**Links to**: [[05 Prediction]], [[Repetition]], [[Difference]], [[Equivalence]], [[Equivalence and difference]], [[Identity]], [[Rifference and Depetition]], [[Different-ciation]], [[Imitation]], [[Différance]], [[Imitation game]], [[Rule]], [[Meat puppet]], [[Entropicalia]], [[Entropomorfismo]], [[Kripkenstein]], etc. ### [[Postulate]]: Imitation is an adaptive strategy resulting in and from predictive constraints. ### [[Question]]: In light of the observations that follow below, we ask: what types of imitative cultural logics result in adaptive and maladaptive strategies? Can we even differentiate between the two? >“A ideia do canibalismo cultural servia-nos, aos tropicalistas, como uma luva. Estávamos “comendo” os Beatles e Jimi Hendrix. Nossas argumentações contra a atitude defensiva dos nacionalistas encontravam aqui uma formulação sucinta e exaustiva.”^[Add translation.] C. Veloso, Antropofagia, 1997, p. 54. >“No entanto, há pertinência em notar na Tropicália (na esteira da Antropofagia) uma tendência a tornar o Brasil exótico tanto para turistas quanto para brasileiros. Sem dúvida eu próprio até hoje rechaço o que me parecem tentativas ridículas de neutralizar as características esquisitas desse monstro católico tropical, feitas em nome da busca de migalhas de respeitabilidade internacional mediana.”^[Add translation.] Ibid., p. 58-9. Imitation and repetition are comparable concepts, but for the order of things as they will stand in this exposition, let’s distinguish them: **imitation** as the *performative act*^[More on this below, when moving onto Tarde, Kripke and Borges.] of repeating something,^[Whether consciously or unconsciously: it could be the imitation of an accent, or the dialectics of mimicry in butterflies and their environment] and **repetition** as the more general overarching concept: the appearance, event, etc. that is something happening or appearing to happen more than once. Imitation thus is a special type of repetition.^[Repetition pervades, in differential ways (see also: [[Repetition]], [[Equivalence and difference]]).] Since the abstract preferences parametrizing the concepts of difference and repetition for our purposes are treated in other entries, we will here dive into a few specific examples of so-called “cultural” imitation, and how it can be framed by the adaptive logic of prediction. We will argue that the predictive tendencies of organisms lead, in the context of large-scale organic systems such as cultural movements, to different types of adaptive strategies. It cannot be denied that anything that persists: adapts. Therefore, whether by denial (rejection, revolution), embrace (consumption, merger), or stasis (non-action, indifference), all systems employ adaptive strategies as they remain hooked to reality and, importantly, are perceived by others as doing so. Under the auspices of imitation as _copying_ and doing _again_; imitation is all we do. Imitation is mimick(r)ing, mocking, inevitably morphing. As challenges to the possible conservatism or sameness inherent in the concept of cultural imitation, some proposals come to mind: “Understand imitation, but do not become its beast” or the Deleuzian classic: “act, don’t react.” Elsewhere (in [[06 Principle of Sufficient Interest]]) we treat the Sellarsian distinction between pattern-following and rule-making, which also answers to this. Gabriel Tarde, for example, saw imitation in the general sense of _repetition_, almost in the same way as Whitehead proposes universal habits: >“... a physical realm we know as the undulations of the ether, the vibrations of material bodies, the swings of the planets in their orbits, the alterations of light and darkness, and of seasons, the succession of life and death. Here, then, was not only a fundamental truth of social science, but also a first principle of cosmic philosophy.” (F. H. Giddings, introduction to _The Laws of Imitation_, p. v). https://monoskop.org/images/3/35/Tarde_Gabriel_The_Laws_of_Imitation.pdf Or an example in R. W. Emerson: >“We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? ... Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. ... Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. ... Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare.” (Self-Reliance, p. 18). Looking at these proposals under predictive terms we can gather one general pattern: temper your strategies by becoming intimately aware with the difference between exploration and exploitation. Exploitation being the predictive strategy which hangs onto known patterns, exploration the one that takes risks by seeking novel domains. All these proposals have in common the having witnessed of exploration as highly adaptive, or at least promising of adaptation. ### Kripkenstein and cognitive imitation In the _[[Philosophical investigations]]_, Wittgenstein questions whether there is some fact which can make _true_ the assertion that someone is following some rule correctly (under a _correspondence_ theory of truth), he posits the infamous private language argument as a possible scenario. [[Saul Kripke]] explains the possible paradox inherent in the private language argument through the activity of mathematical addition: if someone has never added anything over 57, and correctly adds anything up to that amount, but gives the answer 5 whenever anything goes over 57, then surely this person is using something _other_ than the **rules** of addition, Kripke says. There are infinitely many rules someone could be following *instead* of addition, as many addition problems as there are possible rules. Since one cannot tell what rules people are using, one cannot assess their addition capacities as “correct” or adhering to a common logic.