Dear Rich and John,
John -- I'd settle for peaceable agreement. It wasn't at all clear from your previous posts that you considered culture and/or technology just as important. The impression I'd gotten was that "No technology from stone carving to supercomputers has ever made any fundamental change in the ways that people
think, talk, and behave..." and "...My original statement addressed *the ways* that people think, talk, and behave -- not the subject matter about which they think or talk. And I definitely meant human nature. ..."
In any event, thanks for your clarification, I'm glad we evidently agree. There is a point to my nitpicking however, and it relates to how we can best leverage the underlying media of formal ontologies - networked formal languages... See the SIO thread for an expansion on this, or alternatively and somewhat more exhaustively, my Master's thesis :P.
Rich - thank you for your kind words. I am delighted that your wife is able to attain a reprieve in gardening.
I do however want to take this opportunity to clarify that reseed isn't simply about the love of gardening, nor is carbon sequestration only window dressing (thought it does use a language that politicians and funding agencies appreciate :D). Biochar is a very exciting and interesting substance that is only recently being rediscovered.
Ultimately, and coincidentally related to the content of the above discussion, reseed is trying to transform how people relate to space, land and food. There's a three pronged approach to the organization -- (1) Community Intervention by Example; (2) Education and Sharing of Learned Knowledge; (3) Change in Government Policy. I refer any interested parties to the website, though our web presence is still in its infancy.
And to tie this seeming digression into the actual purpose of the ontolog forum, check the SIO thread, as reseed provides a concrete use case that could leverage a repository.
Cheers,
Ali
On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 2:31 PM, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Ali,
Your gardening photos look like you are a
lover of natural beauty, so I can see why your interest in subjective
experience is so strong.
You are right; McLuhan, and the flood of new
marketing methods that followed his teachings, demonstrated how little the
things we buy are actually purchased for purely logical and utilitarian reasons.
It’s those things we have been exposed to in our subjective experience,
in our local environment, with our directly experienced emotionally charged
situations and events, which make us learn to think, to place emotional value,
and otherwise to direct our behaviors are higher conceptual levels than thought
does.
That is most especially noticeable in
manifestations of pain. My wife is constantly in pain due to a nervous and
muscular condition, but she is able to escape much of this great pain when she
is focused on a task that interests her emotionally. For example, when our two
year old granddaughter comes over, my wife spends a lot of time caring for her
and teaching her, and helping her explore my wife’s tiny garden, which is
very well taken care of. When she is deep into caring and teaching and
gardening, the pain is much diminished. Its when she his out of the garden,
without the granddaughter, trying to sleep without distracting influences that
the pain is most difficult for her to control.
The pure logic of ontology is, in my
opinion, not sufficient. Although I think your carbon sequestration approach
is politically correct, I don’t think your motivation comes from Al Gore,
but from your love of gardening. Thinking back on the things that have been
really, really important to me in life, not one is important because of logic
and math. All are important because the emotional learning I have gathered,
both conscious and unconscious, establish 100% of any significant meaning,
while logic just glues together the parts that are tangled so I can recognize
them more clearly.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
Dear John and Chris,
Sorry for the delay, I've been traveling the past while...
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 7:09 PM, Chris Partridge <mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John,
I think you may underestimating some of the post-language changes.
I'd like to reinforce Chris' point - I don't think there's anything to be
gained in minimizing or mitigating the effects of "cultural" or
technological interaction on how we come to
understand the world. While it is undeniable that by virtue of being human and
how are brains are structured, we are all predisposed to process the world in broadly/roughly the same way, the impact
of environment plays a very significant role in our "fundamental"
processes.
Here are three examples:
========================
1) Consider the basic inference rule - Modus Ponens:
If P then Q
P
----------------
Therefore Q
Contrast the communication / sharing of this idea via spoken word vs. written
text. When written, Modus Ponens is much more intuitive and reasonable. The
visual component of Modus Ponens lends that statement the semantic
reasonableness / agree-ability which makes it a natural inference rule. You
might similarly use a diagram to communicate it, instead of written language,
however the point is that the *intuition* of this type of semantics is closely
coupled to the media in which it is presented. The auditory route is much more
circuitous and less obvious, and it is certainly not nearly as intuitive. The
invention of writing changed our sense ratios, from one focused on hearing, to
one focused on visualizing, which very probably led to the adoption of this
inference rule. Is this changing human nature? It certainly changed how we
think :D.
