Sperber, Dan & Hirschfeld, Lawrence A., "The Cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004), 40-46
Introducing concepts of negative and positive false domains.
p. 41
An evolved cognitive module if an adaptation to a range of phenomena that presented problems or opportunities in the ancestral environment of the species.
Its function i to process a given type of stimuli or input. These inputs constitute the proper domain of the module.
All inputs meeting the input conditions of a module constitute its actual domain. These inputs conditions can never be perfectly adequate.
Mismatch between domains
The mismatch between the proper and the actual domain of a module can result in part from exploitation of the module by other organisms.
The difference between the proper domain and the actual domain results in inputs being falsely attributed to certain modules.
Such can be false negatives (a snake looking like a wig, therefore not being recognized as a snake)
or a false positive: a stick looking like a snake, therefore falsely identified as a snake.
Table 1: domain for which strong developmental comparative and neurocognitive data exists:
Theory of mind
Folk biology
Number
Face recognition
Naive mechanics
Folk sociology
A great variety of cultural artifacts are aimed at specific modules.
p. 42
The effectiveness of these artifacts in turn helps xplain their cultural recurrence.
***** what effectiveness are they talking about?
THE CASE OF FOLK BIOLOGY
p. 43
The unique importance of animals and plans in ancestral environments .. suggest that a dedicated module might have evolve the governs the categorization of living kinds...
The similarities of fold taxonomies across cultures ... confirm this hypothesis.
However, the fact that inputs to this module come not just from direct experience ... but also .. from communication with other people allows expanding the actual domain of the module well beyond its proper domain.
*** this shows that the building of the module is primarily cultural.
cultural exploitation of the module: wolves, which are only encountered in zoos, are still represented as dangerous.
Culturally reinterpreted wolves have become superstimuli.
Modular processing of information about living kinds is similarly the basis for the variety of cultural exploitations lumped together in classical anthropological theory under the label of 'totemism'.
p. 44
THE CASE OF FOLK SOCIOLOGY
The cognitive demands of such reasoning (social grouping) is sufficiently specific and complex to suggest the possibility of a special purpose modular competence in naive or folk sociology.
Unlike the social lives of non-humans primates, human social life is thoroughly cultural. *** WHAT?! what does it mean "thoroughly"?
THE CASE OF SUPERNATURALISM
From a point of view informed both by cognitive science and evolutionary biology, the existence of such needs and the ability of religion to satisfy them are quite questionable.
Supernatural beings are not just impossible in nature. They blantantly violate thekind of basic expectations that are delivered by domain-specific cognitive mechanisms.
*** religion is not supernatural beings.
As argues by Boyer, it is this combination of a few strikin gviolation with otherwise conformity to ordinary expectations, that makes supernatural beings attention arresting and memorable, and rich in inferential potential.
p. 45
Representations of supernatural beings, ... spread and stabilize in different cultures because they function for one or several cognitive modules as superstimuli. ... typically comvine not just exaggerated but also paradoxical features with ordinary and essential ones... in falling in the actual domain of two different modules.
Conclusions
We agree with standard social science that culture is not human psychology write large and that it would make little sense to seek a psychological reductionist explanation of culture.
however psychological factors paly an essential role in culture.
Some of these .. factors have to do with emotion more than with cognition.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Articles on culture and cogntion: The Cental Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution
Donald, Merlin, "The Central Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution: A Reflection on the Myth of the 'Isolated Mind'", (chapter 2 in some book)
concept of brain-culture coevolution.
p. 20: But cognition science still proceeds as if culture did not matter. The only major exception to this is developmental psychology.
p. 21: two people who have influenced: Lev Vygotsky, first to recognize the symbiosis of developing mind wih culture, and Jerry Bruner, who carried this realization into the modern era.
p. 22: In most species, culture, insofar as it exists at all, does not factor into the evoluionary picture in this way.
p. 24: thus, by changing the kinds of cognitive environments to which infants are exposed, symbolic cultures can have a major epigenetic impact on the mind.
p. 25: conventional coevolutionary theories allow only for a tight, inflexible fit between brain and culture.
p. 25: There is an additional factor that affects brain-culture interactions, and it results from the juxtaposition of a super-plastic brain with our highly innovative symbolic cultures. Future generations can adjust to their drastically changed epigenetic environment without genetic change, through assive cultural intervention in their development.
