Copycats, Shapeshifters and Chameleons
In life, we are all copycats, imitators, replicators, shapeshifters and chameleons, learning from others, doing what they do, adapting, changing, etc. The current society views it as "ok" when you're a child that does the mimicry, copycatting, and imitation to learn and progress in doing things, but when it's an adult the legal system often gets involved. Why? Because of the money and scarcity mindset for survival.
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Imitation is a form of flattery, so the saying goes. This is often used to excuse the duplication of behavior, of a method of doing something, or even other people's work. If someone does what you do, then that means you are doing something they find valuable. They can want to do what you do so that they can extract value from doing it. Many things that have value can been attached to monetary gain.
Stealing something is wrong, but replicating an idea isn't. Ideas are not owned by anyone. Intellectual copyright has a flaw in it's reasoning with respect to that. To demosntrate how things can be different, imagine if the world was in abundance with everyone working to help themselves and others without any fear of scarcity or survival tied to money, then it wouldn't matter if you thought of something first to prevent people from using that idea, or to make money through it and prevent others from making money. Patents and copyrights would be different.
To be the originator of an idea or invention would be great, and the importance would not be for monetary dominance over others. Instead, we would want to have the reputation of being known as the one who came up with it. This would only require time-stamping of information in a public trustless ledger like a blockchain. Then anyone could know who was the first to have the idea and gain the social prestige and reputation that comes with it.
This would illuminate some issues of plagiarism, but an idea can be thought of by different people in the same era, or at different times and places. Ideas come from imagination and putting previous information together. Two different people can arrive at an new idea on their own. But then they can get attached to being the originator of an idea, and their ego demands to be recognized as the original source of an idea, suing others for claims of stealing their idea. This would not matter so much if scarcity and survival wasn't such a deep factor in our lives. The ego-I-self still wants to be recognized for what it created, so the ego issue would still remain. Most of us want our works to be known so that we can gain more value from it, be it reputation or money.
Humanity has progressed because everyone stands on the shoulders of those before. We assimilate information we didn't create or invent, and imitate ways of doing things. We tech and are taught through imitation to help each other advance and move forward.
Children demonstrate this simply, from teaching them how to clap, eat, brush teeth, use table utensils, and much more. They do it themselves too, without adult instruction. Children will see what adults are doing, and try to do it themselves. Many learn to walk this way, automatically, without being explicitly taught to do it. Children even imitate adult life with toy steering wheels for driving, and toy phones for talking.
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We go through school, repeating and replicating the knowledge of others. We learn this way. When we learn a bunch of things, we can put things together in new ways and invent innovating new ways of doing something, such as technology. Discovery and learning requires some imitation, replication, and copying of what others have done.
As ego-personality-identity construct of who we are are, we imitate, copy and replicate what others do and incorporate it into ourselves. We go through life and incorporate the things we see and hear as part of who we are. Aspects of who we are changes throughout life.
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We are copycats, shapeshifters and chameleons with respect to parts of our identity and personality. Everything we see and hear in our environment influences us in our lives. We take in some things that we value moreso than other things we don't value as much, and much is subconscious or unconsciously influenced, ingrained, inducted and injected into us to shape us into who we are. We are continually formed and shaped throughout life, shifting along the way, adapting and chaning, like a shapeshifter or chameleon.
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This is not a question of Memes.
This is a not question of Memetics, like how one person copies another's personal knowledge.
This is a question of "Memotics"(hehe), how every copycat can give(positive) value to the meme by adding new info, knowledge or truth, or decrease value(negative) by a simplification with knowledge reduction.
An addendum:
Meme: information standard, stored in the individual memory, which can be copied to the memory of another guy.
A meme is a pattern of cognitive behavior that can be transmitted from one individual brain to another brain.
Memetic (Memetics): The theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread, and evolution of memes.
The evolution of culture and knowledge can be modeled according to the basic principles of variation and selection that underlie the genes theory of biological evolution.
