[Fis] Answers to Pedro and Jerry

[Fernando Flores]

The list allows two contributions and this is my second, therefore I will answer to both Pedro and Jerry:

Dear Pedro:
Thanks for your commentaries. The relationship between negentropy and culture is central for our approach. Our system is built on the idea of the irreversibility of experience. That is the natural "motor" of modernization. Further, we classify family of acts as destructive, mechanical, ludic and vital. The most of everyday acts are vital acts and almost impossible to reduce in complexity. However, the tendency of modernization allows us to affirm that culture will always try to do it. I understand that your trip to Vienna is a good example of easily reduction. Your first experience was vital. Your second was ludic. And if you insist some time, you will develop a computer program that will help you. Our theory works perfectly with learning because it is done with this goal in mind. "Modernization" for us is learning. As you say, the scale: fingers, hands, limps, body, etc. is arbitrary but not irrelevant. We observed that the control of an act (moving from the vital to the mechanic) implies changing in scale from the larger to the smaller having the human body as natural reference.


Dear Jerry
Thank you for your encouraging words. We are very interested in your point of view and we will read your unpublished paper about "economy of relations". Will you send it to us? You ask if we can enumerate a number of examples of agnumetry from various cultures and time periods. We have been working with paradigmatic cases that could falsify our theory. For instance, incorporating a machine to a simple labor process cannot be seen as "simplification". So modernization not only "simplifies" but also "amplifies". Dress fashion in the XVIII century was rather more complex than in our time, but also more complex than in Antiquity. In which sense can be said that dressing in the XVIII century was "more modern" than in Antiquity? Of course the increment of the complexity of fashion has to do with global aspects of culture. In which sense "experience" favored the development of a more complex dress fashion? In any case, we believe that the key concept is that of the conservation of the global informational value and the re-distribution of this informational value in ludic and mechanical acts.
/F


Fernando Flores PhD
Associate Professor
History of Ideas and Sciences
Lund University

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