P. 25: literacy developed in the New Stone Age, 5,000 years ago.
p. 28ff: about encultured apes
p. 29: human features: erect posture, changed vocal anatomy, increased brain volume.
p. 30: analysis of the apes' behaviour
p. 30: thus, just as Kanzi, we are also illusory creatures, products of an incessant process of cultural revolution that has kept raising the intellectual bar higher and higher.
p. 30: apes came close to human cognition as individuals, but they failed on the cultural side of the equation... apes continue to use symbols ony for a pragmatic personal agenda... collectively they have never been inclined to construct their own symbolic cultures... they never extended their use of symbols to hols anything resembling a conversation.
{my remark: perhaps the monkeys who were taught a language, but never learned to converse, prove that language in itself is not the issue; it is just a tool. the culture, its content, is the issue; but we still know nothing about how it came about. our facts are: brain is empty when born. it is filled by education and experience; this is done inter alia by language. the culture exists only in the brains of people}
p. 30-31: In their case, competence in the use of symbols was not sufficient to generate a cultural revolution, not even a very small one.
p. 31: In short, there seems to be more to generating culture than a sprinking of words and a smattering of grammar.
p. 31: Unthinkable as it may seem, we are not even certain that spoken language, as we know it, was part of our primordial profile as a species.
p. 31: our nervous systems are private entities, physically isolated from one another.
p. 32: We can escape from those little boxes and from our intellectual isolation in only one way - through action.
p. 32: The problem is that our brains can never produce truly symbolic acts unless they are imposed from the outside.
p. 32: people who grew up in isolation...never invented symbols.
p. 32: isolated brains ... never invent language, not even a "language of thought" ... we know from the post hoc testimony
p. 33: how culture (language) started is in his work of 1991.
p. 33: he develped the complex of "mimetic skill" (mapping elementary event perceptions, thus creating action metaphore, also: gesture, pantomime, re-enactive play, self reminding and more), thus creating "mimetic culture".
p. 33: Vygotsky's find: children imitate external language first, and do not have inital inner speech (1986). Language is first acted out, and only later internalized.
p. 33: the flow goes OUTSIDE ---> INSIDE
p. 33: this process began 2 million years ago.
p. 34: CONSCIOUSNESS and SELF-CONSTRUCTION. we have a hybrid consciousness, multilayered, complex. Consiousness is a product of our evolution.
p. 34: I had not yet realized that consciousness might be the engine of our cognitive evolution. But I am now convinced that it is.
p. 35: conscious capacity is essential to cultural survival because symbolic cultures hides their secrets from all but the most attentive mind. Their surface appearance is deceiving.
p. 35: CULTURE IS INVISIBLE, it is not immediately present in perception. It takes a long time to learn it.
p. 35: executive capacities were developed to cope with culture. it enables a human being to manage and supervise their own cognitive activities while analyzing the second and third ordr patterns of culture.
p. 36: a bad pun: executive suite.
p. 36: components of the executive suite are all associated with the conscious capacity: memory component (working memory), directional component (directing our attention cleverly), evaluative component (how things of now are connected to things of yesterday or tomorrow. nonhumans don't have it) and there are more.
p. 36: consciousness is essential for understanding culture because culture is un-predictable the needs maximal flexibility in order to generalize rapidly from concrete and from partial information.
p. 36: CONSCIOUS CAPACITY IS THE KEY EVOLUTIONARY FEATURE OF THE HUMAN MIND. IT PROVIDES OUR CONNECTION WITH CULTURE.
p. 37: we do have innately programmed skills, built into our brain at birth, but is pays a much smaller roe in the human case. We developed a symbiotic relationship with culture and a conscious capacity to self-assemble cognitive architerctures.
concept of brain-culture coevolution.
p. 20: But cognition science still proceeds as if culture did not matter. The only major exception to this is developmental psychology.
p. 21: two people who have influenced: Lev Vygotsky, first to recognize the symbiosis of developing mind wih culture, and Jerry Bruner, who carried this realization into the modern era.
p. 22: In most species, culture, insofar as it exists at all, does not factor into the evoluionary picture in this way.
p. 24: thus, by changing the kinds of cognitive environments to which infants are exposed, symbolic cultures can have a major epigenetic impact on the mind.
p. 25: conventional coevolutionary theories allow only for a tight, inflexible fit between brain and culture.
p. 25: There is an additional factor that affects brain-culture interactions, and it results from the juxtaposition of a super-plastic brain with our highly innovative symbolic cultures. Future generations can adjust to their drastically changed epigenetic environment without genetic change, through assive cultural intervention in their development.
