Logos continuously chiseling
new Reality
out of whatever Opportunity is at hand….
At the beginning there was nothing but Chaos.
Then Gods were born. One way or another.
The birth of Gods sowed order into Chaos.
Thus Cosmos was born.
Archives for category: alternative ways of acquring knowledge
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For a proposition to be ‘true’
it is not enough for it to be logically valid.
It also has to make sense. Epistemologically speaking.
Oscar Hoffman
“This house belongs to me”.
“I own this house”.
Logically, these two propositions are equivalent. Both state the same thing.
But which one makes real sense?
Where do you belong?
Where do you feel at home?
What can your house do for you?
What have you done to your house?
Self awareness doesn’t come cheap…
Collectively, species-wise, we’ve done OK. We’ve become the dominant species on Earth.
For good and/or for worse…
Individually, on the other hand…
Doubts!
Self-awareness comes with plenty of them:
Will I be able to find enough food tomorrow? For me and for my family?
When will it start to rain?
Will the sun rise again?
The way I see it, ‘The Stonehenge’ has been built for one thing only.
To assuage fear.
According to scientists researching the phenomenon, ‘The Stonehenge’ had been built by the immigrants who brought agriculture into Britain.
Solving the food problem wasn’t enough. Enough to bring peace of mind…
Now, that full bellied people had enough time on their hands, they started to think about ‘the future’:
‘OK, tomorrow will come. The sun will rise. We’ll be able to sow our crops for the next year. But is there an order in all this? How can we be sure?’
‘Let’s build something which will prove “order”. If we could demonstrate that year after year the summer solstice ‘falls’ under the same ‘parameters’ then there’s indeed an ‘order’. Things don’t just happen, they follow a ‘script’ ‘.
And they did exactly that. Built the first scientific instrument. Proved that the sun not only rises each day but also follows a precise path.
Quite a management feat.
And no, I don’t mean the stone stacking part. However remarkable that was…
Their real success was to convince themselves to keep toiling into the future!
“Give us today our daily bread”
We’ve been around for a while.
300 millennia, according to some. 70 millennia, according to others. Who use a more stringent set of criteria.
Anyway. Homo Sapiens is considered to be 300 000 years old while his nephew, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, is a little younger. Only 70 000 years…
Regardless of age, for most of this time we have been foragers.
OK, even our ancestors had tools. We’ve been around for 300ky while tools have predated us by more than 1my. Yes, our hominin predecessors were the ones to invent tools…
Then what is our contribution? Why are we the ones who are still around?
According to Ernst Mayr – if I interpret correctly – we’ve simply been lucky!
Nothing happened.
No catastrophic event bad enough to extinguish us. And no freshly minted ‘superman’ to take our place.
That question, regarding our contribution, speaks volumes about our infatuation with ourselves.
Hence the paradox.
Very recently, we’ve done something. Used agriculture on a large enough scale to change our way of life.
As foragers, we used to live in a certain way.
As homo economicus, who actively, agentically, produces food – and everything else we need, we’ve crossed yet another barrier. Benchmark? Anyway, we live completely different lives from those experienced by our foraging (fore)fathers. Despite the fact that there’s no biological or psychological difference between us.
Don’t believe me? Take a small child from the African or South American bush, lovingly raise them in a functional family and tell me if you find any difference. Between any of those children and their ‘already civilized’ school-mates. The key concepts here being ‘lovingly raise them in a functional family’ and ‘school mates’. If you understand what I mean…
‘Completely different lives’.
‘OK, I get it. They, the lives, are different. But are they better? Or worse?!?’
Your question, your very pertinent question, is extremely eloquent.
It fully expresses the paradox haunting us.
As foragers, we’ve learned to speak. To carve. To make beautiful tools. To paint…
As foragers, we’ve become human.
As agriculturalists, we live way longer lives. And accomplish way many more things.
Yes, ‘things’.
We speak the same. We paint the same. We carve the same. We even eat more or less the same things. Less of them but there’s nothing really new in our diet. Less diverse, heavily processed in too many instances, but no really new ingredients…
The only two differences between us and our fore-fathers is the length of our lives and the amount of things we end up owning.
