Posted by
gepr on
Jun 09, 2020; 2:43pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/chicken-egg-gumflap-talk-tp7596911p7596950.html
I definitely do not mean to say that songlines are some *one's* (i.e. that of one person) reified thoughts. They are either some kind of 1) aggregation of reified thoughts or a 2) reification of aggregate thoughts. Likely both. Where (1) collections of people get together and argue about their various delusions, much like we do here. And where (2) people like anthropologists or whoever collect songs/documents and try to find, classify, and name trends/cultures in whatever thoughts their subjects might have had. In both cases, the thoughts are not real. But the artifacts (including things like the hyoid bone) are real. I'd include the Jungian archetypes, here. They're fictional patterns we infer from real stuff. Even the languages are not real. But the consistent noises, mouth shapes, written documents, audio recordings, etc. are real. What we call a language is simply a pattern exhibited by those real things. E.g. the dictionary doesn't define words; people's *usage* of words defines the words. The dictionary is just a historical trace.
Re: scientific practice -- What's real are the beakers, machines, solutions, animals, pieces of paper with text, etc. But the ideals around which we normally think those artifacts are organized are not real. They're convenient fictions that help us regularize and control the artifacts (artifacts like young grad students or morons who refuse to wear masks in pandemics).
So, to reiterate, the *stories* are not real. The little machines, devices, and people are real. And any meaning we might attribute to the story is simply a reflection of the patterns we infer from the artifacts. The only reason stories have meaning to us is because *we* inferred them. It's the Ouroboros. Infer¹ pattern X. Infer¹ pattern Y. Infer² similarities in patterns X and Y and voilà you're conspiracy theory must be true!
On 6/8/20 1:32 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> You seem to be saying that (in my example) what I have applied the terms
> "songline" to are (might be?) (only/mostly?) someone's reification of
> some thoughts they had? I *do* understand that the (dead white guy/gal
> - Boas, Benedict, Mead, et alia) field of Western Anthropology might
> well impose onto the Cosmology of a population such as the "first
> peoples" who lived on the continent we call "Australia", our *own*
> projection of what they are about with what we have com eot "reify"?
> under the title of "songline" or "dream track". In fact, I am given
> to understand that within that cosmology, these "lines" are the tracks
> of creator-beings within the Dreamtime, all of which is perhaps too
> foreign for me to do more than recite these terms about.
>
> But that leaves the question of whether what *they* (if there is even a
> they-there?) use their version of these terms for something that is
> "simply a mish-mash of junk from which no sense can be inferred?". I
> realize you were using that phrase to describe an extrema of a spectrum,
> and perhaps were not even thinking of the specific example I put
> forward. (trying to take any idea that I'm throwing up a strawman here).
>
> I don't know if it helps to try to address (so we can factor it out?)
> this Western/Anthropological *interpretation/projection* from the
> *aggregation/abstaction* of trying to treat a people as presumably
> diverse as the entire (pre-colonial?) population of the continenet we
> call Australia, as a single culture. We have acknowledged something
> *like* 250 distinct languages (pre-colonization) but also
> imagine/pretend that their collective spirituality/mythology/culture was
> significantly more homogenous than that encountered, for example, in the
> Americas with a vaguely-parallel timeline (first "discovered" just over
> 100 years later).
>
> You acknowledge Stigmergy and (thereby?) allude to spontaneous order and
> further afield perhaps spandrels and exaptation. Just to be clear,
> I'm not *trying* to "throw dookey in the fan" here (aka "generate
> thread-splatter"), but looking for an arc/trajectory/envelope in it that
> makes sense to me.
>
> What you say about "Scientific Practice" sounds to me like you are
> saying the "object" we point at is more like an ephemeral cloud (from
> another thread) whose boundaries are not what we think they are. That
> is "porous", possibly "fractalish", and not so much objectish, or easily
> pointed at except as a distribution, or maybe an envelope (bounding
> volume?) in higher dimensional space?
>
> Maybe this is another example of how "communication is an illusion"...
> but Frank's recent cartoon of communication that I took to be a stylized
> form of projection -> serialization -> transition -> deserializatoin ->
> reprojection, seems relevant.
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