Hello Arlo, I have a difficult time imagining a time when any life form did not have shared expereinces, everywhere one looks individuals exist via the society of beings they spring forth from schools of fish to cells in the body to coral reefs. In my own opinion, biology and society are correlative, it's the complexity which defines recognizable social norms. -Ron
________________________________ From: ARLO J BENSINGER JR <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2009 10:07:17 AM Subject: Re: [MD] Arlo's Rant and 3rd levels [John] My question revolves around what happens when a culture's values lose their grounding in the "biological patterns of value". My kneejerk analysis is that they then become, by definition, unnatural, warped and doomed. [Arlo] First, I got to say... "rant"? Man, you guys are a brutal crowd. You'll have to be more specific here, as I am not entirely sure I understand what you mean. We may be talking about two different things. What I was talking about with WillBlake is the anthropological and developmental point in evolution where the infant social level first appeared out of the biological level, and how prior to this "thinking" (as it refers to the manipulation of symboliocally encoded experience) was non-existent and impossible. The single best "description" or "hypothesis" about that exact point deep in our pre-history I have found to date is Tomasello's ideas in The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. I won't do it justice with a sentence or two, but the basic idea is this. At some point in our pre-social, biological evolution (when "man" was nothing more than a biological being), the complexity of the human brain, which had been evolving every generation, had hit a point where "shared attention" was possible. This was an unintended consequence of the brain's natural evolution to provide response to the immediate environment. At that point, probably after the complexity was in place for a bit, two biological humans, both focusing their attention on some object, simultaneously recognized that the other's actions were also deliberate towards that object. When one grunted a sound, for example, and the other returned the same sound, and both realized that the "sound" was the "object" (symbolically encoded), in that moment of mutuality "thinking" was born. Of course, we've come a long way since then, we are no so accustomed to language and semiosis of some sort we don't even notice it, it is an ubiquitous sea in which we swim. Thus the "grounding", as I am was referring to, of the social in the biological points to the specific neural biological developments that underscore our evolutionary ability to collectively construct a symbolic representation of experience. I think, if I am reading you correct, you are looking at the effects of a society that denies or ignores biological quality in experience. Before I answer further, I want to see if this is right, or if I've misunderstood you. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
