OK, ‘triggered’ has a clinical definition as well as that of an overblown reaction based on hypersensitivity to a moral issue. More generally, triggering is evocation (maybe invocation or even provocation) of a response to some given stimulus. We can apply a memetic sense of a meme being triggered. From a rule governed behaviour perspective, experience would be a guide to dealing with a situation. The green cross code indoctrinated us with kerb drill, such that we automatically “stop, look, listen” for cars when we get to a kerb. A memetic translation would be that we are hosts to road safety memes, on getting to a kerb, the functional part of the meme is triggered, and the behaviour of attention switching is invoked for avoiding large chunks of metal hrtleing around at alarming speeds. This is something which I forgot today and nearly got squashed; probably because there was no kerb to trigger the meme.
I have said that a meme consists of two noams. The green cross code and the like is clearly a meme as it is not socially acceptable for children to learn about the dangers of the road in a directly Darwinian way. The psi-noam pertains to the spread and replication of hazard awareness. The phi-noam then is the functional component: the bit that keeps you alive.
V)φ = functional behaviour of “stop-look-listen”
V)∞ψ = share this
V)φ ∧ V)∞ψ = W) = the green cross code meme
Stimulus-response is usually associated with Skinner and Pavlov, and the idea of conditioning. However, this input-output is a cybernetic principle and can relate from a grasshopper jumping at a sound (reflex) to a presumably complex processes of the United Nations (resolution). Between input and output there is some process, however direct or intractably bureaucratic. The noam model maintains this cybernetic framework. It constituted by sigma, as stimuli pattern which is someway mapped to rho response pattern of action. Upon trapping a sigma pattern match, the noam is triggered therby invoking the rho response pattern. So, in the example, spotting the kerb and the road (etc.) would pattern match the sigma of the phy-noam of the green cross code meme (such jargon eh!?) and invoke the stop-look-listen behaviour.
σ → [ V)φ ] → ρ
The noam/meme model is somewhat more involved than this, and I will have more to say about it in further posts, but that will do for now.
Leave a Reply