P. 25: literacy developed in the New Stone Age, 5,000 years ago.
p. 28ff: about encultured apes
p. 29: human features: erect posture, changed vocal anatomy, increased brain volume.
p. 30: analysis of the apes' behaviour
p. 30: thus, just as Kanzi, we are also illusory creatures, products of an incessant process of cultural revolution that has kept raising the intellectual bar higher and higher.
p. 30: apes came close to human cognition as individuals, but they failed on the cultural side of the equation... apes continue to use symbols ony for a pragmatic personal agenda... collectively they have never been inclined to construct their own symbolic cultures... they never extended their use of symbols to hols anything resembling a conversation.
{my remark: perhaps the monkeys who were taught a language, but never learned to converse, prove that language in itself is not the issue; it is just a tool. the culture, its content, is the issue; but we still know nothing about how it came about. our facts are: brain is empty when born. it is filled by education and experience; this is done inter alia by language. the culture exists only in the brains of people}
p. 30-31: In their case, competence in the use of symbols was not sufficient to generate a cultural revolution, not even a very small one.
p. 31: In short, there seems to be more to generating culture than a sprinking of words and a smattering of grammar.
p. 31: Unthinkable as it may seem, we are not even certain that spoken language, as we know it, was part of our primordial profile as a species.
p. 31: our nervous systems are private entities, physically isolated from one another.
p. 32: We can escape from those little boxes and from our intellectual isolation in only one way - through action.
p. 32: The problem is that our brains can never produce truly symbolic acts unless they are imposed from the outside.
p. 32: people who grew up in isolation...never invented symbols.
p. 32: isolated brains ... never invent language, not even a "language of thought" ... we know from the post hoc testimony
p. 33: how culture (language) started is in his work of 1991.
p. 33: he develped the complex of "mimetic skill" (mapping elementary event perceptions, thus creating action metaphore, also: gesture, pantomime, re-enactive play, self reminding and more), thus creating "mimetic culture".
p. 33: Vygotsky's find: children imitate external language first, and do not have inital inner speech (1986). Language is first acted out, and only later internalized.
p. 33: the flow goes OUTSIDE ---> INSIDE
p. 33: this process began 2 million years ago.
p. 34: CONSCIOUSNESS and SELF-CONSTRUCTION. we have a hybrid consciousness, multilayered, complex. Consiousness is a product of our evolution.
p. 34: I had not yet realized that consciousness might be the engine of our cognitive evolution. But I am now convinced that it is.
p. 35: conscious capacity is essential to cultural survival because symbolic cultures hides their secrets from all but the most attentive mind. Their surface appearance is deceiving.
p. 35: CULTURE IS INVISIBLE, it is not immediately present in perception. It takes a long time to learn it.
p. 35: executive capacities were developed to cope with culture. it enables a human being to manage and supervise their own cognitive activities while analyzing the second and third ordr patterns of culture.
p. 36: a bad pun: executive suite.
p. 36: components of the executive suite are all associated with the conscious capacity: memory component (working memory), directional component (directing our attention cleverly), evaluative component (how things of now are connected to things of yesterday or tomorrow. nonhumans don't have it) and there are more.
p. 36: consciousness is essential for understanding culture because culture is un-predictable the needs maximal flexibility in order to generalize rapidly from concrete and from partial information.
p. 36: CONSCIOUS CAPACITY IS THE KEY EVOLUTIONARY FEATURE OF THE HUMAN MIND. IT PROVIDES OUR CONNECTION WITH CULTURE.
p. 37: we do have innately programmed skills, built into our brain at birth, but is pays a much smaller roe in the human case. We developed a symbiotic relationship with culture and a conscious capacity to self-assemble cognitive architerctures.
