It is indeed a reference to "human universals". These are traits and "drives" found in every culture, and originally were identified in the 3000 or so traditional cultures studied by Anthropologists.
For example, every culture examined has a language, stories, kinship, status and power, a "culture" (a tradition for living and survival), religion, magic, revenge, fantasizing, games and sports, music and dance, etc., about 300 identified so far, many of the most important ones are genetic. In computer terms these can be thought of as "spreadsheet cells actively looking to the environment for concrete things to fulfill the traits and drives. This gives rise to a fundamental idea in Anthropology: a child at birth can be taken anywhere in the world and they will grow up as a member of the receiving culture, not the one they were born into. These drives operate to some extent even after most of them have been filled. Live in another culture for more than a few weeks and quite a bit of deep normalization starts to happen. So these are deeper than "motivations" but form some of the context for them. One branch of the science of traits and drives is Neuroethology. And there are several others. Once this idea is taken up, it is interesting to make a list of "non-universals" -- for example: reading & writing, empirical model based science, deductive abstract mathematics, equal rights, etc. And to realize that these were inventions -- and not easy to come by, and quite recent given that female mitochondrial DNA suggests that we've been on the planet for about 200,000 years. Then we can note that a lot of money can be made by making amplifiers and environments for the built-in traits, and we can also reflect that the reason these sell so well is that we are essentially "automating the Pleistocene". It is a much harder sell to both the funders and the public to make amplifiers and enviornments that embody the non-universals, even though much of what we thing of as "civilization" comes from our inventions not our genes. Cheers, Alan ________________________________ From: Thiago Silva <[email protected]> To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> Sent: Sat, February 19, 2011 8:36:40 AM Subject: Re: [fonc] Software and Motivation On Friday 18 February 2011 20:30:56 Casey Ransberger wrote: > It got me thinking about an interview I saw on the tubes that Alan did on > collective cognition, where he mentioned a list of human motivators that > anthropologists had identified. Does anyone know where a list like that > might be found? Maybe in a book or a research paper with a title like > _________? > It seems a reference to "human universals". There is a book with this title by anthropologist Donald Brown. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
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