One Feeds Off The Other ... or what?!

[kellychaos]

Yes, I can understand individual episodes of cognition, but from where do the sociological shifts eminate and why ... i.e. what's the spark? Read on.

Originally Posted by DAN SPERBER

What I want to know is how, in an evolutionary perspective, social cultural phenomena relate to psychological mental phenomena.

The social and the psychological sciences,when they emerged as properly scholarly disciplines with their own departments in the nineteenth century took quite different approaches, adopted different methodologies, asked different questions. Psychologists lost sight of the fact that what's happening in human minds is always informed by the culture in which individuals grow. Social scientists lost sight of the fact that the transmission, the maintenance, and the transformation of culture takes place not uniquely but in part in these individual psychological processes. This means that if what you're studying is culture, the part played by the psychological moments, or episodes, in the transmission of culture should be seen as crucial. I find it unrealistic to think of culture as something hovering somehow above individuals — culture goes through them, and through their minds and their bodies and that is, in good part, where culture is being made.

LINK TO FULL ARTICLE

[kahljorn]

Brmp.

[kellychaos]

I mean, I can understand, through mass media, how a culture can be forced and translate into individual episodes that parrot that culture but how did culture permeate whole populations in a socio-cultural wave, so to speak.

[kahljorn]

It's pretty easy, really, when just about everything you *need* is supplied by an outside source. Everything you receive is taxed, depending on the culture. This breeds dependence, which breeds all kinds of insufferable psychological attachment-- in at least some sense.
Culture also comes with it's own religion usually, like some kind of action figure apparel. there's no reason to even get started on how religion plays it's hand in that. You know.
There's also things like families; when you have the father and mother figures of the family already set to follow your beliefs, their kids are more likely to have the same set of beliefs.
Since you are using the word socio-cultural... have you ever heard of the socio-sexual circuit from timothy leary's 8th circuit model of consciousness? most of it is pretty much more or less loosely based on the observations of other psychologists, philosophers and other such people of history. It outlines Freud's and Jung's feelings on things, more so Jung's.
So it's called Socio-Sexual. That really states alot, but to continue it's believed to be inherited/imprinted during adolescence. This is the fourth circuit, the three before it are Oral, anal and reasoning(or semantic). Basically, as a child you have all of those fine psychological weaknesses to be consciously or unconsciously beaten into you by your parents and society until your actual "Socio-sexual" circuit is imprinted.
The socio sexual circuit includes functions such as, obviously, what turns you on sexually. What your role in society is. Basically, who you "are". Sex and character. I believe freud called it the, "Genital stage". Nothing like genitals to give you an ego.

[kellychaos]

But don't people step away from the veil at least sometimes?

[kahljorn]

Sure, just like people get tired of waiting in line to go to the movies. But they just go back the next day, or for the next show. Besides, most people's, "Stepping away from the veil" is reading Harry Potter or something.

[kellychaos]

So that's what this Potter business is about.

Even non-comformity is inherently conformist if you take in its purest sense. If you want to be everything everyone else is not, chances are that you're not original in this choice. You end up being an "other" that is just in the minority. Anyway, you still ended up being influenced by society as your choice was to effect a personality that is society's polar opposite.

[ziggytrix]

nonconformity is not the polar opposite of conformity. iconoclasm is.

[kellychaos]

P.S. It's sad that I make my word associations with cartoons.

P.P.S. It's believed by many that Pinky was modeled after self-proclaimed iconoclast Orsen Welles.

[kahljorn]