Articles on culture and cogntion: Evolutionary Origins of the Social Brain
Donald, Merlin, "Chapter Eighteen: Evolutionary Origins of the Social Brain", in: Vilarroya, Oscar and Forn i Argimon, Francesc(a?), Social Brain Matters: Stances on the Neurobiology of Social Cognition, Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi (2007), 215-222.
p. 215
Cultural networks are a vital link in the human cognitive process. They greatly affect the way we carry out our cognitive business.
p. 216
What type of cognitive change would have enabled a group of archaic hominides to start developing a communication system that led eventually to the invention of highly variable and arbitrary ... distinctive grammars, and symbolic cultures?
In most species the range of possible behaviors is largely fixed in the genes and closely attuned to its ecological niche. This results in what is sometimes called a "specialist survival strategy".
Human beings have broken out of this morphological straitjacket. ... Where would such flexibility have begun to evolve? This question leads us logically back to the fundamentals of human motor skills and procedural learning. To learn... and individual must carry out a sequence of basic cognitive operations. Traditionally, these include rehearsing the action, observing its consequences, rememering these and then altering...varying the parameters dictated by the memory ... or by an idealized image.
p. 217
we might call {this}... a "rehearsal loop."
Apes appear to be quite poor at rehearsal and meta-cognitive review.
They can engage in socially facilitated imitation, but they cannot independently initiate and rehearse actions ... for the sole purpose of refining their movement sequences.
... in contrast, even young children routinely engage in practicing and refining such skills
a cluster of more basic capacities, including gesture, imitation, and voluntary rehearsal itself, appears to have a common underlying neuro-cognitive architecrture... I have called these components "mimetic kills", or mimesis.
Mimesis involved a revolution in motor skill but also rested on ... Hominids had to gain access to the content of their kinematic memories. Apes appear quite poot at this.
p. 218
... mimesis resides in an imaginative capability unique to human beings.
Human mimetic skills cut across all major sensory and motor modalities.
... we cannot easily reduce mimetic action to discrete or digital algorithms combined according to rules. Instead, it appears fuzzy in its logic, more like the visual recognition of faces.
p. 219
Hominids could not have evolved a capability for language ... without meeting the cognitive preconditions for inventing a morpho-phonology.
On present evidence, this level of mimetic skill would have sufficed to explain the major cognitive achievements of archaic Homo from about two million years ago until about 60,000. ...for evolving a set of shared expressive customs and for triggering a legacy of nonverbal culture.
Language ... came much later.
The cognitive development of human beings depends upon their links with culture.
... an individual mind is a wormhole in a vast culturally defined space. :)
p. 220
All cultural networks, even those of oral cultures, harness the cognitive resources of many individuals and impose a larger organization ... on the mental functioning of individuals.
The most important network-level resources of culture are undoubtedly writing and literacy.
... Oral cultures are limited to the biological memories of their members.
... The earliest literate cultures, such as those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Chine, resembled one another in their style f cognitive governance, despite great differences in the substance of their traditions.
Institutions ... are not conscious entities ... but they are cognitive entities and they do perform cognitive work.
p. 221
{they{ rarely depend on single individuals over the long run. They dominate the minds of their members, and individuals assimilate institutional values to such an extent that they rarely violate them.
culture ... invisible knowledge-gathering apparatus that reaches over time and space into the minds of millions of people.
It is difficult for us to accept the degree of our dependency... we are its primary servants.
p. 215
Cultural networks are a vital link in the human cognitive process. They greatly affect the way we carry out our cognitive business.
p. 216
What type of cognitive change would have enabled a group of archaic hominides to start developing a communication system that led eventually to the invention of highly variable and arbitrary ... distinctive grammars, and symbolic cultures?
In most species the range of possible behaviors is largely fixed in the genes and closely attuned to its ecological niche. This results in what is sometimes called a "specialist survival strategy".
