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| compass rose drawn by a child |
- "When we imitate something that we can see, it is as if we are experiencing it. When we imagine doing something, never mind actually imitate it, it is as if we are actually doing it ourselves. We need to be careful of our imagination, since what we imagine is in a sense what we are and who we become. Thinking about something, or even just hearing words connected with it, alters the way we behave and how we perform on tasks.
- "Music and language are reciprocal skills, of no use to individuals on their own, though of more than a little use to a group. Unless they are mimicked they wouldn't be much use. Skilled imitators strengthen the bonds that tie them to others within the group, and make social groups stable and enduring. The overwhelming importance of mimesis points to the conclusion that we had better select good models to imitate, because as a species, not only as individuals, we will become what we imitate.
- "Imitation can be driven by a feeling of attraction which results in our apprehending the whole and trying to feel what that must be like from the inside - by so to speak an imaginative inhabiting of the other, which is always different because of its intersubjective betweenness. The process of mimesis is one of intention, aspiration, attraction and empathy, drawing heavily on the right hemisphere. It is not mechanical reproduction; copying is the following of disembodied procedures and algorithms, which is left-hemisphere-based. (121, 240-256 The Master and His Emissary)
- The imagination may be seen in stark contrast with reduplicative phenomena, which outside of philosophy and science (cf. multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of physics) are typically due to right hemisphere damage; sufferers from schizophrenia have been known to see themselves as copying machines. (332) However the imagination neither copies, nor re-presents what we already know in some different way, rather it allows something we thought we knew to be revealed for the first time. (408) It is 'presentation', not 're-presentation', and viewed from this contrasting perspective, it may appear to fade the moment it reveals itself. (381)
- There are three basic components to imitation: a model (the object of imitation), a copy (the product of imitation) and “some relation of likeness that obtains between them" to which we can attend. Imitation proceeds concurrently through three different movements: reproduction, variation, and inspiration/absorption. In the last of these, imitation is "responsiveness itself", and we are "carried out of ourselves" to become nothing less than a transformative dynamic. (Muckelbauer 2003)
Iain McGilchrist suggests there may be two separate views upon imitation in accordance with what we know of brain lateralization; two answers to the question: How does the capacity for imitating new habits and patterns enable transformation? The right hemisphere explanation is the more phenomenalist (imitation proper, per McGilchrist). Tanya Luhrmann described cultural models that foster the imagination by representing the mind as "porous" combined with an immersive orientation that allows a person to become "absorbed" in experiences. Here transformation is enabled through active absorption, the "inspiration" of Muckelbauer that "carries a person out of themselves". This is why McGilchrist writes that the imagination is "a single seamless process, a compound in which the parts are no longer separate but integrated into a new whole. It is active, vital, and is already part of what it sees by a process of inhabiting, or permeating from the inside – not by combination or addition from the outside." Accordingly, absorption can only occur through, and from within, an active social context. You cannot "think" or rationalize yourself into imitation, it must be an active, lived process. The more familiar left hemisphere description was provided by Laura Desirèe Di Paolo and Fabio Di Vincenzo (pedantic copying, per McGilchrist). It's a thoroughly accurate, and thoroughly rationalist account. Here it is explained as an iterative process of transmiting hierarchically arranged systems whose decomposability into subroutines allows local mutations and selectionist dynamics to occur. This mechanistic structure enables both cultural invention and the faithful transmission of new procedures that we observe today. This explains the unlimited complexification of technology. It is a scientifically supported description of the methods by which imitation occurs. As Victor Hugo wrote, "true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries". We need both of these accounts. Laozi wrote, "There was a beginning of the universe which may be called the mother of the universe. He who has found the mother (Tao) and thereby understands her sons (things), and having understood the sons, still keeps to its mother, will be free from danger throughout his lifetime." McGilchrist used the master and emissary allegory, however I admit to preferring this mother and sons metaphor. But that's beside the point, the lesson remains the same: we need the living perspective of the right hemisphere, guided by the analytical processes of the left hemisphere, to responsibly navigate into the future. This article endeavors to explain in what ways this has, and still can, occur.
Does imitation really warrant the amount of attention that McGilchrist provides it with? There are many avenues that lead us to this topic. Physical reality, in the words of Carlo Rovelli, is the "reciprocal reflection of perspectives". The world is not, nor can it ever be, described from the outside. As the external point of view does not exist, every description of the world is from inside. These internal perspectives are partial and reflect one another. As he described it in a recent paper "The existence of a subjective perspective is precisely the generic situation in physics: how systems appear to one another." Lee Smolin took a very similar position: "All that exists in the world is views and a process that continually makes new views out of old views." This is the starting point, and the implications are many. As Brook Ziporyn wrote: "For Zhuangzi, the way perspectives transform into other perspectives is the heart of the matter. The Dao is the ceaseless generation of new perspectives.” Peter Sterling, in "Principles of Allostasis", echoed that the goal (of living processes) is not constancy, but coordinated variation. And Mauro Dorato wrote: "The universe can be only partially known by interacting with parts of it from within, namely by dividing it into two parts. If the universe can be described only from within, we must somehow consider all the possible compatible perspectives about it."
Perhaps you can see where this is leading. So far we've established that there are multiple, transforming perspectives that reflect one another. The emphasis on reflection has been made by many. Erin Cline wrote: "For Zhuangzi, a heart-mind (xin) like a mirror constitutes the ideal state of unity with the Way: "The sage's heart-mind in stillness is the mirror of Heaven and earth, the glass of the ten thousand things." For Xunzi, one must have a heart-mind like a mirror in order to learn about the Way. Just as a pan of water can be "clear and pure enough to examine the lines on your face," so, too, can the heart-mind be clear and pure enough to respond appropriately." Søren Kierkegaard used this metaphor, maintaining that the properly attuned heart "mirrors" the Good: "As the sea mirrors the elevation of heaven in its pure depths, so may the heart when it is calm and deeply transparent mirror the divine elevation of the Good in its pure depths." Richard Rorty, too, makes use of the mirror metaphor in his work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, arguing that "The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror". McGilchrist argued that this capacity to mirror, to "imaginatively inhabit", to imitate is the defining characteristic of humanity. It allowed us to escape from the confines of our own experience and enter directly into the experience of others. This is the way we bridge the gap, share in what another feels and does, in what it is like to be that person, and transform what we perceive into something we directly experience. As Andrew Meltzoff put it, imitation transforms “the seen but unfelt” movements of the model into “the felt but unseen” movements of the observer. Paul Condon described how, when we imagine the experience of caring moments, we are simulating those experiences throughout the body, producing patterns similar to when they happened in the past. In various Buddhist traditions, boddhisatvas "see into and resonate with" the student's potential, or "gaze into" the meditator's potential. This "seeing by which they are seen" is very similar to the "imaginative inhabiting" of imitation described by McGilchrist above. This is not restricted to people alone. A more empathic relationship with all life (and ourselves) is possible. Restoring the world will involve restoring our ability to work with and understand the diversity of perspectives we share the planet with. Deep Social Mind theory describes how we are adapted to read the minds of others while at the same time assisting those others in reading our own minds. Our minds mutually interpenetrate. 'Mind' is not locked inside this or that skull but instead is relational, stretching between us. This capacity, to transcend our own perspective so that we are able to attend to that of others (in a coupled/complimentary manner), is sometimes called love or eros. How can I better understand the partial truths and values in another's perspective? Effective communication hinges upon our ability for perspective-taking to this end. Accordingly, assisting others in reading our minds means that actions must be visible and publicly auditable. Visibility is centrally important in domestic affairs and national politics. In a marriage or larger social contract, each party compares, “I did x, y, z; what did you do?” Notions such as 'grip' and 'alignment' all take the dynamics of interaction to be fundamental to experience. Further, if we want to truly understand the perspective of someone who comes from a different culture and speaks a foreign language, translation alone may not be enough. We must agree with Alfred Korzybski that “a map is not the territory”. One must learn the territory itself, the language and culture, and dispose of all maps, pass through all the filters.
Kendall Walton and Samuel Taylor Coleridge can shed some additional light on the relationship between perspectivism and imitation. In order to acquire a perspective, one must first imagine it. Walton takes the example of playing make-believe, wherein children engage in counterfactual thinking through imitation. But more broadly speaking, all art is understood as props that prescribe specific imaginings, like toys in children's games of make-believe. (Children of a certain generation who grew up in American culture will remember "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and the "Neighborhood of Make-Believe".) In make-believe we pretend to take different roles than we actually have by imitating the characteristics, and inhabiting the contextual world, of that role. Imagination is thus a process of modification and transformation through creative synthesis of oneself with the other. This was explored by Coleridge in "Biographia Literaria" where he writes that imaginative processes sometimes add additional properties or sometimes abstract some properties. He contrasted imagination (Latin imago "image," related to imitari "to imitate", to form after a model, pattern, or original) with fancy (a contraction of fantasy, Latin phantasia "power of imagination"). Perspective combines the roots specere (to look) with per (through). Thus perspective is "seeing through". One modifies how they "see through" things by the power of imagination and imitation; one view is merged with aspects of a second to create a third view. "One enters into the life. Equally that life enters into the imitator." (McGilchrist 247) Elsewhere McGilchrist described the perspectival shift of imagination as "seeing into the depths of something that you think you know, but seeing it for the first time. You're finally making contact with it." Walton's investigations led him in make other analogies. He wrote "Dreams and daydreams are more like games of make-believe than one might have thought". Perhaps no one more famous than Zhaungzi, in his butterfly dream, noted how dreams in which we become something new can transform our perspective. The connection between imagination, dreams, make-believe, imitating, and the transformation of perspective, the central role this plays in human nature, the way these can create both somatic symptoms or placebo effects in the individual, or shape the future path of societies... all this is critical. It should come as no surprise that children who have better pretense and imaginative abilities also show better social competence, cognitive capabilities, and an ability to take the perspective of others. This should cause us to reconsider the role of education. Why learn? Is it the purpose of education to enhance the rote memorization of facts, or the pursuit of money, happiness, or some other modern proxy of the good life? Perhaps children should study or engage in educational activities to enhance their innate abilities for playing make-believe, and learn to understand the mimetic capacities that make it possible.
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| Fumi and her cat, Ebisu (see video) |
An artistic practice that emphasizes self-expression attempts to copy or reproduce the self: “the romantic creates in his own image, thereby imitating himself and God" (Mihai Spariosu), but fundamentally all imitation is constituted by particular kinds of transformation. John Muckelbauer in "Imitation and Invention in Antiquity: An Historical-Theoretical Revision" goes beyond McGilchrist's reference to Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, and instead looks to the tradition of rhetoric as advanced by Aristotle, Cicero, Dionysius, Quintilian, and others. He describes how any act of imitation contains three basic components: a model (the object of imitation), a copy (the product of imitation) and “some relation of likeness that obtains between them.” Instead of focusing on the model or the copy, we can attend to the relations between models and copies. This "active dimension of imitation" proceeds concurrently through three different movements: reproduction (repetition-of-the-same), variation (repetition-of-difference), and inspiration (difference and repetition). In "repetition-of-the-same" invention can naturally emerge due to having numerous models that are creatively recombined. (Coleridge calls this "fantasy".) In "repetition-of-difference", rather than encountering the model as a determinate content, it is encountered as a constellation of possible effects; hence, to imitate the model means to provoke those effects rather than to reproduce a particular content. It is not concerned with simply reproducing the model as accurately as possible (whether that model is conceived as an actual or probable object), but must attempt, instead, to reproduce the effect of the model. In "difference and repetition", Muckelbauer explains, "the whole possibility of determining some relation of likeness between model and copy (through reproduction or variation) is rendered problematic because, when inspiration takes hold, the subject encounters its model as the movement of self-transformation. In other words, the very distinction between imitation and invention becomes impossible; it is simply something other." At this point, we imitate "responsiveness itself"; actual situations serve as the source of inspiration. This inspirational movement's attractive, "magnetic force" carries a person out of themselves and makes them into nothing less than a transformative dynamic. This seems to advance beyond Coleridge's description of imagination, or rather, it returns us to his source of inspiration in Schelling, who collapsed the distinction (relation of likeness) between the objective (model) and subjective (copy) into what he called an "absolute identity" (transformative dynamic). Perhaps it is this that conveys the sense of what McGilchrist means when he contrasts "presentation" with "re-presentation".
In Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant wrote "the mental powers whose combination (in a certain relation) constitutes genius are imagination and understanding", and in his earlier Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant wrote "synthesis in general is, as we shall subsequently see, the mere effect
of the imagination... without which we would have no cognition at all,
but of which we are seldom even conscious." He also used the interesting term "imitative imagination" [nachbildenden Einbildungskraft] (A767/B795). Later Schelling, in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), wrote "If philosophy’s first construction is the imitation of an original, all its constructions will likewise be merely such imitations... Philosophy generally is thus nothing other than the free imitation, the free repetition of the original series of acts, into which the one act of self-consciousness unfolds... the one absolute act we start from contains - united and condensed - an infinity of actions whose total enumeration forms the content of an infinite task." The process philosopher Arran Gare would later note in his 2011 paper "From Kant to Schelling to Process Metaphysics: On The Way to Ecological Civilization" that Schlegel suggested, instead of foundations, philosophy should embrace a circular form of argumentation in which a number of principles are mutually conditions for each other (as Fichte proclaimed, "No Thou, no I; no I, no Thou"). Gare summarized "Building on Kant’s ascription of a central place to imagination... Schelling’s dialectic involves a reflective and imaginative experimentation and reconstruction..." Schelling provided a basis for "overcoming the opposition between science and the humanities and enabling people to understand themselves as culturally formed, socially situated, creative participants within nature. Most importantly, Schelling confronted and charted a path to overcome the nihilism into which European civilization was and is descending, a nihilism that is reaching its apogee in... the specter of global ecocide." The same schism, and resulting nihilism, has similarly been noted by Iain McGilchrist, as well as the importance of imaginative-imitative capacities for charting a new path.
