tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7068528325708136131.post4136939160057458680..comments2024-03-01T21:25:21.218-08:00Comments on Structural insight: Preface to HomerJohn Shutthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00041398073010099077noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7068528325708136131.post-33009497681998405462015-06-12T23:20:18.891-07:002015-06-12T23:20:18.891-07:00A little late to the game here, but there are many...A little late to the game here, but there are many innovations or changes in the ways information is replicated that radically escalate evolution. The current DNA system is highly refined, but so ubiquitous today we can scarcely imagine what it must have evolved from, some earlier system that had lower fidelity and slower duplication, probably. At some point, sex appeared, which made recombination many times faster. And so on and so on.<br /><br />The same thing happens memetically. Remember that a meme is simply a behaviour that is passed on from mind to mind by imitation. Language is a highly developed memetic organism itself, but there were memes before language. Then writing, then the printing press. In my own lifetime I've seen very rapid evolution of chain letters from the old paper forms (I actually received a couple in the mail when I was younger), through to email versions, and now they've exploded again in the form of shared Facebook images. Tom Cantinehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06234109728445439457noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7068528325708136131.post-78314377444821175682012-02-04T17:39:17.476-08:002012-02-04T17:39:17.476-08:00Sorry, this is rather off-topic, but I can't h...Sorry, this is rather off-topic, but I can't help to think that Plato had his metaphor backwards.<br /><br />I mean, it seems more natural to think of real life objects and phenomena as colorful dolls, and then the light of mind projects a shadow from this doll, which is an idea evoked by this real-life situation. For instance, a just veredict is the doll, and the shadow is the idea of justice.<br /><br />When you think in abstract terms, or when you use symbols, those mental pictures and symbols will tend to have less features than the things whose properties they intend to capture. For instance, think of the stop/walk pedestrian lights. They look very much like shadows. Of course, forgetting about particular details of the myriad different instances is exactly what you want to do when you use a symbol.<br /><br />But then maybe that's why most people are turned off by philosophy, science, math and symbolic thought in general. Who wants to spend their lives looking at shadows?Martin Baldanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05754733773684569378noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7068528325708136131.post-46342513902424453462012-01-25T16:16:19.092-08:002012-01-25T16:16:19.092-08:00I'm now taking a philosophy of science class s...I'm now taking a philosophy of science class so by the end of the semester I should know enough to agree or disagree.patchworkZombiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18279408952877283952noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7068528325708136131.post-54584661072717116292011-12-31T07:11:55.353-08:002011-12-31T07:11:55.353-08:00Oh, one other point I should clarify.
"Befor...Oh, one other point I should clarify.<br /><br />"Before you can have a sweeping theory, you need the hundreds of nitpicking details to make it probable. Your thesis has those but this does not." — That's talking about a much later stage in development of a theory. All 'sweeping theories' begin as simple ideas; it's not possible for such things to be born <i>with</i> all the nitpicking details already in place. My thesis (thank you :-) certain started this way. The difference is being willing to put a really young idea out on a blog, for contemplation and feedback from others at a much earlier-than-traditional stage. It seems an excitingly new approach to scientific exploration, and may eventually settle into a new and more potent mode of scientific growth.John Shutthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00041398073010099077noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7068528325708136131.post-80621622790480487242011-12-31T06:59:18.231-08:002011-12-31T06:59:18.231-08:00"Pirahã culture is obviously an innovation fr..."Pirahã culture is obviously an innovation from the more standard mode" — that use of the word "obvious", in relation to something as controversial as the Pirahã, puts me in mind of an old joke involving the Lone Ranger and Tonto.<br /><br />"...not a good model of ancient cultures." — As noted in the post, if Pirahã were a survival (or recurrence) of verbal society, one would expect it to be atypical of its kind, since others of its kind are not in evidence. That doesn't preclude getting insights from it (see the quote attributed to Twain, from my first blog post).<br /><br />"a sudden transition from not storytelling to storytelling ... would have to have occurred long before the neolithic revolution." — I'm inclined to agree, hence my remark about going a bit far. Catalysis in both directions isn't entirely precluded by a long time gap, though, hence my caution against dismissing the idea either. There's also some question about what the word "sudden" should mean, on the time scales involved.<br /><br />Cambrian explosion — interesting to hear about the controversies going on in that field (it's a good sign, surely, that there's vigorous probing of hypotheses going on there; suggests a healthy scientific community :-). I'm using the analogy illustratively, of course; whether the verbality hypothesis is 'somewhere in the neighborhood of the truth' clearly doesn't hinge on the Cambrian explosion; like all of this, though, the analogy is interesting to contemplate.<br /><br />Oral science (and much else here, actually) — An initial exploration of a new idea is guaranteed to be less precise, and less complete, that an established paradigm; to expect otherwise would be unrealistic. My first-approximation expectation of science vs orality is that they wouldn't mix; my second would be that science would be stunted, because the orality would tend to undermine the reliable precision of data records needed for advanced science. Development of primitive scientific organisms in the oral age does seem a real possibility, though. I'll be interested to take a look at that article.