^[This surely reminds of the *Clever Hans* effect.] Water = H$_2$O problem: someone would have to identify all things in the world that are H$_2$O. What fact about the world proves that someone is identifying all H$_2$O correctly?^[Not unlike the [[Twin Earth Paradox]] problem/proposal.]. Kripke looks at the paradox and dismisses some solutions: “Meaning is **use**”: well, _past use_ of rules is consistent only until mistakes emerge, or for cases not yet tested. “If someone can **state** the rule, it shows the rule is being used correctly”: well, most people cannot even _define_ a simple word, let alone define a _rule_ (and how it is or is not consistent with a system), which then leads to unavoidable infinite regress and/or tautologies, how to define things that define themselves in terms of each other? Etc. Moreover, we could add: Gödel’s incompleteness leads us down an unavoidable abyss here, too: there is no real chance of proving the completeness of any mathematical system. “The world **disposes** me to answer this or that way”: well, dispositions, however naturalistic, may be inconsistent, too.^[There exist more dismissals, but these are the main one’s we are interested in covering here, for purposes that will be clear below.] **Kripke’s solution**: moving away from what is _true_, towards what the **rule-community** can assert about someone following a rule. So instead of imagining/supposing the world has some fact that makes rule-application function correctly, we look, “democratically,” at what we all think should be a test for how a rule should be followed. This leaves us with some questions: 1) how does this differ from bad politics? And 2) this doesn’t resolve the paradox, we still cannot know what a rule is, in essence. We will try to examine the idea of a rule-community by looking at cognitive imitation, below. Cognitive imitation (Subiaul et al. 2004), is defined as a kind of observational learning where an imitator copies an “expert’s” (a knowing subject’s) use of a _rule_. The designation of _cognitive_ imitation versus, e.g., motor imitation is meant to signal it as a specific subtype of imitation which doesn’t involve mimicking behavior but an abstract idea (through understanding that the other is _thinking_). Imitation is poorly defined, according to the authors, and many different aspects of learning/imitating are mixed in experiments attempting to observe how the learning process ensues from observation. In their article they present the claim that “experiments on imitation typically evaluate a student’s ability to copy some feature of an expert’s motor behavior” whereas what they aim to study—in Rhesus macaques—is “a type of observational learning in which a student copies a cognitive rule rather than a specific motor action” (ibid.). >Two rhesus macaques were trained to respond, in a prescribed order, to different sets of photographs that were displayed on a touch-sensitive monitor. ... paste further notes here, #todo %% ... Because the position of the photographs varied randomly from trial to trial, sequences could not be learned by motor imitation. Both monkeys learned new sequences more rapidly after observing an expert execute those sequences than when they had to learn new sequences entirely by trial and error.the typical imitation learning experiment subjects must copy novel actions on objects or novel sequences of specific actions (novel motor imitation), in a novel cognitive imitation paradigm subjects have to copy novel rules, independently of specific actions or movement patterns. The following example illustrates the difference between cognitive and motor-spatial imitation: Imagine someone overlooking someone's shoulder and stealing their automated teller machine (ATM) password. As with all forms of imitation, the individual learns and successfully reproduces the observed sequence. The observer in our example, like most of us, presumably knows how to operate an ATM (namely, that you have to push X number of buttons on the ATM screen in a specific sequence), so the specific motor responses of touching the screen isn't what the thief is learning. Instead, the thief could learn two types of abstract rules. On the one hand, the thief can learn a spatial rule: touch item in the top right, followed by item on the top left, then the item in the middle of the screen, and finally the one on lower right. This would be an example of motor-spatial imitation because the thief's response is guided by an abstract motor-spatial rule. On the other, the thief could ignore the spatial patterning of the observed responses and instead focus on the particular items that were touched, generating an abstract numerical rule, independently of where they are in space: 3-1-5-9. This would constitute an example of cognitive imitation because the individuals is copying an abstract serial rule without copying specific motor-responses. In this example, the thief's responses match those he observed only because the numbers are in the same location. If the numbers were in a different location—that is, if the numbers on the ATM's keypad were scrambled with every attempt to enter a password—the thief would, nonetheless, reproduce the target password because they learned a cognitive (i.e., an abstract, item-specific serial rule), rather than a spatial rule (i.e., an observable motor-spatial pattern). >“Agamben proposes yet another reading. He marks a boundary at which the hermeneutic rules are violated. In reading, we always reach a point at which it becomes impossible to discern the difference between the interpreter and the author. Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein comes to mind as an example of such a reading, in which the subjects of the text are difficult to distinguish. For that reason, the author of the thoughts developed in Kripke’s Wittgenstein on _Rules and Private Language_ is often referred to by the name “Kripkenstein.” The moment at which the distinction between author and reader dissolves is also the moment at which the interpreter exits the work. He changes from being the work’s interpreter to being its interpretant; he brings the work’s parts into a new constellation instead of constantly rearranging the parts with a view to its wholeness.” > >Avenessian & Hennig, 2017, p. 89. __________ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_imitation !!! continue writing the unfinished the above and explain why we do not like that others “steal” our ideas, because, like growths that are harvested and based on energetic investment: they are put to action by others who did not spend that energy. Energy is costly. On the other hand, when we desire for ideas to proliferate, what we are doing is making our environment more predictable by filling it up with things *we* know and expect, which can therefore save us energy. The balance between these two things is tricky: on the one hand we may, e.g., want our colleagues to become imprinted with ideas we ourselves cherish. On the other, if we are competing for territory (in the unfortunate case of capitalism), then we risk diluting the possibilities for us all. Is this all there is to it? What a disappointment. #todo %% ### Tropicália In the first quote, presented above, Caetano Veloso reflects on tropicália’s anthropophagic consumption of the iconic flesh of the likes of Hendrix: what a _feast_ to be able to feast without repetitive-remorse or authenticity-ressentiment, but rather in support of the emergence of a radical, differential political voice, and more abstractly: towards growth and *re*-production of the other inherent _in_ one, of an identity—i.e., a predictive strategy—in the making. The history of tropicália is complex, and we will not delve into it here, but it should suffice to say that, as a movement challenging the nationalist tendencies oppressing from within, and the colonial tendencies from within and without, it set forward new motifs that confused the established inside/outside logics of imitation, challenging its local constraints. On the one hand—by the hand of the oppressive government—these constraints resisted tropicália’s anarchic, radical tendencies, and on the other—by the hand of the local leftist movement—its anthropophagic consumption of the “West” was perceived as sociopolitical, cultural treason. In the second quote, Veloso reflects on a problem inherent in tropicália: a tendency to make Brazil exotic (radically _other_, exploitatively unpredictable)^[Here we could ask why not _explorative,_ instead of exploitative. The term _exploitation_ has more resonance in this context, that of colonial oppression, and is thus preferred. However, in terms of biological adaptation: explorative would perhaps be more apt, as unpredictability is that which is _explored_ by organisms, and already-explored patterns are _exploited._ This dialectic, however, becomes confused at the level of large-scale systems such as culture: when _otherness_ can be identified as a pattern which is seen by the dominant strategies as always the same, always _other,_ then we can indeed speak of exploitation in both the biological and oppressive senses. Interesting to note, in the context of Brazil, my father has pointed out to me that explore and exploit are the same word in Portuguese: _explorar._] for both outsiders (tourists) as well as Brazilians themselves, thereby feeding the hegemony of the globally oppressive landscape which eternally devours it (Brazil, and _otherness_). Tropicália shuffled, remixed, reinterpreted and played with established tropes mostly by _affirming_ them, rather than ridiculizing or parodizing them. This combinatorial reconfiguration—through very _mindful_ cannibalism—of disparate (inter)national influences and “high”, “low”, “old” and “new” art forms; towards the musicopolitical production of a local logic, results in a predictive strategy which neither confirms nor denies its alliances: it searches for building momentum in something eternally mutating, eternally in the making: an ambulant metamorphosis (_metamorfose ambulante_; lyric by Raul Santos Seixas, interpreted by Secos e Molhados). This may sound cliché, and bracing the argument for the impact of the ever-returning critique of contingency- or indeterminacy-fetishism, it is important to note that something which establishes no clear alliances invites _all radically other_ to join and participate, rather than isolate specific types of otherness in favor of the conservation of an identity. ### “A different sameness: Borges and Deleuze on Repetition” The subtitle above, and the quote below, are from Gary Peters’ _[[Improvising Improvisation]]_, 2009: >“Echoing Nietzsche and prefiguring Deleuze, Borges in this story recognizes that repetition (or the recurrence) of the same is in essence a movement whereby that which returns contains difference, in fact difference of the two distinct types encountered above: first, the same difference, whereby the same inceptual moment (in this case, of writing Don Quixote) returns along with all the contingency and thus openness and possibility that such a moment contains as its essential futurity— “a book not yet written.” It is this that allows Menard to consider the task: “The Quixote is a contingent book; the Quixote is unnecessary. I can premeditate writing.” What it would mean for computers to “pass” the [[Imitation game]], in light of the above? Borges _is_ Pierre Menard: >“He did not want to compose another _Quixote_— which is easy— but the _Quixote itself_. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide— word for word and line for line— with those of Miguel de Cervantes.” (ibid.). ### Borges and Turing: #todo, need to paste these notes. ### Footnotes