Posted by
glen ep ropella on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-New-Society-for-the-Study-of-Cultural-Evolution-tp7586275p7586294.html
On 06/30/2015 09:14 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> " 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".
Yes, compression is real, not ideological. The reason you feel it easier/better is because it helps you with the inverse map from phenomena to mechanism. You have to act on the mechanism. Compression helps you do that. But it doesn't mean that the ideology is shared. It means the compressed analog is shared. The analog is a stand-in for the ephemeral thing you recognize/register. Funny enough, because there are a bunch of animals almost identical to you standing about, they recognize/register that ephemeral thing in much the same way. Their analogs are very similar to your analogs because your body is very similar to theirs.
When/if we find communicative life elsewhere (here or other planets), we'll be able to test the hypothesis completely. But we can do it in small bits right here and now. Do amputees "understand" the world in the same way non-amputees "understand" the world? Did Helen Keller think the same way sighted and hearing people think?
> 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"?
The delusion is simply in assuming the analog _is_ its referent. It would be like wondering why real airplanes aren't made of balsa wood. This is why I tend to think tele-war (very remotely operated weapons like drones) will cause something like PTSD similar in devastation, but from the opposite circumstance, to the close-up witness of, participation in, violence. That sort of removal from your context can be very difficult, I suspect. You have no choice but to act as if the analog (controller) is the referent (weapon). And it is the same ... yet it's not, because of the very complicated machinery between the controller and the controlled, machinery invisible to the operator.
What's doing the assuming? Your body, of course. The better the analog, the more your body is tricked into acting upon the idea as if it's the referent. Ideas are brain processes, analogs for real things to which they refer. E.g. mental manipulation of an image of a 3D object engages many of the same circuits as actual manipulation of the 3D object. The better the ideas, the easier it is to be tricked into thinking those analogs are ultimately accurate, so accurate that the idea is the real thing. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be tricked ... which means I'm completely safe.
--
glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847
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