Ancient writers used the analogy of the beehive or the anthill to tie the city to the natural world. The action of man in civilization was like the action of bees to make their hive survive. Until very recently, most men lived outside civilization and outside the walls of the city. The principles that organize the city are alien to earth.
Formal languages, like mathematics or computer languages, or music, are also alien to earth and are possibly only a few thousand years old. Perhaps they come from concepts that are embedded in natural language, or from relationships that are embedded in the body, or in the physical world.
Animals, plants, microbes in a given area all evolved together over thousands of years. Man, too, evolved within the constraints of given environments. Where animals, plants, and man violate the constraints of those systems, they die off.
Human civilization (the Orc version) tries to remake the world into an artificial one--one that's motivated by the whims and convenience of citified man. A tremendous expenditure of energy is required for that. (See: Recreating the Steppe, and Technology Doesn't Make the US more Energy Efficient)
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Coevolution and Simultinaeity
In a few recent posts, I touched on the concept of all animals in a given area evolving together. This concept seems straightforward, but in fact our language using brain has a great deal of difficulty grasping systems of things that happen simultaneously. Language and a concept like cause and effect are knitted together neatly. The concept of cause and effect fits the serial methods of transmitting information that we use all the time: the spoken and written word. "John tripped because the book was on the floor."
Our bodies and minds actually work as parallel systems all the time--we really can't even think about those functions verbally. The ostensibly simple act of walking involves the coordination of many muscles and sensory input from our eyes, ears, and inner ear orientation detection. Learning new physical skills--like rollerblading, ice skating, or riding a unicycle--"happens". Any instruction on those subjects is usually about how to structure the learning process. A verbal explanation is actually only valuable to an intermediate practitioner of those activities, because they can associate the language with the action their bodies perform, and the sensations they feel.
Similarly the written word flops when trying to describe simultaneous interactions of animals, plants, microbes, fungi in some environment. A mathematical model can be constructed with systems of equations, or algorithmically, but the model itself is created through language--formal language--and is computed serially.
Our bodies and minds actually work as parallel systems all the time--we really can't even think about those functions verbally. The ostensibly simple act of walking involves the coordination of many muscles and sensory input from our eyes, ears, and inner ear orientation detection. Learning new physical skills--like rollerblading, ice skating, or riding a unicycle--"happens". Any instruction on those subjects is usually about how to structure the learning process. A verbal explanation is actually only valuable to an intermediate practitioner of those activities, because they can associate the language with the action their bodies perform, and the sensations they feel.
Similarly the written word flops when trying to describe simultaneous interactions of animals, plants, microbes, fungi in some environment. A mathematical model can be constructed with systems of equations, or algorithmically, but the model itself is created through language--formal language--and is computed serially.
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