Toddlers teach us how imitation works as they naturally imitate the adults around them, sometimes in very amusing ways. Adults continue to imitate others, or an archetypal cultural model. This ability exists along a spectrum, and additionally the particular systems one might select to imitate vary widely. For example, people with high functioning autism tend to interact using a more analytically-centered communication approach rather than an imitative cue-based, script/schema approach, and so they may decide not to imitate actions that they do not analytically understand. 'Rebels' against social norms may simply make a conscious decision not to imitate their peers, but instead resist expected social norms and select nonstandard models or multiple models in novel combinations. Imitation and originality are natural allies. Imitation is "the most important human skill" per McGilchrist (though tolerance, alloparenting, and others rank high as well). Perhaps this is why Turing proposed his "Imitation Game" as an appropriate test for intelligence. What's the difference between imitation and a generative model, conceptually? If we all define and work off the same model, we focus on the thing. If we improve our ability to imitate and mirror others, we focus on the process, and defining the model itself may be secondary, if at all. This dual orientation toward embodiment and relations means the study of biosemiotics is relevant to the model/imitation question. The model remains a fluid and nebulous concept; it cannot be said to exist as a well defined, fixed structure or object. The thing/process distinction involves seeing the same subject from two different perspectives, according to two different aspects. With diverse models available, when the focus shifts to the imitative act rather than the model, we can ask 'why' and 'how'. Why imitate? In some cases this may be to adopt a new, perhaps more desirable perspective. How to imitate? Zhuangzi might suggest this happens through the process of transforming both form and action. Wang Yangming famously stated the unity of knowledge and action, so for him imitation may be the means by which action leads to new knowledge. A sort of "fake it until you make it" view. But because the path to that new view may not be the same as was taken by the original model being imitated, the reasons for imitation, and the resulting vista, can be very different.
In our first example of a toddler, the evolutionary explanation is that the child is trying to increase their fitness as they learn to navigate a complex social and physical world (an intrinsically pleasurable activity). The child literally tries to 'be like' other family members. But turning to the case of an insect that mimics a stick, the insect doesn't necessarily adopt the view of the stick, or seek to actually become a stick. It simply wants (from the perspective of teleonomy) to acquire one notable aspect of being a stick, which is that sticks are generally left alone by predators. A psychopath might mimic a person who does not have a personality disorder, not so they can be more 'normal', but because it enables them to better deceive and manipulate, to be a better psychopath. So by observing mimicry alone we cannot deduce the motivation behind that mimicry. We must view it within the larger context in which it occurs. Likeness, similarity, imaginative and analogical/ metaphorical thinking, all these reflective dynamics can be used to direct our attention either toward, or repel it away, from something. Attention, the act of viewing from a particular perspective and the effect it produces, is key to understanding why we imitate. According to many psychological theories, such as Active Inference, we want to better control and direct attention, more harmoniously reflect and inhabit the world, the bodies, and the minds around us, and words and language are both learnt by it and then later used to as tools to further that purpose. To what end? That is up to us. A capacity for imitating new habits and patterns enables transformation, and expands our potential. But who among us can really change? Old habits and patterns prevent sustained attempts at imitation. Generally, one does not imitate by analytically defining their relations and adjusting these so they conform to some alternate conception or standard. Imitation doesn't operate very well through the tools and methods of science and reason. Instead imitation operates through imagination, which can produce deleterious psychosomatic symptoms or efficacious placebo effects as well. Oscar Wilde wrote "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", but more importantly, it is a living art. It is a force of nature. It isn't taught to children; they feelingly know how to do it. As do many, if not all, animals and plants. But it remains a mystery to McGilchrist's emissary exactly how it happens. The person who sets out to imitate "greatness", as Wilde put it, might begin by noting the qualities of that which they desire, and then feel their way into new habits and patterns by imagining, visualizing the perspective of one who already has, or had them. It is through imagination, one of the four paths to knowledge described by McGilchrist, that we are able to imitate. (The other three are intuition, reason, and science. Robert Rosen wrote, "the essence of an observation, of a perspective, is that at root it rests on the unentailed, on the intuitive leap".) In our contemporary culture, where imagination is progressively marginalized and difficult to accommodate within our utilitarian conception of the world, awareness of it's power is often allowed to wither and atrophy as one ages. The capacity for 'authentic' imitation, not done for the sake of appearances and mere conformity but out of a desire for inner growth, development, transformation, and radical change, is denigrated. This is a travesty, because through imitation, per McGilchrist, "we can choose who we become, in a process that can move surprisingly quickly." How influential are our mimetic abilities? The potency of our imitative tendencies is such that, under the right conditions, we can acquire practices (such as suicide) that natural selection has directly acted to eliminate under most conditions. In The Secret of our Success (p50) Joseph Henrich writes "If humans will imitate something that is so starkly not in our self-interest, or that of our genes, imagine all the other less costly things we are willing to acquire by cultural transmission." Yes, imagine indeed. Perhaps, in the place of those behaviors that combine to elevate existential risk, we might replace them with those that enhance global peace and security instead.
In his final lecture, Terrence Cole said "Forget about the saying 'those who don't know the past are condemned to repeat it'. That's crazy. The problem is, people who know the past are the ones who love repeating it! They're stuck in it. They can't get away from it. And they can't see what's ahead." This sort of intentional imitation of the past is a theme many have frequently returned to. Iain McGilchrist cited Thomas Mann's 1936 lecture 'Freud and the Future'. Here it is noted that Ceasar imitated Alexander, Alexander imitated Miltiades (and claimed he was the son of Jupiter-Ammon), and Napoleon imitated Alexander (and Charlemagne as well). In 1890 Gabriel Tarde wrote "Every invention and every discovery consists of the interference in somebody's mind of certain old pieces of information that have generally been handed down by others. What did Darwin's thesis about natural selection amount to? To have proclaimed the fact of competition among living things? No, but in having for the first time combined this idea with the ideas of variability and heredity." Joseph Henrich later picked up on this 'imitation hypothesis', and noted that culture arises by acquiring models from others, and models evolve according to those three Darwinian processes outlined by Tarde: variation, differential selection (competition), and heredity. Theoretical evolutionary biologist Eörs Szathmáry, like Henrich, also applied this to culture: "It was language, with its unlimited hereditary potential, that opened up the possibility of open-ended cumulative cultural evolution." As the saying 'ontology recapitulates phylogeny' points to a deep developmental history, likewise imitation cannot be separated from its historical context. For Tarde, human history could be interpreted as a "career" of imitations, trajectories of inherited inventions through populations. This is not unlike the causal "light cone" defining the 'views' described by Lee Smolin's causal theory of views (CTV). It provides a possible way to understand heritable processes within a wider physical framework. Hinting at the imitation hypothesis of Tarde, and later Henrich, Arran Gare noted that "a series of renaissances of civilization in Europe were built on the capacity [for imitation]", the meta-skill that enables, as Donella Meadows puts it, "the power to transcend paradigms". Tarde's proposed sociology attempted to identify the variables that influence why some imitations come to be selected, in other words are more environmentally "fit", than others.
René Girard wrote “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” Televangelist Pat Robertson appears to have recognized as much. In 1981 he said "People are like a bunch of sheep. They’re saying, ‘What must we do?'" And so his show "The 700 Club" was designed to tell people what they ought to do, or in Girard's words, what desires they ought to imitate. Girard's mimetic theory states that the imitation of desires leads to conflict, and when a buildup of
conflict threatens to destroy all involved, we use a scapegoat. This idea has been used to explain how social media platforms, among the most powerful and potentially destabilizing forces in contemporary life, harness and manipulate our desires. Girard has many Silicon Valley disciples, most notably the founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel. But, as Justin Smith writes, it's not without critics. Problematic for Girard’s mimetic theory is that "it appears to leave out all those instances in which imitation serves as a force for social cohesion and doesn't involve any process of "internal mediation" leading to scapegoating... Girard is missing at least half the story." Perhaps he was overreaching in his totalizing urge, but his instincts in regard to the significance imitation were not too far off, as the problems of media manipulation are very real.
Joseph Goebbels' lead article from Das Reich, dated 20 July 1941, shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union, was one of his more vehement anti-Semitic tirades. Titled "Mimicry", he described Jewish people as "mimics" who are "masters at fitting into their surroundings" and adjusting to conditions. He wrote that they became "angry at us for uncovering them" and ended with the threat that "mimicry will not help the Jews". Roberto Calasso, in "The Unnameable Present", his 2017 book on the re-emergence of nationalism and totalitarianism in global politics and culture, outlines this perspective on mimesis by the Third Reich, not only as a metaphysical argument for perpetrating the Holocaust, but also in how such a radical failure to understand the nature of mimesis as an innate human trait (a failure to understand "the essential insubstantiality of modern personhood" per Bailey Trela) has become diagnostic of the totalitarian or fascist character, which would have us believe that it "doesn't have to imitate anyone. They are always and only themselves". (138) Such a belief in "primordial" essentialism is indeed diagnostic of absolutist ideologies. Goebbels' interpretation was also deeply ironic - he himself was a propagandist. "The attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign", Edward Bernays was later quoted as saying. And he would know, as Goebbels read his books. In Propaganda (1928) Edward Bernays wrote "We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of". This clearly echoes Tarde's "laws of imitation". Bernays, "the father of public relations" (or "the father of spin") influenced, perhaps moreso than any of his contemporaries (with the possible later exception of lobbyist Rick Berman), which imitations came to be selected and propagated during the majority of the 20th century. For the purposes of our analysis here, it's possible to differentiate between the process of imitation/mimesis itself and the environmental conditions in which it occurs, where forms of persuasion and control such as propaganda and disinformation operating in an ongoing geopolitical 'information war' may mean that people have disproportionate exposure to selective aspects of their sensory world. The interaction of these resulting in the conditions we find ourselves today. We've seen how the term "cargo cult" has been used as a pejorative for various cultures and ways of thinking (Feynman), though these are not always well understood. Whether this mimicry is a form of sympathetic magic, social control used by elites, or something else altogether, it may apply just as much to the Global North as the Global South. Ekaterina Shulman coined the term "reverse cargo-cult" to describe the Russian point of view that key institutions in Western societies are as hypocritical as they are in Russia, it’s just that “Westerners are better at pretending.”
A further word of warning. We currently live in a culture where some people tend to see themselves as perpetual victims ("come to believe that they are aggrieved", per Jim Wright), generalized across many kinds of relationships. Even entire political and cultural groups may emphasize a victimhood identity, competing in what Scott Barry Kaufman referred to as the "Victimhood Olympics". He writes, "A group that is completely preoccupied with its own suffering can develop what psychologists refer to as an egoism of victimhood". Here the tendency for interpersonal victimhood culminates in an inability to see things from the perspective of the rival group. This is characterized by three main cognitive biases: interpretation, attribution, and memory. Stated another way, perspective taking is negatively correlated with the tendency for interpersonal victimhood. "Socialization processes [including imitation] play a role in the development of collective victimhood. If these can instill in individuals a victimhood mindset, then surely the very same processes can instill in people a personal growth mindset". Here is where Tarde's ideas about social contagion, later developed in
Henrich's imitation hypothesis, should be brought to bear. Per Olufemi Taiwo, the constructive approach focuses on pursuing specific goals or end results, not on establishing a hierarchy of victimhood and deferential practical norms. Indeed, an exclusive focus on identity (by which is usually meant "my identity") in an abstract manner can never serve to confirm nor defend the truth and morality of any position. Anti-relational perspectives tend toward division, given their constricted sense of empathy and underdeveloped imagination. A misplaced obsession with essentialist distinctions diverts attention away from more important questions of "How do you know what you know?" This is important as there are meaningful differences relating to methods of inquiry; process should be emphasized over essence. In any social interaction, the assertion that “my access to truth is just as good as yours” is deeply problematic. Assuming Kaufman is right about a culture of grievance and victimhood, characterized by a constricted perspective that is consistent with McGilchrist's analysis of the effects of brain lateralization, then such dynamics must be kept in mind. Healthy relationships cannot be long maintained in the absence of a sufficiently broad perspective, one that is able to imagine the experience of the other person or group.
Memetic Theory
Richard Dawkins defined the meme as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation”, that is, any cultural entity (whether thoughts or behaviors) that an observer might consider a replicator. And in keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, he similarly argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes. Unsurprisingly, just as the selfish gene metaphor came under criticism, so has the "selfish meme" metaphor, primarily (though not only) for being based on an inappropriately reductive understanding of the unit of selection. (Reductionistic thinking can be found in ideas of physical evolution as well, for example Stephen Wolfram's cellular automata, about which Carlo Rovelli said "I am not overexcited by the idea that a simple classical microscopical model could reproduce the complexity of the physics that we see." Perhaps the same situation applies to memes.) According to the extended evolutionary synthesis, it’s not genes or memes, but organisms that are the unit of selection, and some argue one has to go up still another level to “group selection”. (As Spreadable Media (2013) put it, "culture is a human product and replicates through human agency.") But could an organism actually be a meme? Or a species, or an ecosystem? To explain imitation and cultural transmission, neither a meme-centric nor organism-centric approach may be sufficient. Imitation does not necessarily benefit the individual, but rather appears to maintain the system of social ideas and practices they are part of. As Niklas Luhmann (1986) argued, social systems have agency and ensure their continuation and self-regeneration. The challenge facing memetic theory is that the most widely accepted definition of memes (as discrete, indivisible, replicating units) is far too essentialist, and must be reconciled with the understanding that thoughts cannot be quantized. There are no "atomic" ideas that exist outside of their context. This inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to quantifiable key units and precisely specify them is a problem that genetics didn't face to the same degree. While genetics has flourished since the discovery of genes, no such windfall has benefited the memetic theory and fulfilled the aspirations of its early proponents. Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson write "the analogy between genes and culture is quite loose; culture has a much richer array of psychological processes with population level consequences."
Iain McGilchrist’s thesis in The Master and His Emissary is an appropriate lens through which to understand the development of memetic theory as an attempt by the left hemisphere’s view of the world to understand processes of imitation. But it’s ultimate failure as a reductive science does not mean that its initial intuitions about the significance of imitation within cultural evolution were wrong. Rather, we might say that memetics, per se, cannot be formulated from a strictly left hemisphere perspective, but must be reconceived as a right hemisphere science. This task is not simple. Consider the criticism of memetic theory from biosemiotics, (Deacon and Kull) which states that the concept of a meme is a primitivized concept of “sign”. That is, a meme is a sign without its triadic nature. Biosemiotics has long wrestled with what Deacon calls “teleodynamics”, or the ontological status of signs and their biological instantiations. But more generally, semiosis is about bringing oneself "in relation to a relation." Like memes, the science of signs has proven a difficult research topic, though has maintained a more lasting presence with a wider scope of research. In his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, E. O. Wilson suggested memes have a fundamental role in unifying the natural and social sciences, this has been the promise of biosemiotics as well. And these both investigate novel evolutionary concepts. Unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show both Darwinian and Lamarckian traits. Susan Blackmore distinguished the difference between the two modes of inheritance in the evolution of memes, characterizing the Darwinian mode as "copying the instructions" and the Lamarckian as "copying the product." A very similar distinction was made by Muckelbauer in his description of the three different movements of imitation. Due to the various methods of inheritance, Dawkins noted that in a society with culture a person need not have descendants to remain influential in the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death. Given this highly influential capacity, speculations regarding the applications for memetic theory abound. Kevin Kelly suggested a "mirror world", and Pedro Domingos wrote about "digital doubles", or what Rosen would've called psychomimetic models. But the problems with mimetic theory outlined above remain today; imitation has in general continued to defy a workable analytic approach. Many have shifted to theories of cultural evolution. Nonetheless, an insufficient focus on relationships over isolated facts and reports still prevents systemic transformation.
