I will look these up. In addition the sandwhich structure pops up in Freud:
Over-ego/ego/ID and, as I've recently learned, in Deleuze:
Socius/individual/desire machines. Deleuze assigns no existence to the
individual. It is, he claims, merely a medley of desiring machines suspended in
the field of the socius.
I do not agree with deleuze on this point although I assign greater
value to the Social than to the individual. As I see it the meta-control system
(the Self) plays a vital role in the erection of the sandwich. Sure enough the
Self could not have existed without the Social but neither could the Social
have existed without the Self. Therefore I assign real existence to the Self.
On the other hand, I have recently made a horrible/fascinating
discovery. It may be obvious to many but its new to me: there is a genetically
encoded back-door into the Self! Normally the mind erects a psychodynamic immune
system around the Self to protect it from destructive forces and to reinsure its
continuation. But this immune system is not water proof. There namely exists a
communication channel directly from the social to the mimickers (or from the
social to the subconscious if you like) which bypasses the entire psychodynamic
immune system. This back door is the channel through which the Social being
culturally encodes the individual.
My sandwich model is not unique as you have demonstrated. On the
contrary, it steps into known land. (Social systems are frequently referred to
as reflexive.) I do, however, believe my model have some obvious strengths
compared to other similar models. First of all I incorporate the theory of
memetics in a more holistic fashion. Memetics in turn builds on epidemology
which is a well known area. Thus, my model gets existing, powerful conceptual
tools for free and therefore allow computational modelling.
Second, and this is the most important reason, I give an *evolutionary*
explanation to the sandwich. How did it evolve? I propose an evolutionary
mechanism for this which explains why the language organ and the back door is
*genetically* encoded into humans. I also explain why our recognition processes
has the structure of a *concept*. And as a side effect I might have the answer
to why the neanderthals went extinct, why scizophrenia evolved and why hominid
evolution proceeded abnormally fast.
In the near future I will post an article in which I investigate this
evolutionary mechanism. If there already exists material on this intermediate
stage of human evolution and on the back door then I'd very much want to hear
about it.
Onar.