Again, this isn't to say that an oral culture wouldn't discover or accept Modus
Ponens, just that it arises much more naturally in a visual culture.
========================
2) A recent study done by the Rotman School of Management ( http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-03/uotr-rpf032510.php
; http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/newthinking/fastfood.pdf
) indicates that what we eat affects our disposition. Now it doesn't alter
human nature, but if human nature consists of a range of predisposed possible
reactions to situations, then different environments (and technologies, and
foods) will alter how and the ratios in which that nature is expressed.
Specifically, the study indicates that eating fatty / fast food type meals
biases people's disposition to be more impatient. And particularly, if certain
types of reasoning are associated with impatience (i.e. less deliberation, more
rash, quick, short judgments), then I hope you agree that there is a marked
change in our manifested fundamental process of thinking.
To be clear, an analogy I prefer here is to compare our cognitive faculties to
the weather. While there may be certain basic rules that govern how weather
across the earth generally operates, conditions in the arctic are drastically
different than those near the equator. To wit, while our "fundamental
processes" afford us a range of cognitive / perceptual processes, our
local environments and interactions bias and tease out only parts of this
potential range.
========================
3) Which brings me to the last example. Consider communities where the
predominant form of transport is:
a) driving
b) biking
c) walking
Each person in these communities will have a fundamentally different conception
of space, location, time etc. And the reason for this, while they may all share
roughly the same "fundamental processes" is that they are engaging
these processes, manifesting them, in drastically different ways. Each time
someone opts to bike instead of drive, they use a different set of faculties
with which to interact with the world, which in turn affects longer, more
subtle perceptions. Similar to the food study above, repeated engagement of
certain cognitive faculties when interacting with the world will affect how /
which components of cognition one will choose to process other aspects of the
world.
========================
Going back to the first example, people in a society where thought is often
visualized will be more likely to intuit / discover / propose Modus Ponens than
another society. This isn't to say that it is impossible. Only to point out
that the effects of social and technological habituation / interaction are
significantly more important than what seemed to be implied in your recent
posts.
For further reading, I would highly recommend:
* John Dewey - Experience and Nature - 1925 ( http://www.amazon.com/Experience-Nature-John-Dewey/dp/0486204715
)
* Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man - 1964
- (http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Media-Extensions-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/0262631598/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270382776&sr=1-1
; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media:_The_Extensions_of_Man),
from the wiki:
McLuhan says that the conventional
pronouncements fail in studying media because they pay attention to and focus
on the content, which blinds them to see its actual character, the psychic and
social effects. Significantly, the electric light is usually not even regarded
as a media because it has no content. Instead, McLuhan observes that any medium
"amplifies or accelerates existing processes", introduces a
"change of scale or pace or shape or pattern into human association,
affairs, and action", resulting in "psychic, and social
consequences";[2][3]
this is the real "meaning or message" brought by a medium, a social
and psychic message, and it depends solely on the medium itself, regardless of
the 'content' emitted by it.[2]
This is basically the meaning of "the medium is the message".
* Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the
Age of Show Business - 1985 - (http://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270382803&sr=1-1
; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
) - from the wiki:
The essential premise of the book,
which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that "form
excludes the content," that is, a particular medium can only sustain a
particular level of ideas. Thus Rational
argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium
of television for the aforesaid reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and
religion are diluted, and "news of the day" becomes a packaged
commodity. Television de-emphasises the quality of information in favour of
satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is
encumbered and to which it is subordinate.
....
Drawing on the ideas of media
scholar Marshall McLuhan — altering
McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message",
to "the medium is the metaphor" — he describes how oral,
literate, and televisual cultures radically differ in the processing and
prioritision of information; he argues that each medium is appropriate for a
different kind of knowledge. The faculties requisite for rational inquiry are
simply weakened by televised viewing. Accordingly, reading, a prime example
cited by Postman, exacts intense intellectual involvement, at once interactive
and dialectical; whereas television only requires passive involvement.
Moreover, as television is programmed according to ratings, its content is
determined by commercial feasibility, not critical acumen. Television in its
present state, he says, does not satisfy the conditions for honest intellectual
involvement and rational argument.
Cheers,
Ali
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