The intuitions that originally motivated memetic theory continue to inspire new perspectives on emerging crises. Joe Brewer and Balazs Karafiath wrote “Global Warming Is A Virus”, which tried to apply memetic theory to sustainability issues. Alternative, relational frameworks to understanding imitation may be able to extend our understanding further and draw on these earlier attempts where they have seen limited success. Another notable example is the work of Daniel Quinn. In his book Ishmael, Quinn explored the cultural assumptions at the core of Abrahamic mythologies (and Western culture), which he later described as destructive memes. His subsequent book Beyond Civilization outlined these to include ideas like exclusivity, objectivity, hierarchy, rigidity, and control. This indictment is convincing, and his prescription for an "incremental revolution" has been echoed more recently in McGilchrist's anticipation of a "new renaissance" that might emerge from addressing the same destructive memes. However McGilchrist might only add to Quinn's account that they are a product of the characteristic form of blindness that an unmitigated left hemisphere perspective produces. Quinn's motto "There is no one right way for people to live" is essentially a perspectival-relational position, and his incremental revolution has some similarities with Chomsky's anarcho-syndicalism (Chomsky references Bakunin and Kropotkin). Though I think a potentially more interesting comparison might be with Bogdanov. Chapter five in Rovelli's Helgoland introduces Bogdanov and the events surrounding his treatise Empiriomonism, as well as his relations to other thinkers. To quote Arran Gare, he "sees the world as consisting of processes rather than things or substances". Gare again: "Bogdanov was a genuine revolutionary. That is, he was working towards the creation of a society in which people would cease being the instruments of others and would gain control over their own destinies." This is consonant with Daniel Quinn's objectives.
Recapitulation Theory and the Nature-Culture relationship
Alfred Lotka said "the advantage must go to those organisms whose energy-capturing devices are most efficient in directing available energy into channels favorable to the preservation of the species." HT Odum described this "maximum power principle", by applying Moritz von Jacobi's "maximum power transfer theorem", thereby creating an ecological-electronic-economic analogical model for determining how to choose an appropriate load resistance, once a source resistance is given, for maximizing power transfer. If the load resistance is smaller than the source resistance, most of the power is dissipated. If the load resistance is larger than the source resistance, the magnitude of the load power is lower. Maximum power transfer occurs when the load impedance is equal to the complex conjugate of the source impedance. Applied to systems ecology, the max power principle was used to explain processes of ecological succession, and later applied to human systems to explain and predict changes under conditions of decreasing resource availability (aka, increasing source resistance). The theory later expanded to account for processes related to energy production, storage, flow, transformation, system complexity, etc. This large scale/ macroscopic perspective on resource use and system development has similarities to the theory of recapitulation (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) in the sense that young individuals (the load resistance) have not yet maximized power transfer until mature, at which point the rate of energy (caloric) intake levels off or slightly declines, otherwise overconsuming (hyperalimentation) could potentially lead to obesity, microbiome dysregulation, and other health concerns. This is true in both a literal and figurative sense, as Martin Luther King Jr. famously wrote, "The contemporary tendency in our society is... to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity." Extending the analogy further, if the load impedance of the global economy is less than the complex conjugate of the source impedance, this is the condition of an immature economy, characterized by conditions with lower levels of diversity, equality, and stability, as we see in immature ecosystems (see "A tabular model of ecological succession: trends to be expected in the development of ecosystems", 1969). HT Odum's book "A Prosperous Way Down" was premised on the dawning cultural realization that the paradigms of unlimited economic growth that immature civilizations grow up with were finally beginning to bump up against natural limits. When a culture discovers that it is, in fact, asynchronous with current thermoeconomic realities, at that point its economy will need to restore balance somehow, by either finding more energy or by reducing energy demand (w/ the requisite philosophical perspectives needed to support either outcome). Absent these results, the inevitable outcome of overshoot is an uncontrolled descent to a radically impoverished state, or possibly extinction. Due to the practical and technological obstacles that finding more energy presents, HT Odum primarily focused on achieving a stable state (later Odum clarified that systems "pulse" as opposed to remaining stable/steady, see also Philip Loring). This was succinctly stated in "Energy, Ecology, & Economics": "Whenever an ecosystem reaches its steady state after periods of succession, the rapid-net-growth specialists are replaced by a new team of higher-diversity, higher-quality, longer-living, better-controlled, and stable components. Collectively, through division of labor and specialization, the climax team gets more energy out of the steady flow of available source energy than those specialized in fast growth could." The longer this transition is delayed, the longer the load resistance is larger than the source resistance, the more damage we inflict upon nature and the more impoverished our future will be. When governance systems are captured by unaccountable people and organizations (who have effectively unlimited, easy access to enormous energy storages) it is predictably hard to get them to create and/or enforce equitable, responsible environmental policy. The feedback processes that operate in the context of nature-culture coevolution are effectively hijacked and severed. But we know that not only do energetic inputs drive culture, culture can also turn around and reclaim the agency to determine their use. Energy surpluses can either be used to accelerate a global conflagration, or invest in A Prosperous Way Down. Iain McGilchrist and Arran Gare have written extensive philosophically prophetic assessments of culture and the causes of our current nihilistic trajectory. We either change our cultural conditions accordingly, or nature will find a new equilibrium for us. It's better that we take the initiative here, as nature may not be so sympathetic to our situation.
Systems ecology originally grew out of some of the work done by L. von
Bertalanffy, who in turn recapitulated much of Bogdanov's tektology, and
who in turn was inspired by Mach and earlier philosophers like
Schelling. Incidentally, Mach and Bogdanov are sources of inspiration
for Rovelli's relational physics, as he described in his book Helgoland. HT Odum, and others like Georgescu-Roegen, Peter Corning, etc. have continued to inspire work in thermo/bioeconomics. Odum was also critical to the development of the permaculture concept. A lot of the attention in ecological economics today remains mired in the thermodynamic calculations, to the point that the more interesting implications it has for larger scale qualitative developmental changes at national and global levels are a bit more obscure than it's originators would likely have preferred. Today those considerations are perhaps most familiar to process philosophers speculating on the underpinnings of the nature-culture relationship.
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| Mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) |
Sarah Baker wrote a review of a film that holds a mirror up to society, paraphrasing: “The comet in 'Don't Look Up' is not just a metaphor for climate change, it’s also a metaphor for the western white man’s reductionist and self-centered worldview. It’s an elaborate display of solipsism. Nature, the poor, Native peoples, they are all in the background, barely even registering as supporting characters in the white man’s reality. The film is a parody of the grotesque ways in which politicians, big tech and media respond to imminent ecological catastrophe. And it's also a parody of the liberal out-of-touch elite that wrote, directed and starred in the film as well as the middle class protagonist characters in the film, and pretty much all those watching the film at home on Netflix. It's a nesting doll of parodies. Art is mirroring and mocking life, but then real life is one upping the art and becomes an even bigger parody of itself. (Anyone who watched Squid Game had to similarly ask themselves if they were any better than the obscure antagonists that film portrayed.) On one level, the most obvious point of the film is that industrialized capitalistic civilization, and all the problems that stem from it - pollution, illness, racism, sexism, poverty, obscene wealth, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, deforestation, and climate change to name a few - have prevented us from effectively responding to existential threats, and denied us the tools or opportunities for communicating, processing or being present with heavy complex emotions. We live in a culture that has turned everything into a commodity, including ourselves. Without the chronic suppression of our emotions, instincts, intuitions, and conscience none of this insane, violent culture could exist. So there's no need to look up to see what has happened, just look with new eyes that can see through the many filters that normalize all this destruction and violence, look in front of you, look to one another, look within. A second, and less obvious point, is that even if the comet is successfully stopped, all those problems will still be in place. Stopping the comet was about saving the Earth for the "winners". In real life, the biggest efforts to "fight climate change" (aka, the comet) are also just about securing the Earth so the rich can keep being rich by exploiting Her. So we must not only stop the comet, but more importantly we must also stop the destructive system that perpetuates the view that our relations with other people and the whole of Nature are inconsequential. In the film, the ultra rich "escape" Earth on a spaceship that will take them to the closest Earth-like planet. But in real-life, the rich view Earth as a temporary spaceship, one they can use to get to the next best thing, leaving everyone else behind. The Earth was never their home, just a stepping stone.” As Iain McGilchrist recently said, "Even if we could survive these crises, it would be pointless without a new understanding of ourselves and the world, because we'd be just as miserable, spiritually impoverished, and irresponsible as we now appear to be."
How should we respond to problems confronting us today? Yogi Hendlin recalled the inimitable words of Buckminster Fuller: "instead of battling these dinosaurs, we’ve got to create a better alternative". But to avoid recapitulating the same mistakes, we must understand how we got here. Today we can see that the Western world’s delusions about the nature of reality rapidly shift us between fantasies of impotence and omnipotence. They have led to the decadence of modernity where “the whole point of life is just to get some pleasure before we go because there is no meaning in life or in the cosmos at all, it's just a heap of stuff randomly colliding and we are the products of chance” (Iain McGilchrist). This cultural perspective has created the political conditions that enable corporations to concentrate more and more money (though they are never satisfied) - a nihilistic pursuit that ultimately helps us to unmake the world. So to conceal this duplicity they hire propagandists who, as he noted, gaslight us that we’re addicted (while surreptitiously cutting off our access to others). This has the tertiary effect of preventing eco-innovation and slowing our evolutionary transition from a linear to a circular economy. There is a question of whether more overtly authoritarian states with different social contracts, power structures, and a more responsive economic environment (like China) perform better under some measures. Perhaps so, but then so might the growing threat of eco-fascism as well. The deeper issue is that as long as we reproduce the structures that "thing-ify" the global commons (a tendency more common in Western philosophy than Eastern, per Walter Benesch), no matter how noble our intent may be, the left hemisphere will have the upper hand (as it gained in the Western world) and constitutive relationships will be obscured then eventually ignored. So an effective response to the ecological crisis will need to focus on process over essence, event over object, verb over noun. Clearly this is counter to contemporary culture, however the global community is in an unprecedented state of flux today. It is possible that a process philosophical approach to ecological health that fully engages imaginative-imitative capacities could emerge. One which focuses on the process of imitation, the act itself (and, only slightly secondary to that, the imaginative ability that enables it) over the various models and things one might choose to imitate. At its heart, an effective response to climate change will need to adopt the form of such a process-relational environmentalism, as Arran Gare has alluded to. Crafting a process philosophical approach to ecological health that fully engages imaginative-imitative capacities is no small task.
Are humans unique?
Given a choice between a “helper” and a “hinderer”, humans prefer the helper. This may be somewhat unique. Krupenye and Hare describe that "although nonhuman apes possess the cognitive architecture to track third-party interactions and flexibly evaluate others as social tools, there currently remains little evidence that they positively evaluate partners based on their prosocial dispositions toward others." In fact, "bonobos, unlike humans, are more attracted to individuals that are antisocial in third-party interactions as these individuals are more likely to be dominant, powerful allies." Hare's experimental results "raise the possibility that the motivation to prefer prosocial individuals evolved in humans after their divergence from the other apes," thus playing a central role in human development, cultural institutions, and subsequent evolutionary transitions. In a later interview about his later book, Hare explained: "when you ask “What organisms have had huge evolutionary jumps?” it’s almost always a story of a new type of tolerance that then leads to a new form of cooperation." So why are the predictions of the "prosocial preference hypothesis" supported in humans, as opposed to those of the "dominance hypothesis", which find support among bonobos? Tolerance (aka 'self-domestication') allowed ancient humans to develop larger social networks, expanded their mimetic opportunities, and, in consequence of these, led to more sophisticated cultures and technologies. In short, a preference for prosociality is ancillary to the "imitation hypothesis" and the entire historical trajectory of our hominid species. Various versions of the imitation hypothesis have been advanced by Merlin Donald, Joseph Henrich, and others. Some will recall that Mr. Rogers once said “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” Contra Freud, biology isn't destiny. But per dual inheritance theory (gene-culture coevolution) it is still half of what makes us helpers. Contemporary culture can either help or hinder that natural disposition. I once thought that our ability to protect depends upon our ability to predict, because if we cannot correctly predict which things may later threaten us or cause us future suffering, then we cannot determine the means by which the threat can be averted. But prediction does not motivate change at all. In fact it is virtually irrelevant to producing change. Only the archetypal (and often charismatic) identities we emulate can produce change. So our ability to protect depends upon the spread of reliable models from one community to another.
In his paper "The Computational Boundary of a Self”, Michael Levin writes that "the evolutionary pressure to survive in a challenging world leads (in order) from simple homeostasis to infotaxis, memory, anticipation, spatio-temporal scale-up of measurement and prediction, and large-scale global goals (system-level agency)." It is precisely this greedy infotaxis to minimize surprise that drives morphological complexity and multicellularity. "A cell need only to surround itself with its progeny, in order to ensure a much more predictable milieu (the least surprising object in the world is a copy of yourself). The more a cell is connected to other cells in networks, the more processing capacity and the bigger the horizon of what the compound individual can potentially sense, remember, and store. If these “front line infantry” are kept in place and suppressed from proliferating (and differentiated), one immediately gets the kind of arrangement seen across biology, from stem cell/soma systems to queen/worker dynamics in insect colonies. The surrounding body becomes an informational shield (Markov blanket) for the stem cell. The transition from single cell state to multicellular tissue is a crucial step in the expansion of the cognitive boundary and the creation of more complex agents with larger goals." This provides a very convenient analogy. The difference between a basic collection of unicellular organisms and true multicellularity as described by Levin here is like the difference between Fancy and Imagination as described by Coleridge and McGilchrist. The first is a "mixture or combination" of separate parts, while the second is a "compound in which the parts are integrated into a new whole". Levin again: "Cancer is a breakdown of this multicellularity; a (reversible) shrinking of the computational boundary of a biosystem. Cells become isolated from the physiological signals that bind them into unified networks. In the absence of those global cues, they revert to their unicellular past.” In a separte conversation Levin was asked by Kensy Cooperrider just how far this reversion might proceed, "What is the minimal form of cognition?" He responded, "Elementary particles, because quantum indeterminacy means that you are not entirely bound by current, local conditions, and least action principles tell you that even particles of light have the ability to pursue goals." Cooperider: "What is your response to the anthropomorphism objection?" Levin: "Anthropomorphization is a folk notion. There’s a kind of teleophobia that’s around where people are terrified of attributing too much agency to something." Levin also co-authored with Daniel Dennett an adaptation of his article for a more general audience, titled "Cognition all the way down".
