I am assuming that people copy things more often than they create them.
In philosophy this means a philosopher will copy ideas and views from popular books instead of purely making up their own ideas.
In religion people have a specitic command or protocol for copying the ideal, such as the ten commandments or people
that teach we must be immitators of christ.
A religion never reaches “your own ideas are more important than ours.”
Instead it is reaffirmed that we must copy.
The result is that many people we meet have similar beliefs and this can become bothersome if we are searching for
a new way of living.
i completely agree with you that we must be original,
yet i have discovered that wisdom also lies in the ancients(to be copied), and in synthesizing everything they taught to create a new learning
Remember that I didn’t say mimetics are bad or evil, but i will say this:
People in general being copy-cats can be either good or bad. When propaganda happens
we can get something like nazi germany. Or we can instead have some sort of multicultural
eutopia in canada. I mean life is better than ever in some ways and there is consensus in society.
It’s a two edged sword, so to speak.
The next question is why and how are we mimetic?
Is it nature’s way of conserving energy? I’ll assume that mimetics originally and evolutionarily were
meant to be profitable. People in general like symetry and sameness. The quality of art, for example,
is often considered like this: how ever accurately you can copy things like trees and animals, that is
your value and your goodness. So if we make a painting that looks very accurate, it is considered more
valuable. This trend i believe has variants which seep into culture and religion aswel.
If you observe the history of literature, you see a lot of influence of one author over another, instead of the using the word ‘copy’
I believe instead of mimicking, what we have is influence.
Faulkner influenced a ton of modern writers, including Garcia Marquez, and other modern writers, who essentially copied his style, but made something original of their own by studying and first copying his style. It is believed that Gunter Grass has influenced Salman Rushdie in the same manner, who in turn influenced Arundhati Roy
Simply put, what i’m saying, is that nobody likes to copy. However, we all love to be influenced, because we admire something in someone else.
We can even say that the Neo nazi of America i influenced by Hitler, yet they want their own separate identity
This happens to be a nice topic. I love this site
Ok we can use the word influence if you like. Philosophy and culture are very aesthetic.
Aesthetics is about how we guage quality of appearance.
This in turn can be moralized, prioritized, rationalized, and pretty soon it comes to be a focal-object.
What i mean by focal-object is that “truth” isn’t judged just by how true it is, but presentation is also a big factor
for anyone buying into a particular idea or truth. Presentation is aesthetic.
There are consiquences for belief. We have some natural caution but i believe “truth” is only a very
recent issue in evolution. Something that we weren’t perfectly built to handle.
Have you just recently joined the forum?
I was away for a long time but i regestered years ago.
Do you mean memetics?
No i mean immitation.
yes i’m new here
We’re limited, of course, by what nature offers us. It’s the existence of limitation that suggests its opposite: that there’s something beyond. Creativity then tries to enter through that door but it’s really not creative in the sense that it has never been done before. I say that because nature’s offerings are still influencing us and the existence of possibilities, mainly the way concepts could be if not touched by nature or, more practically, if nature operated some other way.
Good luck finding originality, creativity, critical thinking or anything of the sort in religion.
Religion should be the first thing to get thrown out of window when looking for those things.
As someone already said, we are constricted by nature, by physics, by the way this universe is and works therefor there will always be a limit for originality.
If you were truly looking for a “new way of living” why look at others? Isn’t that already a form of imitating? The best route would probably be to create it yourself. Anyway, I don’t see what the big deal with originality is. Nothing worse then being original for the sake of it.
Dan, why couldn’t you and I USE the team spirit of society (that replicates itself when passed down) simply for pulling together when some demand comes up and we need cooperation for a while? Predictability seems a natural tendency for an efficient life and for it we’d draw from a common fund of knowledge. Sanity and intelligence between ourselves would be factors that emerge from some state of affairs copied and put into operation for us to utilize. I know you addressed this already and maybe it’s inherent in nature’s purpose.
But nature is also busy creating uniqueness in individuality within species. There will always be trees and leaves that are unrepeatable, unprecedented in their structure – in their concourse of atoms; same with human organisms. Each is an extraordinary creation, but when judged by society maybe not. So, it would seem we’d have to strip ourselves from ways of thinking that have a hold on us without looking into our past to find a way to do so. Looking back to past experiences for guidance would put us back into the system we’re trying to be freed from. After all, we don’t always need to USE the purpose society used when creating in us the purpose of maintain the status quo. I don’t know, maybe something happens to certain individuals where nature creates them in a genetic way where they are thrown of the evolutionary path and they just cannot be fitted into any patterned or system created by a society or any agency external to them.
When i became less religious I used/copied atheist articles and write ups.
I considered it a blessing to be able to learn from other people who were paveing the way.
I guess we do often have at least a little bit of team spirit.
As usual it can be both bad or good for us.