Glen writes: < This is one of the fundamental criticisms of the concept of memes. "The problem with communication is the illusion that it exists." There are no shared ideas; no shared understanding. There is only shared action, mediated by some medium, which is why Steve's broaching of the commons is important.>
It seems like you are just saying that the phenotype is not knowable, and that there is no inherent meaning until many individuals act and there are consequences. No problem with that. The phenotype is coupled to the environment of the community members, so it needs to be carried along as an instantaneous parameter or dynamically evolving state object. Even so, it seems to me that the individuals, via their control program (which also can be updated), can update the bits that relate the action to the outcome. It may or may not be the case that the individuals develop the same representation of that correlated event, but it seems unlikely that memory would take on a non-compressible representation involving a hugely different number of bits. I speculate that the encoding could be normalized across individuals to some common subset and that one would find some individuals encoding more or less detail and that those encodings could be reliably mapped to words like blue or soccer ball or delight. Given the post-fact world, we'd expect to find predicates with free terms to be grounded randomly against fictive chaff terms, so long as there weren't immediate pain cause by doing so. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