This draws upon research done by Karl Friston on how agents maintain generalized synchrony with, and distinguish themselves from, the external environment to avoid too much 'surprisal'. As Friston noted, "The environment is acting upon you and you are acting upon the environment. It's a dance, a dialogue." Kirchhoff et al.: "It is possible to consider the physiological make-up of a fish, as a model of the fluid dynamics and other elements that constitute its aquatic environment. It is in this embodied sense that an organism is a model of the world it lives in. And by virtue of being a model, it is able to encode or represent that world (within a mental model)." Veissière et al. wrote "In active inference, everything that can change, changes to minimise the mismatch between organism and environment." In "Life Itself" Robert Rosen wrote, “Life is the manifestation of a certain kind of (relational) model.” This is imitation, which enables the maintenance of context-sensitive 'grip' that allows adaptation to occur, though seeks to prevent catastrophic change leading to organismal death. It is truly a dance, or "coordinated variation" in the words of Peter Sterling's "Principles of Allostasis". To Karl Friston, evolutionary theory is basically a process of inference. As Sterling put it, "natural selection ensures prediction down to the limit set by physical laws." This inference is in turn premised on the still more fundamental principle of attunement. Under the influence of changing conditions, the generative process of attunement never produces a perfect copy. The resulting coupling/ entrainment/ entanglement is imitation: a reciprocal/ symmetric relation that approaches convergence, but produces a semi-chaotic, nonrepeating dance, an evolving mutual orbit that 'drives' each agent through phenotypic space (in line with the extended evolutionary synthesis). We imitate (mimesis) what is in opposition to the other (alterity) because we have a "common enemy". The Latin phrase "Amicus meus, inimicus inimici mei" ("my friend, the enemy of my enemy") comes to mind, otherwise stated "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". So it is possible to say that, via negativa, we imitate the other. Necessarily, we carry both mimesis and alterity within a single body, as these form a “coincidentia oppositorum”, the unity of opposites (or diversity in general). Complementarity itself is prima facie more fundamental than any single example of it (i.e. attraction/repulsion). Each agent contains the other within itself, mirroring/ reflecting an infinite regression of infinitely varying dynamic complimentary parts, counterbalancing qualities. The 'via positiva' and 'via negativa' qualities of coupled agent-environment systems have mutually predictive information. This is akin to the "dialectical monism" (aka "universal dialectic") of Heraclitus and Nagarjuna (and by extension Carlo Rovelli). Walter Benesch often remarked "There are two sins in Western thought: infinite regression and contradiction." Imitation appears to involve a measure of both!
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| A short space separates the fingers... eternity. (Chargaff) |
Laozi wrote in the Tao Te Ching, "Tao produced the One. The One produced the two. The two produced the three. And the three produced the ten thousand things" (Wing-Tsit Chan, 1963). Xunzi noted, "When one makes distinctions among the myriad beings of creation, these distinctions each become potential sources of obsession." In "The Matter with Things", McGilchrist writes: Imagination is "a single seamless process: not a mixture or combination, either, but a compound, in which the parts are no longer separate but integrated into a new whole. It is active, vital, and is already part of what it sees; there is no subject-object divide here (cf. Schelling's 'absolute identity'). It recreates the known and familiar as something unique and new, by a process of inhabiting, or permeating from the inside – not by combination or addition from the outside." Coleridge's Fancy/Imagination distinction maps onto the left/right hemispheres, and his term ‘esemplastic power’ describes ‘the organic interpenetration of parts, the formative union of shaping and being shaped’ (thereby transcending the subject-object divide), unifying and synthesizing opposites (cf. 1 John 4:16 "stay one in our hearts with God, and he will stay one with us."). McGilchrist: "My contention is that imagination, far from deceiving us, is the only means whereby we experience reality: it is the place where our individual creative consciousness meets the creative cosmos as a whole." To quote Richard Feynman: "Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there."
"The imagination thrives on the implicit, and is deadened by the explicit. The explicit is single: the implicit is a coming together of opposites, and requires the simultaneous presence and absence of whatever is being gestured towards. Limitation can intensify the sense of infinity. Pursuing something can paradoxically lead to achieving the opposite." Alfred Kazin: "The contradiction itself is the reality in all its manifoldness." CS Peirce wrote "A thing without oppositions ipso facto does not exist... existence lies in opposition." And Niels Bohr’s greatest insight into the deep nature of the universe was that "contraria sunt complementa": contraries fulfil one another. In one of his most penetrating observations, Heraclitus notes: "They do not understand how a thing agrees at variance with itself: it is an attunement turning back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre." Victor Hugo: "true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries". Hegel: "Antinomies appear in all objects and ideas. Everything involves a coexistence of opposed elements." McGilchrist again: "To stand in relation to someone or something requires us to be close to, but sufficiently distinct from, the other: having what I call ‘necessary distance’. It is not enough that we should have the unison of sameness; we should also have the harmony of difference. The import of the name Sandokai, probably the core text of Zen, is ‘the harmony of difference and sameness’."
"For opposites to co-exist, they clearly cannot cancel or annul one another, but must rather give rise to something new: a form of harmoniē, as in Heraclitus’ lyre, a taut synergy [cf. Peter Corning] that produces a dynamic equipoise; the energy of contraries should be maximally present. Naseem Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile is an exploration of the many ways in which by seeking to make a system less vulnerable, we succeed only in making it more so. Making it ‘robust’ and thereby inflexible leaves it open to catastrophic collapse" (cf. "Return to Resistance" by Raoul Robinson). Wrote Barbara Goodrich, "the whole system of the brain is cooperating so as to permit the different frequencies not to entrain each other. This is understandable when we consider that a completely ordered, predictable system cannot itself predict or react to change very well." She continues: "the mammalian organism is built from elements relying on opposing forces, including opposing sodium and potassium ion flows, inhibitory versus excitatory neurons, and the predictability of individual oscillation frequencies interacting with the non-predictability of non-linear interactions among neurons kept in a metastable condition." Balance needs to be constantly disturbed and restored. Symmetry-breaking is everywhere in living organisms; it is ‘fundamental to every physiological process’. "This echoes Schelling’s perception that the equilibrium to life must constantly be disturbed and re-established. Perfection can constitute a flaw. Imperfections in DNA transcription allow change, creativity, and evolution. Nothing good is achieved without a degree of adversity being overcome: health, resilience, courage, skill, knowledge, virtue and wisdom are no exceptions." McGilchirst concludes: "We need not either both/and or either/or, but both both/and and either/or. We need not non-duality only, but the non-duality of duality and non-duality. ...Every adult human being must learn to accept the contradictions in himself or herself which we all inevitably embody; and learn even to embrace them." Goethe: "Dividing the united, uniting the divided, is the very life of Nature; this is the eternal systole and diastole, the eternal coalescence and separation, the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live, and where our existence is woven."
Why this extended discussion on contrasting opposites? Imitation is the recognition of similarity in dissimilars. This is present in analogical thinking. Melanie Mitchell notes that "analogy is really fundamental in human intelligence, maybe even in other kinds of intelligence as well". This insight led Hegel to his famous dialectics, described as a process in which a thing that is one-sided or abstract turns into its own opposite, that's also Jung's enantiodromia. It's an idea much older than either of these philosophers/ psychoanalysts, going back before Fichte (and subject to much contemporary confusion). Imitation, as dialectical monism, can be partially explained in this way since imitation and opposition are both a specie of relation, belonging to this same category, as well as to the category of processes. Imitation is the coincidence of opposites, the union of opposition and identification; in Boolean language: imitation = opposition + identification. It occurs in an infinitely iterative/recursive and increasingly global process of opposition (to "Primary Imagination") and reintegration, endlessly unfolding in this manner. In the words of Schelling, "the one absolute act we start from contains - united and condensed - an infinity of actions whose total enumeration forms the content of an infinite task". In every opposition we see a reflection of the other (alterity), and in the other a reflection of the self (mimesis). This is how we know the "laws of imitation" (Tarde), which also recall Buber's "I-Thou". The left hemisphere sees a dead, zero sum contrast/opposition where the right sees a generative, positive sum synergy/imitation. A slight asymmetry should favor the latter, just as McGilchrist notes pertains to the balance of matter/antimater in the universe.
Imitation within esoteric and religious contexts
Theology has long made the distinction between kataphatic (to affirm) and apophatic (to deny) descriptions, both of which are useful. But sometimes one is preferable to another. The cognitive scientist George Lakoff pointed out that "when we negate something we strengthen the concept". So he argued for a more kataphatic approach, that it's important to describe an idea using the words, metaphors, and worldviews we want to activate in our audience, or it may lose its appeal to an opposing approach. We can consider the process and concepts of imitation and transformation in this light. Take the example of someone dealing with insomnia, and trying to induce a state of relaxation, a feeling of calm. They may seek to visualize or imagine aesthetically pleasing sounds and scenes like those of art (music, sculpture, or anything inspired by the natural world) to reduce their stress and generate a feeling of calm serenity. As visualization exercises increase in complexity (Have you tried visualize the design of a new invention, or the interacting parts of a water pump?) their ability to "get you out of your head" and promote a relaxation response increase as well. The ritual actions of prayer, which incorporate a social/relational aspect and visual/imaginative exercises, and are often performed at night or during transitions throughout the day, can also help the mind adjust to changing conditions, reduce nervous energy, and resolve lingering tensions.
Paul Condon described one way of imaginatively inhabiting the perspective of others, to reciprocally reflect their perspective, he wrote: “In Vajrayana traditions, a teacher’s job is to see into and resonate with students’ enlightened potential, empowering them to transcend their reductive impressions of themselves and others by joining in the deeper seeing by which they are seen.” McGilchrist described the perspectival shift of imagination as "seeing into the depths of something that you think you know, but seeing it for the first time. You're finally making contact with it." Elsewhere he noted, "One enters into the life. Equally that life enters into the imitator." (TMAHE 247) Are such forms of "deeper seeing", leading to perspectival interfusion and mutual transformation, the imaginative-imitative process (variously hypothesized to occur via mechanisms of active inference, see Karl Friston) that characterizes 'deep social mind theory'? Imitation transcends our own perspective so that we can attend to that of others. John Muckelbauer described the inspirational movement's attractive, magnetic force that carries a person out of themselves and makes them into nothing less than a transformative dynamic. As Heraclitus, Jung, and Laozi asserted, opposites are complimentary; the syzygy of freedom and constraint stands in a "recursive and generative dialectic". Mind is a process that is always in flux, constantly dissolving and coagulating. Each time it reconstitutes itself it ‘reproduces’ the language of nature in a way that isn’t strictly reliant on recollection nor conscious intention. Did you forget? Was something lost to the sands of time? No worry. As Nagarjuna wrote, "the wisdom of awakening bursts forth by itself", like Zen it "does not stand upon words". Relations, the inescapable ground of being, imply dependent origination (which may also be termed "contextual emergence"). The Delphic maxim to 'Know Thyself' was repurposed for Plato’s Socrates, but if seen through this sort of imaginative-imitative lens, it could just as well also lead to recognizing how the wide spectrum of Heraclitean flux operates within oneself as a dialectic between division and union, or Jung's “solve et coagula” (separation and analysis on the one hand and synthesis and integration on the other).
Roger Ames is fond of telling the moral of the story of Kisa Gotami: "The wisdom in the Chinese tradition is that an isolated human being, a human being that has had their most important relations severed, cannot function. So what the Buddha is saying to Kisa Gotami is "begin again, rekindle your relations". That doesn't mean you forget, but in order to grieve properly you have to reconstitute yourself as a relationally constituted human being. An individual has to rekindle relationships in order to be competent as a human being." Life ends but not love. "Finis vitae sed non amoris." (The recent film "Swan Song" echoes this advice the Buddha told Kisa Gotami, with a twist.) What transcends our transient world, where everything can be taken? According to Paul it is love, the relational value par excellence. "If I have not love I am nothing." To this Thich Nhat Hanh added, "If you don’t understand, you can’t love." Love can't be blind, it must reflect. Søren Kierkegaard wrote: "As the sea mirrors the elevation of heaven in its pure depths, so may the heart when it is calm and deeply transparent mirror the divine elevation of the Good in its pure depths." Though life may take everything, let it spare my heart so I might mirror the Good, and though I live amidst suffering and loss, still love truly. An important element of Christian theology, ethics, and spirituality has been the ideal of the imitation of Christ. In I Cor. 11:1, Paul writes "lmitatores estote, sicut et ego Christi." (Be you imitators of me, just as I am of Christ.) And in John 13, Jesus is recorded to have said "I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you... As I have loved you, so you must love one another". Paul later expanded the circle to whom this applies, as we see in in Ephesians 5:1 and elsewhere reiterating "Follow God’s example". More recently, Cyrus Lee wrote "Thomas Merton's Imitation of Zhuangzi", in which he concludes: "How do I know that Merton imitated Zhuangzi?" Well, let me quote the dialogue between Hui Shi and Zhuangzi about the joy of fishes. I borrow the old master's answer: "I know the joy of fishes in the river through my own joy, as I go walking along the same river." Imitation transforms perspective. Though it is generally agreed upon, the difficulty consists in trying to determine what it means. Saint Francis believed in the physical as well as the spiritual imitation of Christ, and advocated a path of poverty like Jesus, who was poor at birth in the manger and died naked on the cross. But believers have long been in disagreement over exactly how physically imitating Jesus should be understood. According to a paper by Canadian academics Serge Larivée, Geneviève Chénard and Carole Sénéchal, "Mother Teresa believed the sick must suffer like Christ on the cross". If an accurate statement, this would've been at cross purposes (no pun intended) with the very ethic of care Jesus advocated - when there is access to analgesics and avenues for emancipation, the sick and the poor need not suffer. Martin Luther, a seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation, also expressed a skeptical view toward imitation, seeing it as an attempt to conceal a doctrine on the "works of Christ". Sola gratia, sola fide. In 1530 he notably wrote "Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, aye, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you: “Do not drink,” answer him: “I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to.” One must always do what Satan forbids." So it seems one can freely aspire to imitate Jesus, as Thomas à Kempis wrote about in his devotional book, when this is in regard to humility, service, and love, but should not misapply an ideal of imitation in cases where it would needlessly impose or maintain conditions of poverty and suffering on others. Here one must agree with Christopher Hitchens; where there is clearly no benefit, suffering simply because our role models suffered is a perversion of imitation, and far more like the slavish copying of mechanical reproduction than the "imaginative inhabiting" that adherents of living religious traditions aspire to.
