John Locke knew that all knowledge is derived from experience.
But he was not sure that the same applies to logic or
mathematics. If we define experience as self- constitutive
practical activity, whose output is the ever-changing identity of
the individual or individuals carrying out the experience, logic
derives from it, as do all knowledge and language. This places
logic not outside thought, but in experience, and raises the
question of logical replication. Dawkins defined the replicator
as a biological molecule that "has the extraordinary property of
being able to make copies of itself." Such an entity is supposed
to have fecundity, fidelity, longevity. Language is a replicator;
or better yet, it is a replicative medium. The question is
whether duplication can take place only by virtue of its own
structural characteristics, or whether one has to consider logic,
for instance, as the rule of replication. Moreover, maybe logic
itself is replicative in nature.
This discussion belongs to the broader subject of memetics. Its
implicit assumption is that memes, the spiritual equivalent of
genes, are subject to mechanisms of evolution. As opposed to
natural evolution, memetic evolution is through more efficient
orders of magnitude, and faster by far.
In experiences of cultural transfer (sharing of experience as a
practical experience itself) or of inheritance-genetic or
memetic, or a combination of both- something like a gene of
meaning was suspected to exist. Were it to exist, that would not
mean, within our pragmatic system, that signification is carried
over through memetic replication, but that practical experiences
of human self-constitution involve the act of conjuring meaning
under the guise of various logics pertinent to sign processes.
Replication is, then, not of information, but of fundamental
processes, conjuring of meaning being one of them. Evolution of
language, as well as of logic, belongs to cultural evolution.
Meme mutation and spread of a reduced scale, such as the scale
of finite artificial languages and limited logical rules, can be
described in equations similar to those of genetics. But once
the scale changes, it is doubtful that we could encode the
resulting complexity in such formalizations.
Be this as it may, expression, communication, and signification,
the fundamental functions of any sign system, regardless of its
logic, are endowed with replicative qualities. Logic prevents
corruption, or at least provides means for identifying it. The
easiest way to understand this statement is to relate it to the
many replications involved in the manipulation of data in a
computer. The Error message announcing corruption of data
corresponds to a replication process that went astray. Like all
analogies, this one is not infallible: a certain logic, against
whose rules the replication is tested, might simply prove to be
inadequate to processes of replication that are different in
nature. Indeed, if the logic implicit in the experience of
literacy were to authenticate semiotic processes characteristic
of the civilization of illiteracy, the Error message of
corruption would overrun the monitor. All that occurs in the
experience of networking and all that defines virtuality pertain
to a logical framework that is by no means a memetic replication
of the Aristotelian or some other logical system intrinsic to the
experience of literacy. Memes residing in the brain's neuronal
structure, as a pattern of pits on a CD- ROM, or in an HTML
(hypertext markup language) Web format can be replicated.
Interactions among minds correspond to a different dynamic realm,
the realm of their reciprocal identification.