theory of sound
waves. Just the fact that a meme can only be detected by listening to
what people say casts a huge cloud of doubt of whether memes can be
considered "scientific" in that science requires precise observations and
measurements of empirical data in repeatable experiments. Until
someone can up with an explanation and evidence of how the meme
"infection" is supposed to take place in physiological, neural terms, I
consider the theory on a par with phlogiston. Or, to be generous, I'll put
in the same category as Freudian psychiatry and Marxist sociology
which, as you know, were once all the rage.
I suppose one could point out that "values" are just as elusive as
"memes." The difference is the MoQ makes no pretense of being
acceptable to the editors of Scientific American.
But, I could be wrong. Platt
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