Freud called the theory of repression "the cornerstone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests". Research suggests that people who have a “repressive coping style” actually tend to experience less depression and cope better with pain. Indeed, forgetting induced by suppression is a hallmark of mental wellbeing. Such self imposed constraints promote social cohesion and conformity, creating a consistent culture and social institutions. But there are also unwanted side effects in a culture that handles frustration with psychological repression. Comedy is a unique form of social commentary that can address some of these through exaggerated imitation, and thereby provide both cathartic release and an opportunity for critical reflection. Culturally unique forms exist both East and West (see for example the reductio ad absurdum comedy sketches of Tim Robinson, such as "Instagram", highlighting the conformity pressure in contemporary culture). Understanding context is critical to determining which models, and which aspects of our models, are most appropriate as guides to follow, something that is more easily arrived at from a relational perspective. Nonetheless there remain many examples that are not always clear. Some initiation traditions, such as those of the Mawé people in Amazonas, use bullet ant gloves! Here the pain and suffering is more controlled and localized, and (usually) of a more time-limited nature. As David DeSteno has pointed out, rituals such as these (though he didn't name this one in particular) have developed over a very long time and often convey lifelong psychological benefits in terms of bonding among community members. Membership in collective cultural institutions, and a willingness and ability to imitate a learned pattern of behavior, is often associated with feelings of psychological well-being. Frank Wilhoit said that conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. This may simply be the contemporary political consequence of an oligopoly that manipulates people with a psychological disposition to value purity, react to impurity with revulsion, adhere to the observance of ritual, and carefully avoid the perception of impropriety, neglect, or forgetfulness. These tendencies all point toward the importance of faithful imitation and reproduction. The crude criticism that begins with the phrase "If you were better at life..." suggests a perceived deficiency in these areas. When more attention is given to performing these time tested and proven stabilizing behavior patterns, then relatively less needs to be paid to any perturbations in environmental conditions. Living on "auto-pilot" in this way is less stressful and more energy efficient. Religions, and other cultural institutions, serve to systematize these behavioral patterns, enculture individuals from a young age to imitate them, and suppress deviance. But this can lead to false inferences and maladaptive beliefs (cultural norms, religious dogma, political ideology, or economic systems) that persist longer when associated with the archetypal (and often charismatic) identities we emulate. And a failure of reliable models to spread from one community to another can result in polarization. During periods of widespread upheaval these patterns and archetypes can be destabilized, but due to the benefits they can provide in terms of health, finding alternative archetypes to imitate, or reinterpreting older models in light of changing conditions, remains an active and important field of cultural engagement.
In "Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths", Tanya Luhrmann and coauthors describe how spiritual experiences are facilitated by cultural models that represent the mind as “porous,” combined with an immersive orientation that allows a person to become “absorbed” in experiences. This notion of absorption is like John Muckelbauer's notion of inspiration as described in his paper "Imitation and Invention in Antiquity" (also bears some features in common with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow"). As Muckelbauer put it, inspiration "carries a person out of themselves". This central importance suggests that the absence of absorption/inspiration as imitative processes could be diagnostic of cultural diseases of the sort of described by Iain McGilchrist. (Much of contemporary Western culture has sought to publicly exclude these.) Absorption allows life to "enter into the imitator." As Muckelbauer recognized, this goes past the "feeling with" of empathy into a more embodied "being with" of identification. Contemporary Western societies tend to enculture people to look for their atomistic self and discover who they "truly are". Instead, it may be that we only find ourselves through identification with the other, in "presencing" or internalizing the ways in which we are, in fact, the very dynamic that we habitually externalize. Although in the psychological literature absorption is commonly considered to be a personality trait, Luhrmann and coauthors point out that it may be sensitive to experience or training. They describe: "Absorption has been associated with an orientation toward artistic pursuits, intense mystical experiences in response to psychedelics or placebo brain stimulation, and strong feelings of presence and transcendence when confronted with natural beauty, virtual reality, or music. ...We view absorption as an immersive style of attention, a personal orientation toward one’s own mind associated with more vivid mental imagery and unusual sensory experiences. As people become absorbed, their practical concerns recede and their immersion increases. [Any psychosomatic symptoms would likely recede as well.] Neither porosity nor absorption is the same as religion. Instead, porosity and absorption may be part of the scaffolding on which religions build. Both absorption and porosity in effect blur the boundary between inner mental events and an outer world. Porosity specifies how to understand and reason about this boundary, providing (among other things) an explanation of how mental events might originate from outside sources; absorption allows one to use the imagination to go beyond the here-and-now in a way that does not feel merely imaginary." This recalls what Paul Condon has written on relationality and compassion training. In that context it is important to be able to experience oneself as part of a larger interconnected field, a "field of care" in which we are held and from which our later individuation extends. The significance of porosity and absorption are evident here.
In a sense, we have inner freedom and outer constraint; we are merged with the universe but constrained by our particular form of instantiation within a spatio-temporal boundary. Navigating this dynamic becomes a principle challenge for living systems with the inner psychological capacity for inspiration (the porosity for absorption), which enables them to freely imitate a wide diversity of forms. But one must avoid becoming absorbed by, obsessed with, or imitative of any single one to the exclusion of all others (see Laozi on "keeping to the mother" below). As Zhuangzi noted, "A boat may be stored in a creek; a net may be stored in a lake; these may be said to be safe enough. But if you store the universe in the universe, there will be no room left for it to be lost. To have attained to the human form is a source of joy. But, in the infinite evolution, there are thousands of other forms that are equally good. What an incomparable bliss it is to undergo these countless transitions!" Feng Youlan in his book "Chuang-Tzu: A New Selected Translation with an Exposition of the Philosophy of Kuo Hsiang" summed it up "The perfect man identifies himself with the universe [generalization] and follows the nature of things [particularization]." This corresponds to the right/left brain lateralization of McGilchrist. Zhuangzi again: "If we take the universe as a great melting pot, and nature as a great foundryman, what place is it not right for us to go? Calmly we die; quietly we live.”
成然寐，蘧然覺。 (Zhuangzi, 476–221 BC)
"I shall go whithersoever I am sent, to wake unconscious of the past, as a man wakes from a dreamless sleep." (Herbert Giles, 1889)
"We are born as from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awaking." (James Legge, 1891)
"Calmly we die; quietly we live." (Feng Youlan, 1933)
"Then he sank into a peaceful sleep and woke up very much alive." (Yutang Lin, 1942)
"I will go off to sleep peacefully, and then with a start I will wake up." (Burton Watson, 1964)
"I'll fall into a sound sleep and wake up fresh." (A.C. Graham, 1981)
"Soundly he slept, Suddenly he awoke." (Victor H. Mair, 1994)
"Peacefully we die, calmly we awake." (Martin Palmer, 1996)
"In peace he slept and at ease he awoke." (Wang Rongpei, 1999)
"I will doze off whole and, drowsily, wake up." (Paul Kjellberg)
"As naturally as we fall into a sound sleep, we just as naturally suddenly wake up." (Nina Correa)
"All at once I fall asleep. With a start I awaken." (Brook Ziporyn, 2009)
"I will fall asleep, and then suddenly, I will wake up." (Robert Eno, 2010)
"Calmly I sleep and freshly I awaken" (Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, 2014)
As McGilchrist describes the situation, the left hemisphere treats the world like a predator would; it locks onto something to chase it down and kill it. A bird uses its left hemisphere to identify if a grain is food or sand, while simultaneously using its right hemisphere to be on guard for predators. The ideal process is: Right (presenting) => Left (re-presenting) => Right (integration). The "imaginative inhabiting" of imitation (inspiration/absorption) unfolds in this way. Feng Youlan describes this in a Zen parable, the famous saying of Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin (Seigen Ishin): 老僧三十年前未參 禪時、見山是山、見水是水、及至後 夾 親見知識、有箇入處、見山不是山、見水不是水、而今得箇體歇處、依然見山 秪 是 山、見水 秪 是水 In "The Way of Zen", Alan Watts translated this: "Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters." Or as Laozi wrote, “There was a beginning of the universe which may be called the mother of the universe. He who has found the mother (Tao) and thereby understands her sons (things), and having understood the sons, still keeps to its mother, will be free from danger throughout his lifetime." Another common saying is that "samsara is nirvana". If life is samsara, that's the first level, the second level is nirvana, but only when you "rise yet another step over the top of the hundred-foot bamboo" will you see that samsara is nirvana. This is the paradoxical "attainment of non-attainment", the third level of integration/synthesis. Within Taoism, it is the "knowledge of no-knowledge" as Youlan describes (p113-117 of A Short History of Chinese Philosophy). As the Heart Sutra says, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”
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| Components of culture (Francys Subiaul) |
In "Emulation, (Over)imitation and Social Creation of Cultural Information", Laura Desirèe Di Paolo and Fabio Di Vincenzo provide a nested systems description of the role of imitation. This insightful explanation takes a hierarchical systems approach. They write: "In order to explain the specific feature of human-like culture, we must assume the existence of an evolutionary link between cultural production and faithful transmission of inventions and new procedures, through the preferential use of (over)imitative channels. [Evolution is a selectionist theory, but it is easy to overlook that this means the selective imitation of successful forms.] Exploitation of these channels can in fact give an account of both faithful transmission and social innovation. At the very beginning the usefulness of tools initiated imitative learning. The role which imitation assumes with respect to innovation is clear. The former may in fact have been the best option for obtaining reliable and functionally precise tools, and only its early development and exploitation would have supplied children with the pivotal information and skills necessary for becoming, once grown up, expert toolmakers. By means of over-imitation, children learn to be taught, which means to be proper children (not infants nor simply young individuals). Humans combine two elements in a unique and very productive “learning-inventing strategy". Innovation grows upon the socio-cognitive and procedural pillars that are provided by (over)imitation. Or in other words, humans exploit a sort of emulative strategy on top of the procedures that they have previously learnt or embodied via pedantic (over)imitation. This turns the imitative chain (i.e. the procedure) into an outcome per se, something that can be modified, and innovated upon itself (to produce “variations on the same theme”), by turning the imitative procedure (in which passages for reaching the goal are known) into an emulative procedure (in which only the goal or the intention is known). In this type of emulation 2.0, humans do not perform the complete reconstruction of the learned procedure but make innovations within this structure and, more significantly, by means of this structure. The combination functions as a coarse filter before ratcheting. On one hand, it prevents (or strongly reduces) the severe mistakes that are usually associated with non-trained procedures (and in general with non-experts’ activities), while from the other, it permits minor errors or variants to pass this sieve, thereby becoming a main source of variations and innovations. Thus, these new variants can be safely and easily incorporated (both cognitively and productively) into the extant well-trained procedures supplied by imitation. This combination, or synthesis, of the cognitive structure of pedantic (over)imitation and emulation allows the kind of culture humans exploit, characterised by the “ratchet effect”. Imitation offers a faithful channel for the transmission of innovations and actively constrains and shapes the cognitive mechanisms, allowing error avoidance and increased efficiency and parsimony in both time expenditure and memory effort. The acquisition of basic skills (including know-how and rules) through pedantic training is therefore necessary not only for becoming proficient in a particular field of application, but even for becoming a competent innovator. This allows for the fast and correct acquisition and execution of procedures and the production of new outcomes."
Di Paolo and Di Vincenzo cited Richard Byrne's earlier work (who in turn cites Richard Dawkins' "Hierarchical organization") which had differentiated between imitation levels of "program" and "action". This description resembles the "social scripts" paradigm, a form of knowledge structure about the sequence of events to be expected in a given setting. About this, Albarracin et al wrote: "Scripts may share similar clusters, or event sequences. These may be linked into tracks or decision trees, which inflect at script gates." The appearance of a braided river (a metaphor also used in evolutionary diagrams) comes to mind. "It is useful to identify whether a policy element is a gate or not, because if it is avoidable then selection is driven by cultural values." We can then ask which intervention strategies (innovations or "script surgeries") can bring individual and collective interests into greater alignment. Here, we also see the same hierarchical structure that defines which elements can be innovated upon and which cannot, which must be imitated and which can be substituted under variation. The key is the way in which imitative capacities at various higher (and lower) levels stabilize the overall behavioral structure, and allow the liberation of the "adjacent possible" to occur through innovation at other selected levels (either higher or lower). Holding some levels constant while varying others (within a modifiable structure) enables a ratchet-effect to occur, unlocking the adjacent possible. There are two tendencies to avoid. The first is the tendency to attend exclusively to the innovative factor in an atomistic way, however this usually forms only a small part overall, the larger portion being the network of supportive, imitative elements that made it possible, and without which it couldn't function. The second is to attend to the imitated behaviors (aka the program, script). Both tendencies lead to dead ends. Rather, one should attend to the capacity and process of imitation itself (Laozi's "mother") which makes both innovations and imitated behaviors (Laozi's "children") possible. No innovation or script alone is sufficient. See the operation of the imagination in the processes of imitation, verified through the cultural transmission of scripts/ algorithms that are hierarchically arranged in levels, embedded in semiotic webs, and subject to selective modification (at both levels and nodes). It is important to note that the cultural transmission of appropriate models (aka behavior modification) is the central missing piece for effectively creating a green renaissance that addresses both ecological and social justice issues.
