While responding to the charge that memetics is useless because ideas are Lamarkian while genetics are Darwinian, DD makes a particularly pompous and defensive --- and shallow -- response (he makes it 25 minutes into part 2 of the audio version). To show how off target the critics are, he points out that with ideas there is no distinction between the germ line and the somatic line; nor is there a distinction between genotype and phenotype. That's supposed to show that memetics is quite unlamarkian. But this reply seems embarrassingly counter-productive. For Larmarkians, who were taken seriously prior to Mendel's discoveries, were in no need of such distinctions. Theirs was a holistic account. And in that way, it actually seems all the more appropo to look at memetics under a Lamarkian lens. And it is all the more inappropriate to compare the transmission of ideas to neo-Darwinian genetics.
Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
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