A very interesting article that delves into some incredibly complex and tangled issues.  For those interested, I'd like to suggest picking up copies of two books by David Abram:  The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal: An Earthy Cosmology.  There is an excellent interview of David Abram on the Children of the Code website that I'd suggest reading before making the leap to his books.  I noted that Havelock is referenced in the article, but it is his 1982 book, not his 1986 work, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present.  And then, Walter J. Ong's book, Orality and Literacy, a classic if ever there was one, is not referenced at all.  It is somewhat dated, but by using the bibliography to bring one's self up to date on current thought, it is an excellent introduction to the subject.  Michel is discomfited by "evolutionary schemes" and rightfully so; positivist science is the culprit there, along with cultural boundedness which assign schemes such as Rank 1 through Rank 4 thought.  Anna brings up the issue of control (hierarchy), which I think is vastly underrated by Western thought as a part of human behavior that has led to our current predicament.  We look for external causes when the cause that we really need to look at is inside ourselves.  I am, of course, not positing that hierarchy is solely a Western issue - it is a human issue.

What I'd like to close with is this:  all of the theorizing in the world is useless if the very biological foundations of the world we depend on for survival are crumbling.  It may well be that Rank 1 societies, those that are disparaged for their "primitiveness", will be the survivors, if there are any.

On Jan 6, 2013, at 12:53 AM, Michel Bauwens <michel@p2pfoundation.net> wrote:

Dear friends,

after a year's absense, I 'm rejoining, and I'm sure traffic will go up <g>

it would be great to have a briefing on how the list evolved while I was not participating?

Michel

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 4:55 PM
Subject: evolution of cognition : metaphor, metalingual definition, algorithm, and control
To: econowmix@googlegroups.com, global-survival@googlegroups.com


http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/CogEvol.shtml  ( found via metacogs on fb )

The Evolution of Cognition



William L. Benzon and David G. Hays



Abstract: With cultural evolution new processes of thought appear. Abstraction is universal, but rationalization first appeared in ancient Greece, theorization in Renaissance Italy, and model building in twentieth-century Europe. These processes employ the methods of metaphor, metalingual definition, algorithm, and control, respectively. The intellectual and practical achievements of populations guided by the several processes and exploiting the different mechanisms differ so greatly as to warrant separation into cultural ranks. The fourth rank is not completely formed, while regions of the world and parts of every population continue to operate by the processes of earlier ranks.




  • 1 Evolution in Biology and Culture
  • 2 Ontology, Abstraction, and Behavioral Mode
  • 2.1 Ontology
  • 2.2 Abstraction and Metaphor
  • 2.3 Abstraction and Rationalization
  • 2.4 Neural Implementation
  • 3 Cognitive Rank
  • 3.1 Rank 1: What's In a Name?
  • 3.2 Rank 2: The Letter of the Law
  • 3.3 Rank 3: Subject and Object
  • 3.4 Rank 4: Modern, Post-Modern, and All that Jazz
  • 3.5 Cognitive Rank and Cultural Diversity
  • 4 In Medias Res : The Current Flux
  • 4.1 The Thinking Machine or Electronic Brain
  • 4.2 The Software Problem
  • 4.3 The child is father to the man
  • References





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