When behaviorally “stuck”, one should move within this space, both vertically up/down the levels and horizontally across the webs, to the local nodes at which action is possible. But it is not the particular combination of structural forms (Coleridge’s Fancy) or any novel operations upon them (innovation) that are the key feature, rather it is the nature of our "porosity" and capacity for "absorption" by these living organic structures that is central. All motion is guided by such processes of imitation, this is “imaginative inhabiting”. These two broad categories of form (structure) and process (imitation) correspond to left and right hemispheres and are joined via the "coincidence of opposites". In a hierarchical sense, both mechanisms of transformation (imitation and innovation) are derivatives of the imagination (aka "the capacity for imitation"), from which they arise - the novelty of innovation is relative to the system, it is not an intrinsic or essential quality of the innovation itself - and it is the very capacity for imitating new habits and patterns that is the most responsible for enabling transformation. By combining that capacity and (the enabling hierarchical imitative structure) with the ability to bring forth and recognize innovations, the "telic transformation" (goal-directed system evolution) of ratchet-effect culture becomes possible. Richard Bryne writes: “If behaviour is controlled by an elaborate but modifiable structure of goals and subgoals, then the interesting question for imitation becomes the extent to which individuals can and do imitate this organization of behaviour, rather than the old issue of whether they can imitate a particular action.” Imitation can only ever be understood through, and from within, a social context that includes multiple diverse agents. Likewise absorption can only occur through, and from within, an active social context as well. Absorption is impossible to achieve in some purely abstract, left brain context; you cannot "think" yourself into absorption, it must be an active process. This recalls the scholastic adage that "action is coextensive with being" and Wang Yangming's theory of the "unity of knowledge and action," probably the most well-known aspect of Wang’s philosophy, which especially speaks to neurotic personalities with anxiety, "analysis paralysis", procrastination, and attention problems, for whom "wei wu wei" is an unattainable ideal, and who are adept at rationalizing inactivity or obsession (see Xunzi's "dispelling obsession"). In "The Instructions for Practical Living" (Ch'uan-hsi lu) Yangming wrote, "It is the original substance of knowledge and action that they are one. Now that we know this basic purpose, it will do no harm to talk about them separately, for they are only one. If the basic purpose is not understood, however, even if we say they are one, what is the use? It is just idle talk. Knowledge is the beginning of action and action is the completion of knowledge. Learning to be a sage involves only one effort. Knowledge and action should not be separated."
Aside from the notable attention given by Schelling and others within the tradition of process philosophy, Peirce (in semiotics) and Nagarjuna (Buddhist philosophy) have plumbed the depths of the ontological roots of imitation. As noted, imitation occurs within an active social context of multiple diverse agents. That's why social cognition of this form is understood using a reproduction metaphor (e.g., empathy, resonance, imitation, shared representations, or mindreading). How is the intersubjectivity of social cognition and co-regulation of action achieved? How is a connection established? Co-regulation and intersubjectivity echoes the co-arising and interbeing of Buddhism. These concepts, developed further by Nagarjuna, are rooted in the doctrine of pratītyasamutpāda, or dependent origination. Imre Hamar noted that "In Mahayana thought, particularly Huayan, interdependent causality is understood as a web of causal relations defining reality: to say that something is real is to say that it participates in causal relations with other things that can be said to be real". This [left hemisphere] approach deconstructs imitation into a web of causal processes that form the reality available to our senses [Peirce's secondness], however not fundamental reality [firstness]. In other words, it acknowledges causality, but not first cause, thus avoiding the kind of ontological commitment [essentialism] which Buddhism generally takes to be the most proximate cause of suffering. A key doctrine of Huayan is the mutual containment and interpenetration of phenomena or "perfect interfusion." How is it possible for something observed to signify (or reflect/mirror/imitate) something other than itself? This brings us back to the "reproduction metaphor"/ mirror hypothesis of imitation that figured in the response by Semin and Cacioppo to Susan Hurley's (2008) paper on her "shared circuits model". Another important observation was made by Carlo Rovelli - that a correlation between any two objects only manifests itself in relation to a third (Helgoland 96). The recognition of imitation as a distinct concept is a biologically rare phenomenon, and apparently necessary for "imitative learning" and ratchet-effect cultural dynamics to occur. It minimally implies the existence of a triadic structure, wherein a "third perspective" recognizes the correlation between any other two systems. As C.S. Peirce put it, "A thirdness is required to stand apart from the relation, or to express relations dealing with relations"; it provides perspective to dyadic structures. (Peirce and John Deely, like Schelling, dissolved the subjective/objective distinction, since relational dynamics are “neither strictly subjective, nor strictly objective.”) This has also been called metarepresentation (a form of metacognition/metarelation), metamimesis, suprasubjectivity, or a suprapersonal/ transpersonal perspective. Deely's suprasubjectivity is "the subjective relationship to the multiple subjectivities to which we relate", and precisely that higher awareness which enables imitative learning. Adam Bulley and coauthors write that metarepresentation is "widely considered as critical to the emergence of an understanding of other people's minds". Deely and Bulley are both following a path parallel to Zhuangzi, whose central message was to develop a "perspective on perspectives" (the point Brook Ziporyn forcefully made), because precisely this suprasubjective perspective allows the transformation of perspective via imitative learning. We are able to employ and use reproduction metaphors only because of this third person view upon such processes and structures. Whether they are viewed as a process of absorption, the structure of a fractal network, or an asymmetric synergy of both, will be a context sensitive choice. "Tao produced the One. The One produced the two. The two produced the three. And the three produced the ten thousand things."
Where else do we see this sort of perspective? The "three horizons model" is a useful decision framework for balancing the needs of today, tomorrow, and the distant future, helping us overcome the dangers of temporal discounting. Economists suggest there's a human bias, an inverse relationship between value and distance to the temporal horizon: the shorter horizon models have higher value to us today, while more distant horizon models have lower value for us today (but crucially high value in the distant future). Long term sustainability requires that we are able to work with multiple perspectives on the future, because what may be of very little value today may be the key to survival tomorrow. Why three horizons? The number three is conceptually powerful. It forms the basis of C.S. Peirce's semiotics, and it comes up frequently in many contexts, like in the Tao Te Ching quote above. Once defines an anomaly (or a monad), twice establishes repetition (or a dyad of polar opposites), but three times and you have confirmed an established, iterative pattern (and perhaps many other qualitative differences emerge as well). Iteration or recursion in turn implies an infinitely divisible and infinitely extendable spectrum/continuum, corresponding to an unlimited temporal horizon. And that's appropriate, since the process of evolution and development is never truly finished.
Attending to the elements of circumstance
In her paper What can imitation do for cooperation? Cecilia Heyes introduces another helpful way to clarify this distinction, by contrasting emulation/imitation. She notes that this is analogous to the difference between product/process, between what/how, and I would argue between left hemisphere/right hemisphere (referring to the differences McGilchrist attributes to brain lateralization). Many such dualities can be identified: fancy/imagination (Coleridge), representation/presentation (McGilchrist), destination/journey, and so on. We need both approaches. In a recent interview Iain McGilchrist said "We should live in a world where there is virtually nothing you can't say, it's how you say it" (or as the song goes, "'tain't what you do, it's the way that you do it"). It may indeed be a good idea to focus less on the "what" of life, and more on the "how" of life, especially if we are to understand imitative capacities. Here, the word "how" is used to indicate "the manner or way in which, or the circumstances, context, or situational considerations" surrounding a process. This in contrast to a "what" oriented focus, by which is meant, in this case, a more mechanistic understanding of imitation, replete with mechanistic metaphors, wherein we speak of friction, iterative pumps, spatiotemporal dynamics, and the use of prescriptive interventions such as constraints and filters to strengthen some processes while weakening others, allowing us to "navigate into" or "unlock" the wealth of the adjacent possible. In their Dual-Inheritance Theory paper (2007), Heinrich & McElreath wrote humans are "imitation machines". The overwhelming appeal of a functionalist/instrumentalist approach is clearly illustrated. That appeal is partially due to its explanatory power. It just works. But "The Matter with Things", and thingist explanations in general, is that they restrict our conceptual understanding of problems and delimit the solution space, generally confining it to employing obstacles, barriers, or constraints - all of which are perceived threats to autonomy that proponents of negative liberty fear most. Promoting change by means of threats to autonomy may be a flawed strategy. But it is possible to avoid the prescriptive approach, and its focus on "what" mechanisms operate, and instead take a nonprescriptive approach that instead looks at "how" mechanisms operate, or more broadly, what Aristotle and later writers referred to as the "elements of circumstance". This paradigm shift sidesteps the thingist trap we are in today. And it somewhat echoes insights from theories in developmental psychology regarding our psychosocial maturation, where it is preferable to place less focus on what is done and more on how it is done and how it relates to everything else in life. Parents are familiar with taking on the role of a guide, gradually relinquishing control over selecting the "whats", and increasingly playing a merely supportive role, assisting how their children achieve the "whats" that they have selected for themselves in the course of forming their own personal identity. In this way children learn how to succeed, how to take appropriate risks, and how to safety fail and get back up again. This paradigm shift from "what" to "how" potentially has much to teach us about our contemporary unhealthy obsession (see Xunxi on that topic) with the "what" of life, and our relative blindness regarding the "how". Recall the Buddhist concept of apranihita, which downgrades obsessive striving as the "what" becomes a much less relevant consideration; it's only through it's relationship to "how" that it gains any significance. In "The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching" the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, "There is nothing to attain, no program, no agenda. There is no need to put anything in front of us and run after it. We already have everything we are looking for. All the elements for happiness are already here." This echoes the central message of the Diamond Sutra: "Let your mind function freely without abiding anywhere or in anything." Ignoring the surrounding circumstances of life, the relational aspects, is a trap. Contemporary Western society has yet to escape from it.
In her primer article on imitation for Current Biology, Heyes was careful with the terminology. "When Richard Dawkins, Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson asserted in the 1980s that cultural evolution depends on imitation they meant only that cultural evolution requires social learning. There are substantial reasons to doubt that imitation played a direct role in the emergence of human technology. Other psychological mechanisms - encoding sequences of object transformations, supporting visual discrimination, and promoting patience - have played a more important role in the emergence of technology. Children and adults gain as much by observing the products of others’ labour as they do by observing the labour itself. This is because the difference between successful and unsuccessful tools lies in the topography of objects, not of body movements." She further elaborated in her primer article on culture for the same journal. "Recent studies have shown that newborn humans cannot imitate; imitation is not ‘in our genes’. Instead, the cognitive mechanism enabling imitation is built in the course of childhood through social interaction with parents and other expert imitators, and, at the population level, the imitation mechanism was shaped to do its job by cultural selection; it is a product of culture–culture coevolution." To conclude, "Languages, nonverbal communication, and ritualistic behaviours are inherited through imitation and may be getting better at promoting group cohesion because they are targets of cumulative cultural evolution. These imitative behaviours may have played an indirect role in the emergence of human technology by supporting risky forms of cooperation such as long-term teaching and division of labour."
For Heyes, imitation is separate from, but clearly supports social learning. For a literary scholar like McGilchrist, who references Coleridge and Wordsworth on the subject, the term 'imitation' is likely more closely aligned with Heyes' term 'social learning'. But the distinctions she drawns here are extemely helpful. McGilchrist devotes a portion of his book to imitation in order to support his larger thesis that we must reclaim a more balanced and holistic perspective on life. Does Heyes' interpretation of imitation support that? Yes, in several ways. First, it identifies how this is largely a cultural phenomenon; McGilchrist is focused on culture as well. Second, imitation indirectly supports group cohesion, cooperation, and cumulative culture. Third, Heyes noted that "encoding sequences of object transformations" was conceptually distinct from imitation (this may be a grey area, depending on our definition of an agent/object). Sequences of transformations corresponds to the focus on process, the "how", and the elements of circumstance, in short, the broad relational perspective that McGilchrist identifies with a balanced view of the world. All of this may simply be to say that imitation, per se, isn't really his chief concern. His focus is on "inhabiting" (absorption) - not about what is inhabited so much as that the very process of inhabiting is faithful and true. How does one imaginatively inhabit or become absorbed? Through another theme he frequently returns to: attention. We should adopt the right hemisphere's "global mode of apprehension" that sees the big picture, integrates context, and considers nuance. And avoid the left hemisphere's more detached, narrowly-focused attention that can dispose us to extremism and alienation if over-indulged. This also returns us to Aristotle's elements of circumstance (scalar ontology considerations addressed separately). We should ask: Do circumstances have intrinsic value, or only instrumental value? When it comes to imitation, to inhabitation, indeed to life itself, 'tain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. It's not about the network, perspective, or even imitation, but rather contextual considerations, circumstances (circumstantia, peristases), the "surrounding things" that are perpetually one step removed from whatever is ostensibly the center of focus. To inhabit the center one must attend to the periphery. (To imitate one must attend to the conditions, recall Foucault's milieu to see their influence.) But this problematically shifts the periphery into the center of focus, making it no longer the pheriphery. Perhaps you can see where this is going. One can neither focus on the center nor the periphery, because the essential issue is that focusing our attentional awareness cannot reveal what is needed, it cannot disclose the whole picture and necessarily excludes large portions from view. We are left with attempting to comprehend a sphere whose circumference, though we are tasked to define it, can never be pinned down and measured. We must value that which is forever at the periphery of our attention. An old issue of Reader's Digest quoted a saying that John Lennon later made famous: "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans." This captures the elusive nature of trying to fully appreciate the circumstances we find ourselves in. And yet, it's a task we would neglect at our own peril. Like mystics we are forced to speak in riddles to describe that which is both everywhere, and nowhere at all. And like artists, we become absorbed in the unfolding processes of creation and transformation.