Yea, well, that's a given. Why would anyone care about being an individual or non-conformist? That's not really what any of it is about(unless you have some kind of ego problems). It's really about affecting yourself to be the person you want to be i suppose, and carrying the values you think you should carry to the extent you want to carry them.
Basically, so that "negative" influences in your brain don't really fuck with you. In a cultural and psychological way, and in the way of life, that is the ultimate goal isn't it?
Culture is, in many ways, designed to breed people's that fit the culture's ideals. Our culture seems to have qualities they like in people. Like obessity, and consumerism. Basically, our culture breeds us to be stupid, fat, lazy and to spend our life working to buy the products we make. Culture is a sort of slavery, when you really look at it, but that's only because it's being used wrong.
Whenever something pops up that doesn't agree with it, it dissipates. once a certain amount of "Culturism" has been introduced, it barely needs to be sustained because people sustain it by themselves, "What's this? A book on quantum mechanics? SATANS WORK".
Culture can be a very good thing, and even as a bad thing it's not all pervasive. There's always little nooks and crannies of goodness. Culturism is a very useful tool, if this were a different world it could be used to teach children to be respectful of eachother and share. Of course, it's hard to teach children to share when adults don't share. Share a toy, share 1,000,000,000,000 dollars.
Psychology is a sort of mapping of the consciousness. It's not really about homosexuality being caused by abusive fathers. Anybody who has a degree in psychology and says shit like that is not only a moron but in desperate need of a shrink themself. Psychology would seem to be made to benifit the individual, but it's really more universal.
Developmentally there are certain "Points" which elicit huge consciousness changes that are acknowledged by psychologists. Culturally, we try to fill those huge holes of conscious changes with our culture, whether it's schooling or parenting. Let's say at these developmental points there were to be some kind of problem, for example; You're having sex for the first time with your girlfriend, and a cop knocks on the window and scares the shit out of you. Blam, you can be rendered impotent. That's an actual true story, and they fixed it by reimprinting that, "Developmental point".
Another example would be children who are born "Among wolves", the entire idea that they begin to accept their parents as wolves is one of those developmental points. Or the entire cliche that the first face a baby bird sees it considers it's mother is another example.
Our culture knows these points of vulnerability, and fills them with their own ideals. Usually dirty, smelly ideals.

the idea that our culture can make us mental eunuchs without even trying is kind of hilarious. they can quite literally render us physically and emotionally incompetent simply by placing the word terrorist into the media.

[kellychaos]

Originally Posted by DAN SPERBER

When you are told something, the simple view of what happens would be: 'ah! These are words, they have meaning,' and so you decode the meaning of the word and you thereby understand what the speaker meant. A more realistic and, as I said, also a more interesting idea is that the words don't encode the speaker meaning, they just give you evidence of the speaker's meaning. When we speak we want our audience to understand something that's in our mind. And we have no way to fully encode it, and trying at least to encode as much as possible would be absurdly cumbersome. Linguistic utterances, however rich and complex they may be, cannot fully encode our thoughts. But they can give strong richly structured piece of evidence of what our thoughts are.

In terms of literature rather than speech, local culture notwithstanding, how important is the choice of wording in conveying (or encoding) our thoughts. Does an extensive vocabulary necessarily convey deeper meaning? Does a mellifluous flow to even common words, as in verse, strike something in your conscious more so than choice of vocabulary? How much does the combination and/or order of the chosen words matter? One of the more obvious examples I can think of is Hemmingway in The Old Man And The Sea. Though composed of short, choppy sentences, the novel made complex ideas more lucid to an universal audience.

[quote"DAN SPERBER"]From the point of view of the audience, a speaker is providing rich pieces of evidence, which we interpret in a context of shared background knowledge, drawing on the common cultural, on the local situation, on the ongoing conversation, and so on. You construct a complex representation helped by all these different factors. You to end up with something which will have been strongly guided, sometimes guided in an exquisitely detailed manner, by the communication, by the words used by the speaker, but which end up being a thought of your own, relevant to you, a recognition, to begin with, of what the speaker meant, from which you extract what is relevant to you.[/quote]

How important to the author/speaker is local culture in projecting the ideas, through the connotations of the chosen words. Aren't some of the most profound ideas those which can be made to appeal to the broadest of audiences?

[kahljorn]

Have you ever read about E-prime, english prime? It's basically the english language without using any forms of the verb, "To be". Like AM for example, or IS. the reason you do this is because you sort of talk yourself into a certain mind frame, a mindframe like, "I am a republican". You can be nothing else, just republican. Rather, it's better to say, "I hold similar views as many republicans."
The basic idea is to tell the truth, all the time, even to yourself. Alot of people think there's alot of confinement within language, imagine how differently people who were born into a certain language think. It affects your thought process, and defines things that have no set definition. The object is to avoid all that and simply state the unlazy truth.
Essentially, lawyers talk/write like this. And scientists, and often times mathematicians...
I know that didn't exactly answer your question, but if you read into it a bit it kind of does.

