List, The relationship between imitation and entropy has been occupying my thoughts of late, and I wonder if this might be of further interest to anyone here.
As we've discussed before in this forum, simplistic imitation is of limited utility to the Peircean paradigm... it gets a bad rap in many circles concerned with philosophy of Mind. The usual argument is along the lines that it ignores the nuances and principles that we are familiar with in semiotic theory. But, I suggest that imitation plays a very important role in pragmatism. Imitation fast-tracks how an organism defines the things that matter, and a timely response is important in resisting entropy and increasing the odds of survival. In terms of human culture, imitation saves us from having to reinvent the wheel. Just do what everyone else is doing, and you optimize your chances for survival... and of course who you choose as a role model to imitate can impact on wealth and success or punishment and failure. The same line of thinking applies to any organism that has to make choices from its colony. Imitation, within the context of our experiences, wires brains (neural plasticity), and so it is not easy to reverse if it is allowed to persist for some time... has practical implications, eg, feral children, domesticated animals. Imitation is survival, and people who are born with limbs missing, for example, can bypass their handicapped predispositions by imitation of cultural narratives and assumptions. But does this not then suggest that an ape or chimpanzee can assimilate completely into human culture, without handicap, by imitation? No it does not, because they do not have the same predispositions, whether those predispositions manifest at the biological or cellular or molecular levels. Domestication, yes. Complete assimilation, no way. I suggest that imitation provides an indispensable overlay for the theory of pragmatism. It cannot be ignored because it is integral to resisting entropy. Peircean-biosemiotic theory accounts principally for the bottom-up predispositions that inform an organism as to the things that matter. But to fast-track survival and resist entropy, we must factor in imitation... and that's top-down. If we define imitation in the context of replication of behaviour (and not in the simplistic Dawkinsian interpretation as expressed in memetic theory), then there are several ways in which imitation might play out. We learn everything through imitation, including our gender roles (where our male and female mind-bodies only account for cultural predispositions). At the level of matter, for example, I suggest that it might play out in the context of quantum entanglement. No form of existence is possible without the replication of behaviour that is imitation. Imitation in its most primal form, as an important manifestation of pragmatism, is ultimately... knowing how to be. Relates to Martin Heidegger's Dasein (Being in the World). I suggest that knowing how to be is the single ordering principle of the universe. Even matter has to know how to be. Without knowing how to be, all that can ever be is chaos, entropy, and ultimately, void. (Some people here have objected to this line of thinking before, based on their assumptions innateness. We will never agree, so there is little point in revisiting... what I suggest here is in direct opposition to the notion of innateness, which I see as an artefact of the genocentric narrative... innateness is the very thing that needs to be dispensed with if further progress in the life sciences is to be entertained) sj
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