Let's return to McGilchrist's notion of "imaginative inhabiting" (his definition of imitation). This depends upon our capacity for attention, and the way in which attention has been diminished within contemporary culture goes a long way to understanding why we face many of the challenges we do today. He writes "Each hemisphere deals with absolutely everything – just in a reliably different way. The right hemisphere is primary in the bringing about of the experienced world. As far as the left hemisphere is concerned, what it doesn’t attend to doesn’t exist. A common consequence of a stroke in the right hemisphere is a disorder called 'hemineglect' or just 'neglect'. It leads to a failure to take into account half the world. Unlike subjects affected by hemianopia, writes neuropsychologist Edoardo Bisiach, "neglect patients not only do not see stimuli presented in the contralateral half of space, but behave as if that half of space did not exist and never had existed. Indeed, the most astonishing aspect of neglect is perhaps this: patients suffering from it, not only are unable to perceive the left side of space, but are not even able to conceive it." One patient with neglect, as reported by Peter Halligan & John Marshall, recounted "I knew the word ‘neglect’ was a sort of medical term for whatever was wrong, but the word bothered me, because you only neglect something that is actually there, don’t you? If it is not there, how can you neglect it? It does not seem right to me that the word ‘neglect’ should be used to describe it. I think they thought I was definitely, deliberately not looking to the left. I wasn’t really... If it is not there, you are not neglecting it." These patients exhibit not just neglect, but what is called anosognosia (Greek a, not, + nosos, disease, + gnosis, knowledge), unwillingness to acknowledge a deficit, as we have noted. This is almost always consequent on right hemisphere damage. This might sound like a simple cognitive problem, a neglect of information, rather than, as it is, a denial of experience. There is not just a derangement of cognition (knowledge about), but of affect (emotional involvement with), known as anosodiaphoria (Greek adiaphoria, indifference)." This constellation of problems (neglect, denial, and indifference) characterize our relationship with much of the world today and represent a significant challenge to overcome. If Heyes is right that imitation is about the how - the process, manner, and circumstances - then this is dependent upon our ability to appropriately attend to these things. We cannot imaginitively inhabit that which we do not see, whose existence we deny, and about which we are indifferent. Perhaps more confounding, though we are able to perceive the world with our senses, our ability to imagine may be diminished. How do we respond to this cultural moment we find ourselves in today, indeed perhaps the Anthropocene itself, that is defined in part by neglect, by "a failure of imagination, the creative power that enables us to enter into what is there"? We can begin by acknowledging that how we attend is quite likely more important than what we attend to, and critical for our future. Counterintuitively, focused attention will often prevent us from attending to the most consequential aspects of life. It can indirectly lead to the escalation of global risks when we become blinded by
narrow pursuits, and blind to our own limitations, or simply cause us to dismiss risk factors related to personal health and the quality of our interpersonal relationships. As McGilchrist wrote, "The right hemisphere is sensitive to the whole picture in space and time, background and periphery, while the left hemisphere is focused on what is central in the field of vision and lies in the foreground. It gives narrow, sharply focused attention to detail. (People who lose their right hemispheres have a pathological narrowing of the window of attention.) Focused attention, the only kind the left hemisphere can offer, makes us blind to almost anything, however arresting and however close, that happens to be going on outside our sphere of concern at that moment in time. So focused is the left hemisphere on what it is up to, that it is content to ignore all that is irrelevant to its purpose. When we are highly focused on a single aspect of a situation we can miss obvious events happening right under our noses." In a separate presentation he concluded "We've drifted further to the left hemisphere's point of view nowadays. We live in a world which is paradoxical. We pursue happiness and it leads to resentment, unhappiness, and an explosion of mental illness. We have more information, but we get less and less able to use it, to understand it, to be wise."
Questions to explore
- Economy. In The Master and His Emissary, the Emissary doesn't see the world as the Master does, and though he thinks he can imitate, even improve upon him, he fails miserably. But in an apprenticing relationship of the sort that many skilled trades workers have maintained for centuries, the apprentice is able to learn the skills and perspective of the Master. Instead of a producing a poor copy that lacks the wisdom of the original, an apprentice is eventually able to see the world in the same way that the Master does, inhabit the same sort of relationships that the Master had, and produce the same quality of work. How does imitation factor into the economy today?
- Technology. New innovations allow for greater mimetic expression. For example, in the virtual worlds of video games, today one of the most lucrative sectors of the entertainment industry, our natural ability to explore counterfactual scenarios and models is liberated with relative ease. Daniel Suarez speculated that online games are the “larval stage” of something coming next, possibly a massively distributed and decentralized democracy. What are the implications for imagining and imitating new relationships with each other and the embodied environment? The intersection betweeen artificial intelligence and imitative capacities is an important region to explore. Could an appropriate explication of these form a guiding principle and approach in ethics of artificial intelligence?
- Cosmology. Can reproduction, development, and evolution be reinterpreted as selective imitation? Would this apply to universes as well (see various theories from Lee Smolin and Louis Crane)? Should cyclical cosmologies, Nietzsche's eternal return, beliefs about reincarnation, traditions, rituals, the reverence for ancestors and consideration for the "seventh generation", all be understood in this context? And what does this say about the return on investment (ROI) of imitation, which is to say, must one literally 'dream big' to achieve great feats? Does imitation, as a form of relationship, have certain conceptual equivalences with the transformation of things in Zhuangzi, or the flux of Heraclitus?
- Naturalism. Mimicry in plants may provide protection against herbivory (herbivory mimic), or may deceptively encourage mutualists, like pollinators, to provide a service without offering a reward in return (such as shelter mimics, for example). What local forms of mimicry have been documented within your region?
- Food. Can agricultural relationships imitate other naturally evolved synchronies seen elsewhere among heterotrophs? Animals have farmed bacteria, fungi, algae, and insects far longer than we have farmed them. What can we learn from them? Is there a book titled "The Biomimicry Cookbook" that spans everything from sourdough fermentation to cellular agriculture?
- Networks. How can we compare CS Peirce's triadic/ tripartite relations of semiosis (sign, object, interpretant) with the triadic relations involved in mimicry (model, mimic, dupe) where there are "two senders, one receiver"? And these again, with René Girard's assertion (in his book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel) that the structure of desire is triangular, incorporating a subject, object, and another subject who models the any subject’s desire. The web of relationships these can form at larger scales take on a fractal appearance. What language might be most appropriate for describing "fractal mimesis"?
- Opposites. Imitation is conceptually related to Schelling's ideas concerning the coincidence of opposites, and later as developed in German idealism the notion that these opposites are synthesized within a single primary whole. In psychology the ideas of attraction and repulsion (or reactance) are also important. Can imitation be conceived of as a category of response, one that is stimulated through "reactance to its opposite"? In other words, imitation is done not for its own sake, but in a via negativa, negative feedback self-regulatory sense, to restore a sense of balance that one perceives has been lost? Fables and stories contain cultural lessons and warnings for what to avoid imitating: "You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself." (numerous sources) “Experience is a master teacher, even when it’s not our own.” (Gina Greenlee)
- Senses. Is there any relationship between reports of aphantasia/hyperphantasia and imitative capacity? Research into this topic has been increasing lately and patterns are emerging, as described in this interview with Rebecca Keogh: "For example, Craig Venter, who sequenced of the human genome, and Blake Ross, co-creator of Mozilla Firefox, both partially tie their success to having aphantasia. It becomes a question of whether it is a problem at all, or just an interesting little human quirk of our individual differences." Her paper "The blind mind" states: "Aphantasic participants' self-rated visual object imagery was significantly below average, however their spatial imagery scores were above average." This suggests it may be orthogonal to imitation. Aphantasia isn't a lack of imagination, but rather an inability to experience one sensory channel (in this case sight) through imagination. Analogical thinking may be more central to imagination (and thus imitation) than visual re-presentation.
Keywords: imitation, mimesis, imagination, imaging/visualizing, (bio)mimicry, symbiomimicry (Glenn Albrecht), (bio)semiotics, semiotic selection, "copy and paste", model, simulation, emulation, analogy, metaphor, simile, similarity, relation, reflect/mirror/feedback/closed loop (infinite regression, eternal return), attention, conform/transform, peer pressure, "neighbor effect", social learning, social facilitation, "cargo cult", cultural appropriation, cultural evolution, convergent evolution, correspondence problem, social/emotional contagion, social influence, social physics (network science), suggestibility, empathy/sympathy/omoiyari (思いやり), make-believe, pretend, impersonation, actor/acting, accent, imprinting, sympathetic magic, placebo effect, supernormal stimulus, propaganda/PR/advertising/memetics, persuasion, peer/social/group pressure, perspective-taking, anti-foundationalism, imaginal cells, aphantasia/hyperphantasia, recapitulation theory, relationalism, dialectical monism, universal dialectic, carcinization, uncanny valley (epitomized by the film "Us"), Imago Dei (Genesis 1:27), "I and Thou", "Tat Tvam Asi", enantiodromia, "difference and sameness", metamimesis, metarepresentation, suprasubjectivity, "elements of circumstance"
Books and articles:
• Iain McGilchrist. The Master and His Emissary (2009)
• Jane Benyus. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (2002)
• Timo Maran. Mimicry and meaning: Structure and semiotics of biological mimicry (2017) "The closest resemblance to animal communication in humans can be found in dreams. Like the human dream, animal communication also lacks linguistic structure."
• Hurley & Chater. Perspectives on Imitation Vol. 2. Imitation, human development, and culture (2005) Innate or cultural deficits can contribute to psychopathy and violence. Therefore, under the assumption that (automatic or selective) imitation is a primary engine of cultural evolution, the study of imitation has clinical and policy applications. (50)
• Merlin Donald. Origins of the modern mind: three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition (1991)
• Merlin Donald. Imitation and Mimesis. (2005) "Mimesis is highly social. Its adaptive significance depends upon such phenomena as empathy, sympathy, social identification, role-playing, imagination (especially kinematic imagination), gesture, and mind reading, or the ability to track other minds and share attention with them. Accurate imitation is so highly developed in humans that it stands out as one of the defining characteristics of the human mind... We are mimetic creatures. We identify mimetically with our tribal group and have an irresistible tendency to conform to its norms. Conformity, on all levels of overt behavior, is one of our signature traits, conferred by a universal mimetic tendency. We conform not only to the immediate patterns of our social group but also to the internalized ideals and archetypes of that group. And those archetypes shape the roles we tend to play during life, as actors in our own dramatic productions."
• Michael Taussig. Mimesis and Alterity (1993) How do people from different cultures experience the two themes of this book – how they adopt or assimilate another's nature or culture (mimesis), and also how they come to identify/distance ourselves with/from it (alterity). The central category of dialectics is the unity of opposites, related to the notion of non-duality in a deep sense. The mimesis/alterity pair may elucidate our political situation. Who do we compare with? Contrast against? (Compare with "empathy and mimesis", described by McGilchrist (325) as complementary.)
• Kendall Walton. Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990) See also Alison Gopnik, who similarly addresses the role of play and make-believe.
• Alison Gopnik. Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions (2020) An extended curious childhood is a protected time to extract information from the environment through exploration and to imagine even far-away and unlikely possibilities. This may make the learner more likely to discover genuinely new ideas.
• A.N. Whitehead. Modes of Thought (1938) "As we think, we live."
• Lee Dugatkin. The Imitation Factor: Evolution Beyond the Gene (2000) Cultural transmission in animals.
• Boyd and Richerson. The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (2005) "Culture is not based on direct replication but upon teaching and imitation."
• Peter Richerson. The evidence for culture led gene-culture coevolution: the naturalization of culture or the culturalization of human "nature"? (2011)
• Joseph Henrich. The Secret of our Success (2015)
• Graeber & Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything (2021) "Do ‘early states’ have any common features? All deployed spectacular violence at the pinnacle of the system; all ultimately depended on and to some degree mimicked the patriarchal organization of households... Was the rise of monarchy as the world’s predominant form of government inevitable? Can one really say that it’s only a matter of time before some enterprising overlord establishes a regime of bureaucratically administered violence? And once he does, is it inevitable that others will imitate his example? The answer is a resounding ‘no’." (Chap. 10 and 11)
• Luke Burgis. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (2021)
• David Deutsch. The Beginning of Infinity (2011) "The transmission of human-type memes cannot be other than a creative activity on the part of the receiver." (412-16) Deutsch evaluates whether prediction, imitation, or creativity is a more plausible explanation for human evolution. The capacity for reflection/mirroring is a prerequisite in any case.
• Peter Singer. The Expanding Circle (1981)
• Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition (1968) Deleuze defines repetition as "difference without a concept" (13). Profound repetition is characterized by profound difference. Recall McGilchrist's statement that imitation is "imaginative inhabiting of the other, which is always different". In these two writers, with Coleridge, the "coincidence of opposites" defines the imitative process.
• Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time (1923) "The only true voyage of discovery, is not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others."
• Gertrude Stein. Tender Buttons (1914) "An imitation, more imitation, imitation succeed imitations" (from "Breakfast”) "Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting." (unsourced)
• James Baldwin. Imitation: A chapter in the natural history of consciousness (1894) "My sense of myself grows by imitation of you and my sense of yourself grows in terms of myself." Baldwin's work inspired Jacques Lacan's "mirror stage" and the "Imaginary".
• Gabriel Tarde. The Laws of Imitation (1890) In many ways Tarde
was the eminent forerunner of other 'big history' writers like Jared
Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel,) Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens) and more
recently Joseph Henrich (The Secret of our Success). “Contagion may even
come from the past, out of a dead and buried epoch.”
• Samuel Coleridge. Biographia Literaria (1817) Imitation "consists either in the interfusion of the same throughout the radically different, or the different throughout a base radically the same". And in Chapter 13, "Descartes, in imitation of Archimedes, said “Give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe". In the same sense the transcendental philosopher [Schelling] says "Grant me two contrary forces and I will cause the world to rise up before you".
• F. W. J. Schelling. System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) "If philosophy’s first construction is the imitation of an original, all its constructions will likewise be merely such imitations... Philosophy generally is thus nothing other than the free imitation, the free repetition of the original series of acts, into which the one act of self-consciousness unfolds... the one absolute act we start from contains - united and condensed - an infinity of actions whose total enumeration forms the content of an infinite task."
• George Berkley. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) Berkley wrote "esse is percipi" (to be is to be perceived), a reference to the pure Latin phrase "esse est percipi". This also appeared in the film adaptation of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: "To be is to be perceived. And so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other."
• Thomas à Kempis. De Imitatione Christi (1418–1427)
• Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria (95 CE) Book X, chapter 2: "It is of the first importance that every student should realise what it is that he is to imitate, and should know why it is good... We shall do well to keep a number of different excellences before our eyes, so that different qualities from different authors may impress themselves on our minds, to be adopted for use in the place that becomes them best.” Aristotle, Dionysius, and Quintilian wrote about the importance of mimesis/imitation in rhetoric.
• Aristotle. Poetics (335 BC) "Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation."
• Robert Rosen. Essays on Life Itself, Chapter 7: "On Psychomimesis" (2000) "Norbert Wiener provided the ultimate in mimetics, a biological version of the Ptolemaic Epicycles as his solution to the problems of life and of mind - another version of the perfect actor." Rosen called the Turing Test sympathetic magic, and distinguished between plausibility based on behaviors themselves, as opposed to based on the way they are generated, concluding that "fields such as artificial intelligence deal no more with intelligence than, say, symbol manipulation deals with literature or poetry."
• Daniel Hutto. First Communions: Mimetic Sharing without Theory of Mind (2007) "The Mimetic Ability Hypothesis (MAH) claims that the technical and social advantages conferred by imaginative-imitative abilities had a ratcheting-up effect, reinforcing their selection, and constituting an important basis for the development of language."
