Good story Mike. There is a lot of neurological work being done on song and language evolving at the same time and song being the emotional motivation for the symbolic representation in words. Pre-story.
-The Singing Neanderthals, The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Steven Mithen, Harvard -Sweet Anticipation, music and the Psychology of expectation. David Huron Bradford MIT -The Origins of Music, ed. Wallin, Merker and Brown, Bradford MIT And then there are the Lavitin and Sachs books as well. The others have to do with Musicological Archeology. All new stuff since I was last on the list. If you want to know the ultimate story that includes the entire sensorium or most of it then you are speaking of the Operatic form. Observing an old opera is experiencing the same sensory stimuli as was done at the time. That truth is the reason that the early music movement is so important. It's a kind of dancing with your ancestors. REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Monday, July 12, 2010 3:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Keynes the convert REH wrote: > Stories are powerful.... > .... > Is it any accident that the market is called "Sociopathic" and the > perpetrators seem even "Psychopathic?" And then there are the group > pathologies that excuse all of this crap. [snipping from a much longer post] At the risk of being a tendentious bore, I'm reposting somthing I sent back in November, (before you rejoined the list, Ray), that I think might be relevant. - Mike -------- Date: 27 Nov 2009 03:54:51 -0400 From: [email protected] (Mike Spencer) To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Is Belief in God Hurting America? Steve Kurtz <[email protected]> wrote: > http://www.alternet.org/story/144174/is_belief_in_god_hurting_america?page=e ntire >From the article: "Popular religion," Paul proposes, "is a coping mechanism for the anxieties of a dysfunctional social and economic environment." Paul, who was criticized, mostly on statistical grounds, for a similar study published in 2005, says his new findings lend support to the belief that mass acceptance of popular religion is determined more by environmental influences and less by selective, evolutionary forces, as scholars and philosophers have long debated. In other words, we're not hardwired for religion. Steve again: > I disagree with the statement that this might mean we're not 'wired' > for religion. The expression of that wiring can vary with cultural > and environmental circumstances. The notion of being "hard-wired for X" is pretty ambiguous. To say that we're hard-wired for vision is, roughly, tautological. To say it of religion is way off at the other end of the ambiguity scale. Ambiguity notwithstanding, I think it must be reasonable to say that we're hard-wired for language. Julian Jaynes' concept detailed in his "bicameral mind" book is controversial but it does make sense that there was a point -- well, an epoch -- in the evolution of human language capacity in which a constellation of features appeared. A canonical list of such features is beyond my wit. Say, very loosely, ability to articulate self-awareness, ability to abstract, to hypothesize and (to make a subtle distinction) the ability both to lie and to utter counterfactuals. I think it was Gregory Bateson who said that he would believe that an AI -- an artificial intelligence -- was really conscious in the human sense when its reply to something said to it was, "That reminds me of a story." What we became hard-wired for -- the innate capacity, the emergence of which Jaynes was trying to get a handle on -- is stories. Yarns. What the story teller does is create a coherent stream of language that, from his point of view, maps his internal experience of the world. The same cognitive apparatus allows (or causes) the listener to construct his own fictitious -- today we'd say "virtual" -- experience. And stories don't have to be "true" in any objective or even logical sense. Look at how the "stories" on TV absorb our attention so easily and so totally, exploiting the intrinsic ("hard-wired" if you will) response to stories. I think religion and ideology, patriotism and valor, literature and filial piety, bar fights and family loyalty -- well, here's another list that is beyond me -- all these emerge from stories. I think that telling stories and listening to stories is the cognitive mechanism at the core of practically every socially complex behavior. To get back, very slightly, on topic.... The dogmata of market capitalism and Soviet communism, of Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism, Chicago School economics and American exceptionalism all have gaping lacunae, counterfactuals and contradictions but dammit, they all have *great* stories. Of course, stories aren't the whole of psychology any more than libido or language are. But if you're looking for an underlying mechanism that explains why the Chicago School or the Bush(43) administration or the present teabagger opponents of the present US administration have covens of leaders and flocks of followers, I suggest it's because they have and propagate good stories. One might even look to the lack of good stories to explain the present weakness of the Canadian Liberals. Fundamentalist Christians take biblical accounts to be literally true and lament that "liberal" Christians believe that the stories of the Bible are metaphors and fictional yarns that are somehow edifying. At the other end of the spectrum, Unitarian Universalists believe just that. (Correct me if I'm wrong: I know about fundamentalists but not much about UUism.) I surmise that in economics and politics, we are asked to be fundamentalists, to believe that the stories are literally true. That may have been okay when the stories accumulated on their own and were about King Arthur or Robin Hood or George Washington or Louis Brandeis. But it's no longer okay when our stories are crafted by highly trained career manipulators of money, power and public opinion. If we allow our collective, shared library of stories to be overwhelmed by ones constructed, explicitly and with enormous expertise, in the interest of the corporatist agenda, we submit to the management of a major aspect of being human to that agenda. It doesn't matter whether the story tellers are ad agencies, economists, political idealogues or the chairman of the Fed. If we imbibe their carefully fabricated stories without looking critically at what's on the ends of our forks, we'll end up drinking their Kool-Aid. We're hard-wired that way. FWIW, - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