<br /><br />I'm reminded that I really need to get around to my planned blog post on the theme of how to go about exploring extra-paradigmatic scientific ideas — and the pitfalls to beware of.John Shutthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00041398073010099077noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7068528325708136131.post-87058824509880744132011-12-30T19:41:24.614-08:002011-12-30T19:41:24.614-08:00This post sets off some of my "probably wrong...This post sets off some of my "probably wrong" detectors. It seems to turn one or two simplified vignettes into sweeping theories of how things work.<br /><br />First the Pirahã culture is obviously an innovation from the more standard mode and therefore is not a good model of ancient cultures. If there was a sudden transition from not storytelling to storytelling it would have to have occurred long before the neolithic revolution. (The way people transition to agriculture is a personal interest of mine.)<br /><br />The cambrian explosion is a messy thing that may not be a real phenomenon exacerbated by the fact that lineages exist for a long time without fossil record (I feel qualified to talk about this because I am at school for applied evolution). <br />I can believe that literacy makes scientific investigation more efficient but it seems vastly implausible that science cannot exist without writing. Here is a paper about science in pre literate societies http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0498.1953.tb00516.x/abstract<br /><br />Before you can have a sweeping theory, you need the hundreds of nitpicking details to make it probable. Your thesis has those but this does not.patchworkZombiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18279408952877283952noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7068528325708136131.post-37267717212135544742011-12-30T11:07:28.426-08:002011-12-30T11:07:28.426-08:00I'd tentatively accept the conjecture that all...I'd tentatively accept the conjecture that all bureaucracy is literate, but the conclusion about science doesn't follow from that. Instead, it follows from a stipulation that all literacy is bureaucratic.John Shutthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00041398073010099077noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7068528325708136131.post-4774293538822524982011-12-30T04:32:54.032-08:002011-12-30T04:32:54.032-08:00Bureaucracy would seem to be an affliction of the ...Bureaucracy would seem to be an affliction of the literate.<br /><br />Weirdly, this would make science a state effect.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7068528325708136131.post-34505979148798311472011-12-29T08:21:59.971-08:002011-12-29T08:21:59.971-08:00One wonders to what extent bureaucracy can exist i...One wonders to what extent bureaucracy can exist in an oral society; having never asked the question before, I've not even a provisional answer ready to hand.<br /><br />But, inability to support science is a terrible price to pay.John Shutthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00041398073010099077noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7068528325708136131.post-68786389412574836742011-12-28T22:05:02.416-08:002011-12-28T22:05:02.416-08:00Interesting to put next to James C. Scott's ob...Interesting to put next to James C. Scott's observations in The Art of Not Being Governed. Most tribal communities around today are preserved in reaction to the state and built from waves of migration into and out of nearby states. All sorts of seemingly primitive features of these societies become explicable when put in terms of avoidance of the state. Scott argues this extends even to literacy - a non-literate group will find it easier to adjust their oral traditions and histories to best suit the survival needs of today.<br /><br />Thinking of these as different modes to be chosen by a society then allows a loop back to say small software teams. Why not document? - because the bureaucratic overhead of literacy is or was historically too high.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7068528325708136131.post-21219472879020782542011-12-28T06:58:46.782-08:002011-12-28T06:58:46.782-08:00Both fun questions, and I'll have something to...Both fun questions, and I'll have something to say on each.<br /><br />From my admittedly sketchy understanding of genetic evolution, about half a billion years ago <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion" rel="nofollow">something</a></i> happened that caused evolution to shift into a higher gear. A slew of new lifeforms emerged, many of which apparently didn't last long in the resulting heightened competition. As if genetic evolution had hit upon a device that made genetic evolution itself more potent. I've some half-baked ideas about what that might have been, but my point here is that orality may have been like that, a device that made memetic evolution more potent. Before the genetic event, genetic life seems to have languished at the single-cell stage. So perhaps in the verbal age, memetic life was limited to the equivalent of single-cell. I've also a suggestion for what that equivalent might be. It seems a <i>language</i> is itself a sort of memetic organism, a very primitive one, obviously exists in a verbal society, and even provides basic elements for more sophisticated organisms (in the case of sciences, think <i>technical jargon</i>). So perhaps language itself was the dominant taxon before orality.<br /><br />I've heard the agriculture interpretation of the myth suggested, and it does fit very well, even to the use of a <i>fruit</i> as the concrete object. The transition to agriculture may be facilitated by orality, so that the two are likely to correspond. One might even speculate that the transitions to agriculture and to orality would tend to catalyze each other, but perhaps that's going a bit far.John Shutthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00041398073010099077noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7068528325708136131.post-42863697230994704592011-12-28T04:22:34.348-08:002011-12-28T04:22:34.348-08:00Do you think you could expand a bit on what you ca...Do you think you could expand a bit on what you call a verbal society. What would the dominant taxon(s) likely be?<br /><br />As an aside I have thought the garden of Eden might refer to a transition from hunter gatherer to agricultural food production. Perhaps explicitly so in the contrast of garden of fruit vs. sweating and working for your food. Would that line up with a transition from verbal to oral society?Samhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15272731951164781833noreply@blogger.com