Human beings have broken out of this morphological straitjacket. ... Where would such flexibility have begun to evolve? This question leads us logically back to the fundamentals of human motor skills and procedural learning. To learn... and individual must carry out a sequence of basic cognitive operations. Traditionally, these include rehearsing the action, observing its consequences, rememering these and then altering...varying the parameters dictated by the memory ... or by an idealized image.
p. 217
we might call {this}... a "rehearsal loop."
Apes appear to be quite poor at rehearsal and meta-cognitive review.
They can engage in socially facilitated imitation, but they cannot independently initiate and rehearse actions ... for the sole purpose of refining their movement sequences.
... in contrast, even young children routinely engage in practicing and refining such skills
a cluster of more basic capacities, including gesture, imitation, and voluntary rehearsal itself, appears to have a common underlying neuro-cognitive architecrture... I have called these components "mimetic kills", or mimesis.
Mimesis involved a revolution in motor skill but also rested on ... Hominids had to gain access to the content of their kinematic memories. Apes appear quite poot at this.
p. 218
... mimesis resides in an imaginative capability unique to human beings.
Human mimetic skills cut across all major sensory and motor modalities.
... we cannot easily reduce mimetic action to discrete or digital algorithms combined according to rules. Instead, it appears fuzzy in its logic, more like the visual recognition of faces.
p. 219
Hominids could not have evolved a capability for language ... without meeting the cognitive preconditions for inventing a morpho-phonology.
On present evidence, this level of mimetic skill would have sufficed to explain the major cognitive achievements of archaic Homo from about two million years ago until about 60,000. ...for evolving a set of shared expressive customs and for triggering a legacy of nonverbal culture.
Language ... came much later.
The cognitive development of human beings depends upon their links with culture.
... an individual mind is a wormhole in a vast culturally defined space. :)
p. 220
All cultural networks, even those of oral cultures, harness the cognitive resources of many individuals and impose a larger organization ... on the mental functioning of individuals.
The most important network-level resources of culture are undoubtedly writing and literacy.
... Oral cultures are limited to the biological memories of their members.
... The earliest literate cultures, such as those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Chine, resembled one another in their style f cognitive governance, despite great differences in the substance of their traditions.
Institutions ... are not conscious entities ... but they are cognitive entities and they do perform cognitive work.
p. 221
{they{ rarely depend on single individuals over the long run. They dominate the minds of their members, and individuals assimilate institutional values to such an extent that they rarely violate them.
culture ... invisible knowledge-gathering apparatus that reaches over time and space into the minds of millions of people.
It is difficult for us to accept the degree of our dependency... we are its primary servants.
Articles on culture and cogntion: What belongs in a fictional world?
Weisberg, Deena Skolnick and Goodstein, Joshua, "what belongs in a fictional world?", Journal of COgnition and CUlture 9 (2009), 69-78
The authors set out to check which fact from the real world people assign as true also in a fictional world.
p. 70
Previous works which they rely upon:
Ward, 1994; Ward and Sifonis, 197; Bredart et al 1998, which show that real world tends to constrain creative imagination.
Careiras et al. 1996 - about gender prejudices.
Kelly and Keil (1985) people tend to assign naturalistic structure to mythological beings.
Principle of Minimal Departure (Ryan, 1980; Lewish 1978; Walton 1990).
p. 71
They are checking in this study Distance (from the real world) and Fact Type.
They presented people with various types of stories and asked them whether various types of fact are true or not in the world of the story.
p. 72
three stories with different similarity to reality.
facts of four categories: mathematical, scientific (people have hearts), conventional (it is rude to pick one's nose), and contingent (Washington DC is the capital of the US).
p. 73
If story worlds are based on reality, we would expect that the test facts, whch were never mentioned in any of the stories, would generally be judged as true. This hypohthesis was confirmed.
p. 74
subjects judged facts in the close story as significantly more likely to be true than facts in the middle story, which were significantly more likely to be true that facts in the far story.
the same stair step pattern about facts from contingent (the least) to mathematical (the most) true in the stories.
reality judgment: people believed the close story was more likely to be true than the middle, etc.
p. 75
"...An alternative hypothesis is that people ue a variety of rules to guide their judgments, inferring what is true in a given story based on more than just a checklist of explicitly violated facts." There was evidence for two rules:
first: people are attuned to the distance that atory world lies from reality. the closer the story, the more real world facts are attributed to it.
second, people make distinctions between types of facts.
they checked how the few fact present in a story would affect readers' representation of the rest of the story world.
p. 76
their study took place off line; subjects had time to reflect.