• Brian Boyd. The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction (2017) "Storytellers deliberately foster and prompt the imagination, probe psyches, and shift perspectives, more often trusting to inference rather than statement. We have a specially swift and responsive imagination when we attend to verbal narrative. Language allows us to instruct others’ imaginations to conjure up out of memory something not part of their direct experience, and therefore to share across the experiential gap between individuals. This allowed us to understand one another in much richer ways, in our variety and commonality, and to intensify our hypersociality and the creative divergences it also made possible."
• Jordan Zlatev. Intersubjectivity, mimetic schemas and the emergence of language (2007) Zlatev differentiates between dyadic and triadic forms of mimesis.
• Jenny Michlich. An analysis of semiotic and mimetic processes in Australopithecus afarensis (2018)
• John Muckelbauer. Imitation and Invention in Antiquity: An Historical-Theoretical Revision. (2003)
• Georges Pasteur. A Classificatory Review of Mimicry Systems. (1982)
• John Randall. A Review of Mimicry in Marine Fishes. (2005)
• Thomas Zentall. Imitation: definitions, evidence, and mechanisms (2006) Opaque imitation is difficult to account for without taking the perspective of a third person. "What should I do such that a third person would say that my behavior matches the behavior of the model?"
• Persson et al. Spontaneous cross-species imitation in interactions between chimpanzees and zoo visitors (2018) "Imitation appeared to accomplish a social–communicative function, as cross-species interactions that contained imitative actions lasted significantly longer than interactions without imitation. Previously regarded as unique to early human socialization, such games serve to maintain social engagement." However a subsequent study was unable to replicate these results.
• Palagi and Scopa. Integrating Tinbergen's inquiries: Mimicry and play in humans and other social mammals (2018) "Behavioral mimicry might have been the driving force facilitating the evolution of social bonding and cooperation in Homo sapiens."
• Goran Sonesson. "The Greatest Story Ever Told: Semiosis emerging from mimesis and/or narrativity" (2017) "It might be better to think of language and all other kinds of semiosis emerging from mimesis in the general sense of whole-body communication... mimesis is really at the origin of it all."
• Kim Shaw-Williams. The Social Trackways Theory of the Evolution of Human Cognition. (2014) Kensy Cooperrider: “On Shaw-Williams’ account, the ability to read tracks selected for a capacity to imagine events we haven’t experienced, to reason about invisible agents and forces, and to put ourselves in the shoes, or hooves, of others.”
• Kim Shaw-Williams. The Social Trackways Theory of the Evolution of Language (2018) “Drawing representations in the sand of the trackways of conspecifics, predators, and prey animals, miming their characteristic actions, and reproducing their vocalizations would have enabled telling the first mimetic/depictive stories.”
• Pauline Delahaye. Ritual Mimicry (2019) "Behavioural mimicry should be studied as a preferred way of acquiring complex concepts, advanced technical skills, and healthy emotional management, all necessary to a long life in intelligent social species."
• Kleisner & Saribay. The Dual Nature of Mimicry: Organismal Form and Beholder’s Eye (2018) "Darwin viewed variation as a disturbing force... Future research should take variation seriously and look at mimicry as a dualistic [relational] phenomenon that results from the synergy of two types of variation: phenotypic (including genetic and developmental) and perceptual."
• Aldana & Otálora-Luna. Artistic Notion of Mimicry (2019) "What if an original is irrelevant? What if behavior is connected to a grammar? ...We propose that T. maculata is not ‘copying’ somebody else but ‘reproducing’ a language, the language of nature. Some merit has to be given to the original, but if there is not such a source, if there is not an original, if there is not a prototype, an archetype (ἀρχέτυπον); what sense does such designation of origin have? To transcend the Platonic archetypical concept of mimesis (μίμησις), that proposes that a copy only touch on a
small part of things as they really are, is a simple task." Similar "language of nature" seen in convergent evolution. Consider the eyes of Anableps (four-eyed fish) are divided into two parts to see above and below the water at the same time. Not as extreme as Gyrinus (whirligig beetles), though for the same purpose.
• Timo Maran. Becoming a Sign (2011) "The mimetic organism ends up in a kind of ambiguous position (duality or split in constitution), where the mimetic component appears to be derived from some other semiotic entity and placed onto the mimic." (cf. Anaxagoras "Everything in everything")
• Kleisner and Maran. Introduction to Signs and Communication in Mimicry (2019) "By imitating others, we search for our place in society and, despite the initial inspiration from the various models with whom we interacted in the course of our development, in the end we become separate, distinct individuals." (For how this might occur, see the analogy above between Michael Levin on multicellularity and Coleridge on Imagination.)
• Yogi Hendlin. I am a Fake Loop: the Effects of Advertising-Based Artificial Selection (2018) The danger of supernormal stimuli hijacking our instincts and leading to evolutionary traps was discovered by Niko Tinbergen. Hendlin applies this to the decontextualizing shift that is occurring within culture today, full of advertising, propaganda, and degenerative semiotics.
• Enrique Font. Mimicry, Camouflage and Perceptual Exploitation: the Evolution of Deception in Nature (2018) "Where a human researcher may appreciate only superficial resemblance, there may be a close match from the perspective of the intended receiver in a mimetic relationship, to whose perceptual systems (and not ours) the signals are tailored."
• Bossley et al. Tail walking in a bottlenose dolphin community: the rise and fall of an arbitrary cultural ‘fad’ (2018) Tail walking behaviour was introduced to a community of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) in the wild following the rehabilitation of a wild female individual, Billie,
who was temporarily co-housed with trained dolphins. Is the imitation of behavior (with no known adaptive function) performed, as is the case with human children, to facilitate bonding with others? Luke Rendell further speculated on the social function of synchronization (mutual imitation), whether in dolphins, marching drills, folk dances, courtship dances (Hooded Grebe) or viral TikTok routines. Like music, these may be forms of "credible signaling", per Edward Hagen.
• Fugazza et al. Did we find a copycat? Do as I Do in a domestic cat (Felis catus) (2021) Using the “action matching rule” Fumi demonstrated opening a sliding lid (sliding to a side the lid of a stainless-steel container) to her cat, Ebisu. The cat then successfully slid the lid to a side on the first trial. Transfer tests of this kind, in which successful performance on one cognitive task is applied to another, ensure that Ebisu learned a rule and not a stimulus–response association. (video) Update
• Huber et al. The evolution of imitation: capacities of non-human animals (2009) Includes a description of how the archer fish (Toxotes chatareus) can shortcut long periods of trial and error learning by observing a skillful model. The dwarf gourami (Trichogaster lalius) also employs ballistic predation, raising the possibility that they may similarly benefit from social learning.
• Peter Corning. The Invasion of the Memes: Is It Science Fiction? (2015) "Humans are highly selective, and manipulative, both in terms of what they choose to imitate and in what they may attempt to foist on others."
• Susan Hurley. The shared circuits model (2008) Proposing a multi-layered model, Hurley argues that mirroring, a similarity of own and others’ acts and mental or emotional states (invoking the similar/different dichotomy here), is prior to the self/other distinction, citing Andrew Meltzoff who argued that imitation begot understanding of other agents, not vice versa. This being distinct from "imitative learning" and "contextual imitation" (act like that, when the environment is like this). Semin and Cacioppo's response noted "social cognition is restricted to a reproduction metaphor (e.g., empathy, resonance, imitation, shared representations, or mindreading). Hurley's model attempts to provide an answer as to how the intersubjectivity of social cognition and co-regulation of action is achieved, establishing a connection."
• The Consilience Project. Taiwan's Digital Democracy (2021) "Throughout the 20th century, the Taiwanese government undertook conscious efforts to imitate the best parts of the West. These efforts, ironically, have now surpassed the West itself."
• Richard Cook et al. Automatic imitation in a strategic context: players of rock–paper–scissors imitate opponents' gestures (2011) This paper is mentioned in Henrich's book.
• Graziano and Gillingham. Spatial patterns of solar photovoltaic system adoption (2015) "Clustering does not simply follow the spatial distribution of income or population, suggesting a spatial neighbor effect conveyed through social interaction and visibility."
• Ermakov and Ermakov. Memetic approach to cultural evolution (2021) "Selectionist approaches emphasize Darwinian competition." Is Darwinian competition the appropriate framework by which to understand imitation? Or should we use the relational philosophies employed by McGilchrist for this purpose?
• Nick Wiltsher. Imagination: A lens, not a mirror. (2019) Imitation as 'passive copying': "Imitation seems positively inimical to creativity... thinking of creating in terms of imitating seems so far removed from the everyday conception of the phenomenon that it's hard to grasp."
• Cecilia Heyes. What can imitation do for cooperation? (2013) "Complex imitation depends on complex psychological processes... To imitate, my cognitive system has to translate visual information from the model into motor output that looks the same as the model’s behaviour from a third-person perspective. The difficulty of this "correspondence problem" varies with the difference between first-person and third-person views of an action sequence; a difference that is maximal for facial gestures and minimal for vocalisations."
• Cristine Legare. Imitation and Innovation: The Dual Engines of Cultural Learning (2015) "A cognitive system favoring high fidelity imitation while affording innovation will work best when there are multiple models to copy and multiple individuals to support change (whether by allowing new ideas to spread widely or ensuring retention of skills when others experiment with novel ways)." A koan: If I imitate an innovator, am I truly imitating, or am I innovating? Or both?
• Cristine Legare. Born to be cultured, A conversation on Many Minds podcast hosted by Kensy Cooperrider (2020) "We had this whole discourse about how imitation is this lesser thing. We talk about “monkey see, monkey do” or “apeing” as though it’s subhuman. It’s a whole cultural complex of ideas surrounding when to conform and when to innovate." But "innovation always builds upon imitation".
• Kensy Cooperrider. The eye’s mind (2021) “Most mysterious of all, perhaps, is the phenomenon of pupil mimicry (or pupillary contagion). Infants as young as 6 months exhibit pupil mimicry. And so do chimps."
• David Roberts. Clever new arguments are beside the point (2016) "Conservatives will accept the scientific facts of climate change when conservative elites signal that that’s what conservatives do." Imitation in politics is strongly influenced by prestige.
• Heinrich & McElreath. Dual-Inheritance Theory (2007) "Humans are "imitation machines"; while only limited social learning abilities are found elsewhere in nature, social learning in our species is high fidelity, frequent, internally motivated, often unconscious, and broadly applicable."
• Richard Dawkins. Hierarchical organization: A candidate principle for ethology. (1976) "Hierarchical organizations of control are easier than linear ones to repair when they fail, allow the economy of multiple access to common subroutines, and combine efficient local action at low hierarchical levels while maintaining the guidance of an overall structure."
• Aenne Brielmann et al. Architectural Proportions, Biophilia, and Fractal Geometry (2022) "Familiarity is an unambiguous signal to the neural system that a façade mimics our ancestral environment - incorporating biophilia, fractal fluency, and nested symmetries - in its informational structure."
• Stephen Jarosek. Plasticity and Imitation: the neglected axioms (2022) "Unconstrained plasticity tends to disorder. Overconstrained imitation annihilates complexity. Together they allow "complexity at the edge of chaos" to persist over time." This generalization appears to misunderstand imitation by conflating the concept with copying. Imitation is a broadly recognized as a naturally plastic process.
• Erik Hoel. Who invented the idea of memes? (2021)
• Jacob Siegel. Is America Prepared for Meme Warfare? (2017)
• Alex Goldenberg. Cyber Swarming, Memetic Warfare and Viral Insurgency (2020)
• Collins and Roose. Tracing a Meme From the Internet’s Fringe to a Republican Slogan (2018)
• Tim Tyler. Definitions of the term "meme" (2011)
• Annie Reneau. Disney recycling animation (2021)
• Wikipedia. Chirality. (2022)
Additional examples:
Hominina: Hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn and they don't understand the intentions behind actions, "Homo imitans" needs to imitate, according to Carl Zimmer. Other primates seem to focus on what the goals are, and ignore the actions. Joe Brewer notes, “Human children perform on par with their ape cousins in every way save one: they excel at imitation while their primate peers falter completely.”
Primates: A 3-day-old macaque is able to imitate tongue protrusion, however this starts sooner and occurs over a shorter time period than for human and chimp babies. Chimpanzees spontaneously imitate seemingly non-adaptive behaviours (“grass-in-ear behaviour”).
Bats: Baby bats (pups) imitate adults while babbling. They share many of the features that characterize babbling in human infants: duplication of syllables, use of rhythm, and an early onset of the babbling phase during development.
Birds: The Cinerous mourner (Laniocera hypopyrra) is a Batesian-mimic that mimics an aposematic moth caterpillar (possibly of the order: Megalopygidae) in the lowland Amazonian rain forest. The European starling's (Sturnus vulgaris) gift for mimicry was noted by Pliny the Elder and William Shakespeare.
Snakes: The death adder and the spider-tailed horned viper (described 2006) use "caudal-luring" in an outstanding example of "aggressive mimicry", a form of mimicry in which predators, parasites, or parasitoids share similar signals, using a harmless model, allowing them to avoid being correctly identified by their prey or host.
Fish: fangblenny (Plagiotremus rhinorhynchos)
Insects: Caddisfly larvae incorporate bits of whatever they can find into their cocoons. With these larvae, Hubert Duprat explored aspects of mimesis in "productive collision between organic forms and technologized materials." The moth Pseudosphex laticincta mimics the appearance of its predators with astonishing precision to avoid being eaten. Atlas moth, deadleaf mimic butterflies (Kallima sp.), stone grasshoppers (Trachypetrella sp.), young ant mantids (Odontomantis planiceps), feather mimic caterpillar, moss mimic stick insect (Trychopeplus sp.), "evasive mimicry" among weevils (subfamily Conoderinae) that imitate flies. Many Tephritidae flies show "Batesian mimicry", bearing the colors and markings of dangerous arthropods such as wasps or jumping spiders, see Goniurellia tridens, which mimics ants. Vestigipoda longiseta is a fly that mimics ant larvae. Derbid Planthopper (Rhotana sp.) mimics spiders.)
Spiders: Twig spiders (Poltys sp.)
Mollusks: Mussels in the genus Lampsilis wiggle a fish shaped lure to entice a fish, then fire its larvae into its gills, mimic octopus.
Plants: "Herbivory mimicry" in the leaves of Babiana cuneata. Orchids flowers of the genus Ophrys mimic female Hymenoptera (Pouyannian mimicry). Instead of fertilizing a female insect, a deceived male bee or wasp fertilizes the flower instead.
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