Posted by
Steve Smith on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-New-Society-for-the-Study-of-Cultural-Evolution-tp7586275p7586292.html
Glen sed:
> ...
> But re: thoughts, I can also say that _embedding_ one's thoughts as deeply in, as tightly coupled to, one's actions, does allow for agility. Taking huge, far-sighted, ideological stances and making huge sweeping plans on _anything_ is .... well, ideological (which is an insult) and goes directly against everything biology has taught us over these last 156 years. Biological systems are complexes of tightly coupled, small changes that can eventually produce dramatic differences.
I think this point is important or at least interesting: The *point* of
ideologies is to set a (more) global fitness function, allowing a
different mode of coupling than happens, for example, without shared
ideology.
> But action is all very local. So, I try to make my actions small, realizing that 99.99% or more of all my actions are inconsequential. If thought is causative at all, it is at this very small scale. The rest is noise.
At one level, what made the Roman Empire the Roman Empire was the
gajillion small actions of a bazillion human beings, yet, it was the
fact that they shared an ideology (no matter what the class, the Roman
"culture" had a story with a place in it for you, whether you be
Emperor, Soldier, Slave, or Conquered Subject) which went a long way to
define "what it was to be a Roman"...
Or when a bunch of Athapascan peoples migrated from the Pacific
Northwest to the Southwest and became who we call "Navajo" and "Apache",
they shared *something* more than genes and language... they shared a
mythology and a world-view that differed enough from the extant peoples
living *in* the Southwest that they remained distinct, were not
assimilated... but established a complementary (if often conflictatory)
presence in and amongst and around the various cultures already
en-situ... " what it was to be Dine' " could possibly be reduced to
their genes, their language and the artifacts they carried or knew how
to make... but I find it easier/better if I include the "stories they told".
> All that is preamble to my (again repetitive) statement that diversity is good.
Diversity is a good antidote/counterpoint to ossification, as structure
is a good antidote/complement to randomness. This is the tension
between Logos and Chaos... with a narrow regime where "truly
interesting stuff" happens... Class IV Cellular Automata, for example,
Universal Computation for example, "Life Itself", for example.
On the other hand, these distinctions might just be illusions, held by
the delusional. But this argument begs the question of "who" or "what"
is delusional? An individual sentient creature such as a human
being? A group of sentients with a shared "ideology"?
Just sayin'
- Steve
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