"online measure such as eye tracking ... could help to determine how much information is contained in a story world as it is actively being constructed from the text." at this period fact from outside the story could be irrelevant.
(perhaps) we may not have at our fingertips all the facts that are true of the fictional world at any given time, but we can supply them if asked explicitly..
the principle of PUZZLE OF IMAGINATIVE RESISTANCE (Gendler, 2000, 2006; Weinberg and eskin, 2006; Matravers, 2003, Stock, 2005): when an author tries to write a story that violates of these fact, usually those about laws of logic and moral behaviour, readers will refust to imagenitively engage with the story or to create an appropriate fictional world.
The authors set out to check which fact from the real world people assign as true also in a fictional world.
p. 70
Previous works which they rely upon:
Ward, 1994; Ward and Sifonis, 197; Bredart et al 1998, which show that real world tends to constrain creative imagination.
Careiras et al. 1996 - about gender prejudices.
Kelly and Keil (1985) people tend to assign naturalistic structure to mythological beings.
Principle of Minimal Departure (Ryan, 1980; Lewish 1978; Walton 1990).
p. 71
They are checking in this study Distance (from the real world) and Fact Type.
They presented people with various types of stories and asked them whether various types of fact are true or not in the world of the story.
p. 72
three stories with different similarity to reality.
facts of four categories: mathematical, scientific (people have hearts), conventional (it is rude to pick one's nose), and contingent (Washington DC is the capital of the US).
p. 73
If story worlds are based on reality, we would expect that the test facts, whch were never mentioned in any of the stories, would generally be judged as true. This hypohthesis was confirmed.
p. 74
subjects judged facts in the close story as significantly more likely to be true than facts in the middle story, which were significantly more likely to be true that facts in the far story.
the same stair step pattern about facts from contingent (the least) to mathematical (the most) true in the stories.
reality judgment: people believed the close story was more likely to be true than the middle, etc.
p. 75
"...An alternative hypothesis is that people ue a variety of rules to guide their judgments, inferring what is true in a given story based on more than just a checklist of explicitly violated facts." There was evidence for two rules:
first: people are attuned to the distance that atory world lies from reality. the closer the story, the more real world facts are attributed to it.
second, people make distinctions between types of facts.
they checked how the few fact present in a story would affect readers' representation of the rest of the story world.
p. 76
their study took place off line; subjects had time to reflect.
"online measure such as eye tracking ... could help to determine how much information is contained in a story world as it is actively being constructed from the text." at this period fact from outside the story could be irrelevant.
(perhaps) we may not have at our fingertips all the facts that are true of the fictional world at any given time, but we can supply them if asked explicitly..
the principle of PUZZLE OF IMAGINATIVE RESISTANCE (Gendler, 2000, 2006; Weinberg and eskin, 2006; Matravers, 2003, Stock, 2005): when an author tries to write a story that violates of these fact, usually those about laws of logic and moral behaviour, readers will refust to imagenitively engage with the story or to create an appropriate fictional world.
Donald, Merlin, "The Central Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution: A Reflection on the Myth of the 'Isolated Mind'", (chapter 2 in some book)
concept of brain-culture coevolution.
p. 20: But cognition science still proceeds as if culture did not matter. The only major exception to this is developmental psychology.
p. 21: two people who have influenced: Lev Vygotsky, first to recognize the symbiosis of developing mind wih culture, and Jerry Bruner, who carried this realization into the modern era.
p. 22: In most species, culture, insofar as it exists at all, does not factor into the evoluionary picture in this way.
p. 24: thus, by changing the kinds of cognitive environments to which infants are exposed, symbolic cultures can have a major epigenetic impact on the mind.
p. 25: conventional coevolutionary theories allow only for a tight, inflexible fit between brain and culture.
p. 25: There is an additional factor that affects brain-culture interactions, and it results from the juxtaposition of a super-plastic brain with our highly innovative symbolic cultures. Future generations can adjust to their drastically changed epigenetic environment without genetic change, through assive cultural intervention in their development.
