The structure of social consciousness

Onar Aam (onar@HSR.NO)
Fri, 2 Jun 1995 18:36:00 +0100

I've received many questions about exactly what qualities are destroyed by
Dawkins' smearing of the spiritual and the material world. I've just finished a
paper on this which is available on my homepage. Here is the abstract:

I l l u s o r y I l l u s i o n s

The structure of social consciousness

The mirrorhouse is a house of illusion. The magic mirrorhouse (1) is an
illusory house of illusion and is a very good model of culture. It is
justified by the following line of reasoning: the main building blocks
of the mind are mimickers (2) which are perceptual machines obtaining
their existence by means of imitation. Imitation, in turn, is illusory
mirroring. Assembling many minds into a group therefore corresponds to
assembling illusory mirrors into a mirrorhouse, and hence we obtain the
magic mirrorhouse.

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References:

(1) The Magic Mirrorhouse, Onar Aam

(2) General Memetics (part 1), Onar Aam

http://www.hsr.no/~onar/

General references:

On the Social Construction of Emergent Worlds, Kent D. Palmer, Ph.D.

Steps to the Threshold of the Social, Kent D. Palmer, Ph.D.

Kent D. Palmer:
Software Engineering Technologist
autopoietic social systems theorist
e-mail: palmer@netcom.com

Onar.