[extropy-chat] "The Psychological Foundations of Culture" online

[Brett Paatsch]

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:

> Brett Paatsch wrote:
> > Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> > 
> >>"The Psychological Foundations of Culture" by John Tooby
> >>and Leda Cosmides appears to have been OCRed online. 
> >> This is chapter 2 of "The Adapted Mind" and #1 on my list
> >>of favorite papers ever.
> >>
> >>http://folk.uio.no/rickyh/papers/TheAdaptedMind.htm
> > 
> > #1 favorite is high praise. 
> > 
> > Thanks Eliezer. Interesting. I haven't read it yet - it prints out
> > at 91 pages and doesn't seem to be only chapter 2.
> > 
> > When was it published? A quick flick through shows citations
> > as late as 1992 as far as I can see.
> 
> 1992.
> 
> Incidentally, Tyrone Pow reformatted this at:
> 
> http://www.tyronepow.com/misc/TheAdaptedMind.htm

Thanks I've read most of chapter 1. I agree its very good stuff.

There are a bunch of 'false dichotomies' lined up that imo afflict
not just the wider-world but also some of what is taken for 
granted within transhumanist subculture as well. 

The false dichotomies or "ancient dualism endemic to Western
cultural tradition": material/spirit, body/mind, physical/mental,
natural/human, animal/human, biological/social. biological/cultural.

The unpacking of words is too important to be left to the Standard
Social Science Modellers. Words are our means of communicating
with and empowering each other. I think it behoves us to take a
scientific and engineering look at some of the words we are using.

In hardware and software and wetware the common component
is ware. "Ware" is tangible even in software. Software is not 
disembodied pattern and information. It is information on a
substrate.  

Language is not mere concepts it is concepts communicated
through a medium. Be that medium the 'physics of the air' or
the 'physics of pixels on a screen or the 'physics of words on
a page'. There is no language separate from all media through which
it is conveyed.

We can vary the particular medium but we cannot remove the
need for all media of conveyance of language or of other information.  

I am suspicious of the viability of cryonics. There is no such thing,
it seems to me, as completely dis-embodied information. Re-emboding
information changes it - whether the change is significant depends on
the user of the information and on how finely grained they need the
replication to be. We can probably be satisfied with the results
of re-animated friends and loved ones who present to us only as 
sensory data anyway. But we do not present or sense ourselves 
only in the same limited senses that our friends percieve us. We sense
ourselves as changing but not as discontinuous. Cryonics would be 
radical discontinuity. The radical discontinuity of others would be 
transparent to me as I experience them as discontinuity anyway 
and vice versa. But my own discontinuity looks to me to be my death.
This may not be a falsifiable hypothesis to me but then neither is the
assertion that information pattern maintenance is enough to preserve
me beyond death. - There is a limit to the scientific way of seeing too,
that is NOT the same at all, so far as I can tell, to the shallow muddle
-headed limits charged to the scientific way of seeing by many social
scientists that argue against reductionism and for what Tooby and 
Cosmede ascribe to Lowie (that) "culture is a thing sui generis which
can be explained only in terms of itself...Omnis cultura ex culture". 

The real limit to the scientific way of seeing comes from the inevitability
of seeing exactly the same things together. The universe presents to
all practising scientists as one and not one. As one-that-perceives- 
necessarily-from-the-standpoint-of-"self" and all else (including all
others - including other scientists and one's colleagues in all enterprises
scientific, familial, and social). 

Hmm. I can see approaches towards accelerate rates of change (the 
singularity ?) coming on from a variety of directions and one of them
is when real scientists (the ones that like to integrate their knowledge
domains rather than keep them in isolation) take to evaluating 
language and information. Of course some scientists already are but
as we are each necessarily the centre of our own perceptive
universes we must each do this (or fail to do it) for ourselves by 
ourselves. 

Regards,
Brett