I dont know if we have a metaphysical soul, or whether that is just a metaphor for a vast tangle of neurons. At some level we have needs and wants and in the noam model, I am taking the fundamental unit of analysis to be that of values. The definitions here are drawn from philosophy (axiology) and psychology, especially those elaborated by Milton Rokeach, and those that have been employed by clinical psychlogy. I’m sure the economic definitions overlap, but in the noam model of motivational narrimes, I’m trying to get to our core impetus, the things that drive us to action, our causes. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy one of the things is to have commited action in the service of our values. In that sense, we behave according to what we think is important to us.
Stimulus and response are familiar concepts to behaviourists: bell – slaver! The noam model introduces a third point of value to make a triangle. For higher thinking organisms the connection between stimulus and response is a bit more involved. When presented with a situation, a human will often consider the consequences of their action (albeit unconsciously) before responding. That anticipated cosequence is evaluated according to the agents value system. Is the outcome likely to be profitable, or an exercise in futility? Of course, in reality we are searching for the the best overall outcome from a range of potencial options, and the factors involved can be bewildering. Often it is not just a case of ‘what’s in it for me?’ but also of ethics, of enviromental concerns, of cost, of other people. To oversimplify, we summise all these value components, and chose the action that yeilds the greatest overall reward.
Hence our values motivate our choice of behaviour; they also give motion to the notions and narratives that are expressed as culture. Metaphorically, values are memetic mitochondria: they power the flagella that propel the germplasm of ideation through society. They tell us what information to accept from others and what information to pass on to others. In an advertising situation of yesteryear for example, we might have gleamed that ‘Guiness is good for you’, if we were to believe that that beverage’s nutritional content was beneficial to our health (along with all the other factors such as taste and price and acceptance of alcohol), then we might be inclined to brand switch. If we achieved outstanding results and attributed it to the Guiness, and we knew our friends shared similar values, then we might further be inclined to recommend it, maybe even reciting the slogan. The Guiness brand would be a meme propagated as being ‘good for you’. The Holy Salvation meme has a similar modus operandi.
Value systems themselves are also memes: they spread. Conservatism, liberalism, or socialism do not arise independently in the individual, but are adherited from the individual’s social milieu. Beck and Cowan refer to these wider worldviews, in Spiral Dynamics, as vmemes (value memes); they are cognitive gadgets (Hayes). It is within the framework of our incombant vmemes that we filter insurgent memes presented to us.
In the noam model have denoted stimulus as sigma, response as rho, and values as nu, and will contemplate the triangular interrelationship between them, with respect to cliology, in later posts.
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