P. 25: literacy developed in the New Stone Age, 5,000 years ago.
p. 28ff: about encultured apes
p. 29: human features: erect posture, changed vocal anatomy, increased brain volume.
p. 30: analysis of the apes' behaviour
p. 30: thus, just as Kanzi, we are also illusory creatures, products of an incessant process of cultural revolution that has kept raising the intellectual bar higher and higher.
p. 30: apes came close to human cognition as individuals, but they failed on the cultural side of the equation... apes continue to use symbols ony for a pragmatic personal agenda... collectively they have never been inclined to construct their own symbolic cultures... they never extended their use of symbols to hols anything resembling a conversation.
{my remark: perhaps the monkeys who were taught a language, but never learned to converse, prove that language in itself is not the issue; it is just a tool. the culture, its content, is the issue; but we still know nothing about how it came about. our facts are: brain is empty when born. it is filled by education and experience; this is done inter alia by language. the culture exists only in the brains of people}
p. 30-31: In their case, competence in the use of symbols was not sufficient to generate a cultural revolution, not even a very small one.
p. 31: In short, there seems to be more to generating culture than a sprinking of words and a smattering of grammar.
p. 31: Unthinkable as it may seem, we are not even certain that spoken language, as we know it, was part of our primordial profile as a species.
p. 31: our nervous systems are private entities, physically isolated from one another.
p. 32: We can escape from those little boxes and from our intellectual isolation in only one way - through action.
p. 32: The problem is that our brains can never produce truly symbolic acts unless they are imposed from the outside.
p. 32: people who grew up in isolation...never invented symbols.
p. 32: isolated brains ... never invent language, not even a "language of thought" ... we know from the post hoc testimony
p. 33: how culture (language) started is in his work of 1991.
p. 33: he develped the complex of "mimetic skill" (mapping elementary event perceptions, thus creating action metaphore, also: gesture, pantomime, re-enactive play, self reminding and more), thus creating "mimetic culture".
p. 33: Vygotsky's find: children imitate external language first, and do not have inital inner speech (1986). Language is first acted out, and only later internalized.
p. 33: the flow goes OUTSIDE ---> INSIDE
p. 33: this process began 2 million years ago.
p. 34: CONSCIOUSNESS and SELF-CONSTRUCTION. we have a hybrid consciousness, multilayered, complex. Consiousness is a product of our evolution.
p. 34: I had not yet realized that consciousness might be the engine of our cognitive evolution. But I am now convinced that it is.
p. 35: conscious capacity is essential to cultural survival because symbolic cultures hides their secrets from all but the most attentive mind. Their surface appearance is deceiving.
p. 35: CULTURE IS INVISIBLE, it is not immediately present in perception. It takes a long time to learn it.
p. 35: executive capacities were developed to cope with culture. it enables a human being to manage and supervise their own cognitive activities while analyzing the second and third ordr patterns of culture.
p. 36: a bad pun: executive suite.
p. 36: components of the executive suite are all associated with the conscious capacity: memory component (working memory), directional component (directing our attention cleverly), evaluative component (how things of now are connected to things of yesterday or tomorrow. nonhumans don't have it) and there are more.
p. 36: consciousness is essential for understanding culture because culture is un-predictable the needs maximal flexibility in order to generalize rapidly from concrete and from partial information.
p. 36: CONSCIOUS CAPACITY IS THE KEY EVOLUTIONARY FEATURE OF THE HUMAN MIND. IT PROVIDES OUR CONNECTION WITH CULTURE.
p. 37: we do have innately programmed skills, built into our brain at birth, but is pays a much smaller roe in the human case. We developed a symbiotic relationship with culture and a conscious capacity to self-assemble cognitive architerctures.
concept of brain-culture coevolution.
p. 20: But cognition science still proceeds as if culture did not matter. The only major exception to this is developmental psychology.
p. 21: two people who have influenced: Lev Vygotsky, first to recognize the symbiosis of developing mind wih culture, and Jerry Bruner, who carried this realization into the modern era.
p. 22: In most species, culture, insofar as it exists at all, does not factor into the evoluionary picture in this way.
p. 24: thus, by changing the kinds of cognitive environments to which infants are exposed, symbolic cultures can have a major epigenetic impact on the mind.
p. 25: conventional coevolutionary theories allow only for a tight, inflexible fit between brain and culture.
p. 25: There is an additional factor that affects brain-culture interactions, and it results from the juxtaposition of a super-plastic brain with our highly innovative symbolic cultures. Future generations can adjust to their drastically changed epigenetic environment without genetic change, through assive cultural intervention in their development.