So. Are our lives better?
Longer, for certain!
Less painful? Probably. Considering the physical pain…
Happier?
Then what? Give up agriculture? Go back to bare-back foraging?
How about learning from agriculture?
Digesting the concept, not only the produce…
As foragers, we were ‘expandable’. Each of us could do everything. Statistically, speaking… Gathering, hunting, fetching water and wood, you name it. We depended on each other, of course, but none of us was irreplaceable.
As homo economicus we also depend on each other. But differently!
Just remember what happened last week. When nobody knows how/why, yet, the fuel lines of an airplane taking off somewhere in India were switched off.
Or think about what happens when one of your colleagues calls in sick.
Smith, Adam ‘Free Market’ Smith, taught us about ‘the baker, the butcher and the brewer’.
We still have to digest his teachings.
Our daily bread demands a lot of cooperation.
We’re no longer capable to accomplish much individually.
Our longer and way more bountiful lives depend on our ability, and willingness, to cooperate.
Respectfully….
Where there’s a way
There will be a will!
An open wound will be ‘colonized’ by various organisms.
A mixture of water and flour will develop a ‘froth’.
A naive person will be swindled.
A healthy immune system will, eventually, take care of the infection. Successfully or not…
If in the hands of an experienced baker, the mixture of water and flour will – eventually – become the starting point for a delicious sour-bread loaf.
The previously naive person, once swindled, might learn something from the experience.
Life is nothing but an added layer of opportunity.
The pre-animated world is about strict rules. No variation, except for that brought about by happenstance.
Life is also about rules. But way laxer than those governing the pre-animated world.
While the pre-animated world is about nothing more than mere existence, life is about surviving in the given conditions. About evolution. About change.
And here’s the catch.
Pre-conscious change is also mainly about happenstance.
Darwin’s evolution is driven by minute changes at the DNA level. Those which are helpful are perpetuated while those which are harmful either kill out-rightly the organism where they have appeared or restrict its ability to ‘give birth’.
Nota bene. Darwin’s evolution was about “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection“
In his understanding, and in the real world, evolving – biology wise – is done by the species. Not by individual organisms!
Conscious change, on the other hand… is driven by individuals!
Happenstance continues to be involved, heavily, but the main drive comes from ‘want’. From individuals willing/wishing to ‘make a difference’.
Is this a good or a bad thing?!?
It is a fact. Neither necessarily good or bad. Just a fact.
The outcome, evolution wise, depends on how the social organism – the cultural species – digests the experience.
For a while, I was convinced we were living in a virtual reality.
In a reality of our own making. As I mentioned earlier, ‘vir‘ is a Latin word. “Man”. “Hero”.
Hence ‘virtual’ literally means ‘man-made’. ‘Manufactured’.
Now I’ve realized we live inside an experiment.
We are both the objects and the agents of the intersecting experiments currently active.
We call them ‘lives’. Our lives…
Living organisms constantly exchange information with their environment.
Then where is the difference between ‘us’ and the rest of the living creatures?
Information-wise, of course!
Language…
As far as we know, humans are the only critters currently living on Earth which are interested in how other creatures learn. Or teach…
In the 20 odd years since Caro and Hauser have set the bar for what teaching means quite a number of species have been found to do it. To fully or at least suggestively cross all the necessary t-s. From ants to primates.
Interestingly enough, all of those species have a clear ‘collective’ behavior.
All individuals belonging to a species collaborate, of sorts, towards the survival of that species. This goes without saying.
But in some species this collaboration is more intense than in others.
Ants and bees versus most other insects.
Elephants versus cheetahs. Or leopards.
Even chimpanzees versus orangutans…
OK, for some species hand to hand collaboration between generations is impossible. Most parent insects are dead when their offspring hatch. Orangutans live in forests where food is too scarce for more than 1 individual to forage.