[kellychaos]

I took a discrete mathematics course with a chinese instructor who was very fluent in English with just a trace of an accent. I don't know how we arrived at the subject but we (or someone in the class) asked him if he still thought in chinese. His answer was "Yes" and that he still found the English language rather restrictive in comparison in conveying his thoughts. As mathematics is a universal language, I find it hard to believe that culture plays much of a part in what he was trying to convey in most cases. Of course, the Greeks did have a hard time with the concept of zero at first (I think that "0" was, more or less, a place holder in the Arabic number system) but I don't know if that had to do with philosophy, religion, ect.

One thing that is certain, which is pointed out in the article, is that language is not simply encoding and decoding information. There are all manner of factors including body language, inflection, intent, choice of words, tone, ect and you still won't completely convey what it is you want to say. The best that one can hope is a high percentage. The perceivers are going to place their own psychological slant on it anyway based on their life experience, culture, ect.

Every picture tells a story. Are art (architecture, painting, sculpture, ect) and music an extension of language in communication or do they transcend language in this respect? Are we to expect that those who do not excel in language comprehension do equally poorly in art/music comprehension? Is language lumped in with mathematics in the left-right brain theories? I can't remember how that is supposed to play out. I know that in Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author pointed out how some could quickly break down music into its mathematical components and have an appreciation for it in that way while others would have an overall appreciation for the piece in a "the sum is greater than the sum of its parts" kind of way.

[kahljorn]

The chinese language's philosophy is different than the philosophy of the english language. The philosophy of their culture is different, and so is the way they think. It's not really that surprising considering the difference in chinese and greek/christian philosophies...
Besides that language is inherently mathematics anyhow. Language is Mathematics. Language=mathematics. The only real difference I suppose would be the usage of it maybe. The english language seems almost assumptious sometimes, saying they ARE things. "I am depressed", you aren't depressed! You just FEEL depressed.
By the way, I've heard that while alot of americans have alot of problems accepting and understanding the ideas of quantum mechanics, people from china seem to almost inately understand it. One reason I heard americans have a hard time with it is how exactly something can be in more than one place at the same time.

"Are we to expect that those who do not excel in language comprehension do equally poorly in art/music comprehension?"

No. Alot of artists and writers are reclusive and don't really enjoy the company of people. I just watched the henry darger documentary the other day-- it almost seems relevant to this. That just really sparks the question of if communication with real and normal people really has any value beyond being the accepted norm to function in society, namely to propagate. If not, is there any real value to communication and language at all?

[kellychaos]

I do not want to procreate with people that don't understand music and art, no matter what language they speak ... I mean ... what's the point? I AM NOT A ROBOT ... although robots are sort of of sexy in a sterile, cold-steel, violent kind of way!!

[kahljorn]

Yea, personal choice is always nice. I agree with you. It's just annoying to be with someone who isn't going to do you any good.

[theapportioner]

Originally Posted by kahljorn

Besides that language is inherently mathematics anyhow. Language is Mathematics. Language=mathematics.

Whoa there. This is preposterous.

The only real difference I suppose would be the usage of it maybe. The english language seems almost assumptious sometimes, saying they ARE things. "I am depressed", you aren't depressed! You just FEEL depressed.

There is absolutely nothing improper with the expression "I am depressed". People who use it understand what it conveys.

[ziggytrix]

Originally Posted by theapportioner

Whoa there. This is preposterous.

As 'i' approaches 'there' 'this' is approximately equal to 'preposterous'.

Mathematics is a language. The converse is not necessarily true for all languages, BUT any numerologist worth his salt could give you at least a half-assed argument for such being the case..

[theapportioner]

Kahl did not say "mathematics is a language". He said "language is mathematics". HUGE difference. Don't confuse subject and predicate here.

[ziggytrix]

Originally Posted by ziggytrix

The converse is not necessarily true for all languages

[theapportioner]

Forget about "necessarily". It's not true at all.

[ziggytrix]

But I saw PI, you can't tell me Hebrew language isn't a bunch of numbers. :P

It was in a MOVIE.

[kellychaos]

Originally Posted by theapportioner

Kahl did not say "mathematics is a language". He said "language is mathematics". HUGE difference. Don't confuse subject and predicate here.

I think that this is what Kahl was alluding to although I think that artificial intelligence has a long way to go and that mathematics is too incomplete to account for all nuances of human language with an "is":

LINK 1

LINK 2

LINK 3

[kellychaos]

In a nutshell, that's what the article was about. New theories on the subtlties and complexities of communication versus older theories of language as simple encoding/decoding of data.

[ziggytrix]

Compute the cosine of Beethoven's 5th and get back to me.