P. 25: literacy developed in the New Stone Age, 5,000 years ago.
p. 28ff: about encultured apes
p. 29: human features: erect posture, changed vocal anatomy, increased brain volume.
p. 30: analysis of the apes' behaviour
p. 30: thus, just as Kanzi, we are also illusory creatures, products of an incessant process of cultural revolution that has kept raising the intellectual bar higher and higher.
p. 30: apes came close to human cognition as individuals, but they failed on the cultural side of the equation... apes continue to use symbols ony for a pragmatic personal agenda... collectively they have never been inclined to construct their own symbolic cultures... they never extended their use of symbols to hols anything resembling a conversation.
{my remark: perhaps the monkeys who were taught a language, but never learned to converse, prove that language in itself is not the issue; it is just a tool. the culture, its content, is the issue; but we still know nothing about how it came about. our facts are: brain is empty when born. it is filled by education and experience; this is done inter alia by language. the culture exists only in the brains of people}
p. 30-31: In their case, competence in the use of symbols was not sufficient to generate a cultural revolution, not even a very small one.
p. 31: In short, there seems to be more to generating culture than a sprinking of words and a smattering of grammar.
p. 31: Unthinkable as it may seem, we are not even certain that spoken language, as we know it, was part of our primordial profile as a species.
p. 31: our nervous systems are private entities, physically isolated from one another.
p. 32: We can escape from those little boxes and from our intellectual isolation in only one way - through action.
p. 32: The problem is that our brains can never produce truly symbolic acts unless they are imposed from the outside.
p. 32: people who grew up in isolation...never invented symbols.
p. 32: isolated brains ... never invent language, not even a "language of thought" ... we know from the post hoc testimony
p. 33: how culture (language) started is in his work of 1991.
p. 33: he develped the complex of "mimetic skill" (mapping elementary event perceptions, thus creating action metaphore, also: gesture, pantomime, re-enactive play, self reminding and more), thus creating "mimetic culture".
p. 33: Vygotsky's find: children imitate external language first, and do not have inital inner speech (1986). Language is first acted out, and only later internalized.
p. 33: the flow goes OUTSIDE ---> INSIDE
p. 33: this process began 2 million years ago.
p. 34: CONSCIOUSNESS and SELF-CONSTRUCTION. we have a hybrid consciousness, multilayered, complex. Consiousness is a product of our evolution.
p. 34: I had not yet realized that consciousness might be the engine of our cognitive evolution. But I am now convinced that it is.
p. 35: conscious capacity is essential to cultural survival because symbolic cultures hides their secrets from all but the most attentive mind. Their surface appearance is deceiving.
p. 35: CULTURE IS INVISIBLE, it is not immediately present in perception. It takes a long time to learn it.
p. 35: executive capacities were developed to cope with culture. it enables a human being to manage and supervise their own cognitive activities while analyzing the second and third ordr patterns of culture.
p. 36: a bad pun: executive suite.
p. 36: components of the executive suite are all associated with the conscious capacity: memory component (working memory), directional component (directing our attention cleverly), evaluative component (how things of now are connected to things of yesterday or tomorrow. nonhumans don't have it) and there are more.
p. 36: consciousness is essential for understanding culture because culture is un-predictable the needs maximal flexibility in order to generalize rapidly from concrete and from partial information.
p. 36: CONSCIOUS CAPACITY IS THE KEY EVOLUTIONARY FEATURE OF THE HUMAN MIND. IT PROVIDES OUR CONNECTION WITH CULTURE.
p. 37: we do have innately programmed skills, built into our brain at birth, but is pays a much smaller roe in the human case. We developed a symbiotic relationship with culture and a conscious capacity to self-assemble cognitive architerctures.
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