Others have found their niches. Where the individual approach is good enough for them to survive. Cheetahs, leopards. Bears, even…
Charles Darwin taught us about evolution. Merging individual lives into the survival of the species those individuals belong to.
Life, as I see it from a “functional and mechanistic perspective“, is yet another manner in which matter is organized. Yet another ‘state of matter‘.
For life to be present, three conditions have to be met.
– Individual organisms have to be exchanging, in a controlled manner, substances with their environment. To ingest nutrients and to excrete the by-products of their metabolism.
– Individual organisms have to be exchanging information with their environment. And with their interior. Otherwise the exchange of substances would no longer be controlled by the individuals.
– Individual organisms have be passing to the next generation the pertinent information needed for the species to survive. In the kind of life we are familiar with, that would be ‘the genetic information’.
Considering the above, I dare to make a difference between what Caro and Hauser consider to be teaching and what we, humans, do.
Intent!
I doubt that any of the ‘animal teachers’ do it under their own volition.
After all, nobody has yet identified an animal con-artist who cons the members of their own species… as we do!
As far as we currently know, ‘teaching behavior’ is displayed inside species which collaborate more closely than other species. Which suggests that that kind of behavior is somehow innate to those species. A ‘habit’, not a choice. As it is with us.
What makes it possible? This difference?
Our special kind of conscience and our use of language.
The fact that we are the only species – as far as we know – capable of building a ‘virtual image’ of the surrounding reality. Capable to select certain aspects of what surrounds us and codify them using various forms of ‘notation’.
And to do this according to our own, individual, interests!
Sometimes even against the interests of the community/species to which we belong.
100 divided by 2 equals 50
100 divided by .2 equals 500
Meta. “An ancient Greek word meaning “beyond”, “after” or “behind”“
Morphe. Another Greek word, meaning “form, outward appearance; nature, character“.
So. Metamorphosis can be interpreted as both the process of changing shape and/or nature and the result of that process.
My point being that we are the ones who make the connections. Who connect the dots…
We are the ones who have noticed the link between the caterpillar and the butterfly.
We are the ones who have taken the notion of division way further than its very nature.
How much (natural) sense does it make to divide something to a divisor which is smaller than 1 ?!?
It is nevertheless possible… arithmetically speaking… we do it by carrying the rule into the ‘sub-unitary realm’ … without giving much thought to the ‘metaphysical’ aspects of the ‘operation’.
To the fact that by dividing something to a sub-unitary divisor we actually transform division into multiplication!
We do that by applying a rule beyond, also known as ‘meta’, its natural domain.
One man’s junk
is another man’s treasure
Dung beetle are very industrious.
They don’t think much but are very useful.
And they have been useful for quite a while.
Since long before our ancestors had started to roam the Earth…
My point being that their attempt at taking care of their next generation – their species collective effort to survive – have helped shaping the current version of Earth’s ‘environment’. The current version of the place which we, all of us, call home.
Where we, humans, do our thing. Think!
Think and make differences.
For the dung beetles, poop is both a resource and an opportunity. They need dung in order to ‘nest’ their eggs so whenever they find it they start working.
Dung beetles are very good at using poop. In doing their job they perpetuate their species and they reintegrate poop into the natural order of things. Read here what happened in Australia between man had introduced cows and the ‘same’ man had got wise enough to bring some dung beetles specialized in using that particular kind of poop.
But dung beetles are not able to think. Or to speak. About anything, including their most prized resource. Dung.
We do. We are able to think. And to speak. Among ourselves. And with ourselves…
How else do we do what makes us humans?
How else do we think except by using words? Concepts…
And this is how we get to the gist of today’s post.
The difference between a resource and an opportunity.
It was by thinking that we have identified something as being a resource. That something can be used.
And it was through the same process that we have coined the concept of ‘opportunity’.
We don’t eat everything in sight, right?
We understand the difference…
In fact, we are able to understand.
We have the necessary resources to make the difference!
But we don’t always make good of the opportunity…
“At the trial of God, we will ask:
why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo:
why did you allow all this?”
Ilya Kaminsky, The Deaf Republic.
nicichiarasa 