The best thought I had when I finished studying memetics was that the structure of genes as biological information units that are being transformed by a for a type of reality's information in cultural social interactions, the memes.
I especially dislike the false truism that "truth is simple". Truth is complex. Truth is reality is existence is so complex. Reducing the explanation can often lead to injecting things that don't apply because something is not understood enough. Once understood, it seems "simple" in our mind's eye, but to get there we needed many layers or prerequisite understandings ;)
Truth is a hard job's life. that's one only simple truth.:)
sir @krnel .., the language of your article is very high and full of its meaning. are you a lecturer in a renowned faculty or a teacher ...?. I love your work.
we all know that a child is born clean and holy, like a white paper that has not been stained with ink. depending on his or her parents whether the paper will be in writing with good ink or with bad ink. to create the good character of the children need the process to the perfect human being, that is with education, both formal and non formal education. not enough just with that alone, here the most important parent role in creating the character of the child to the perfect human being. thank yo
No, I'm not a "professional" or teacher ;) Thank you.
Yes, we are essentially blank paper, and the characters of the paper become our character, inscribed by the influence of others, especially parents.
thanks sir for your short reply, solid, and clear comment, i like your language. thank you
Well written and I never looked at it for this viewpoint! Indeed children do learn what to do by copycatting their parents!
Human race is just evolving not only by copycatting, replicating or repeating but to take the idea and expand it a little more. Creating a new added value. This goes on and on and on, just like one big snowball rolling down a mountain, or a simple small wave in the ocean which can become a tsunami.
Technology and just evolution are unstoppable and it keeps on increasing in pace! Just look back and see how fast the technology around us in evolving. From the first simple call from Bell to his assistant, to complete computers we are walking around with calling them smartphones.
To bad that some evolution make us, the human race, more stupid than smarter. I am referring here to John Doe! 10 years ago, everybody knew the phone numbers from family or friends by heart! Now I do know the number of my wife and that's it!
We need to keep on stimulating our brain, or complete generations will be lost! People are telling that the educations needs to change and they have to, but they still need to stimulate the brain of the future generations, otherwise the evolution could come to a stand still!
Yup, in order to move forward and create new things, it's best not to reinvent the wheel and instead use what came before by standing on those who came before ;) That ow humanity progresses more efficiently. The brain needs to work too, like other muscles, indeed. We need to keep thinking and imagining ;)
We must remember that most of us love evolution and hate revolution. This because they see the first a natural things and the second as something that can disrupt their normal behaviour!
The first mobile phones were seen as a revolution and lots of people were telling that they would never use them, but then the mobiles phones started to evolve and nowadays everyone has one!
The samegies for the current blockain technology and the related crytpos!
Yeah, when things start out they are often big and cumbersome, like computers taking up whole rooms. Cellphones were bulky too, unattractive. But after time, it gets smaller and gets wider adoption.
I did mentioned you in my friendship post, where I do introduce 3 Steemains I am following to my followers with the reason why I do follow them.
Hope that you don't mind. You can find the post on my blog, it is the friends of the week post!
We are adopting a young boy from a Thai orphanage and we are currently reading a lot on connections and learning delays. I find it facinating some of the behaviours outlinded in these books due to missing that initial family and home interaction.
Although he will be 15 months when we get him, we are to revert his learning back to a newborn level to embed some of these natural learnings.
As for adulthood as you said we step on the shoulders of others learning and there really is no way to not copy behaviours and learnt lessons as it makes us who we are.
I hope things go well for you in your adoption :)
Thank you me too lol! :)
I think about this a lot. Do I want recognition? The idea of fame has never sat right with me, but when I think of others profiting off my ideas, that certainly doesn’t feel any better. I do want some recognition but I don’t believe fame is natural. I just want to be respected as a valuable member of a community and make new friends through my work.
As far as pay, I want that too, simply because plane tickets and sushi and space to open a nice studio aren’t usually free.