[Fis] Cultural Acceleration?
Pedro C. Marijuan
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
Thu Jun 11 13:40:51 CEST 2020
Thanks for the comment, Howard. What you say may relate to the further
points below.
/2. Inherent competitive nature of social communicative
interrelationships. /The clear constraints in the sociotype quantitative
distributions, to which the “econophysics” of the Planckian Distribution
Equation (PDE) may be applied, represent an extra argument for
considering our communicative interactions as immersed in an “attention
economy”. This seems to widely apply to the world of culture as well.
Current approaches to the decay of scientific and cultural items are
pointing in a similar direction, and this suggests that there might be a
universal law of decay presumably based on a generalized competition
stemming from the optimization of individual cognitive resources. The
limited sociotype, actually our most important cognitive reserve,
symbolizes the extent of such individual limitation.
/4. Emergence of differentiated generations/. The historical
differentiation of generations ultimately relates to the imprinting of
values, tastes, and styles of thinking taking place during youth and
early adulthood along the ontogenetic development of the individual.
Mostly produced out from two basic relational dimensions of the
sociotype – friends and colleagues – this imprinting introduces a strong
bias in the maintenance, decay, and replacement of cultural items. Each
cohort would be attracted towards the new vision, tastes, and fashions
upheld by the own generation.
/6. As the economy grows, the past recedes. /The decay of cultural
elements has been accelerated, and biased, with preference for much
faster discarding the items of the previous generations, the contents of
the received world. Factually, “doubling generations” become “halving
generations,” systematically pruning the previous cultural legacy which
already contains in itself the remains of previously decimated legacies.
Like competing for writing on a vanishing palimpsest: each ascending
generation brings its own new contents and relegates more and more of
the distant past to oblivion, to increasingly outdated text books,
archives, museums, etc. “As the economy grows, the past recedes”.
And finally, along the Fourth Industrial Revolution – the so called
Information Age – the GDP has been doubling on a global word scale, and
far more than tripling in some countries. And this is compounded with
dramatic changes in new communication media and new interconnected
systems of worldwide extension. What are the consequences? Let us leave
this as an open question—only stating the formidable ignorance of the
own cultural past in the ascending generations.
Best wishes--Pedro
*
*
El 09/06/2020 a las 4:09, Howard Bloom escribió:
> culture provides an extension to individual memory.
>
> cullture and the technologies that carl sagan calls extracranial
> storage, from writing and paintings to computer files.
>
> which means that we have added tens of zettabytes of data to human
> memory in just the last few years.
>
> with warmth and oomph--howard
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
> To: Krassimir Markov <markov at foibg.com>; 'fis' <fis at listas.unizar.es>
> Sent: Mon, Jun 8, 2020 8:09 am
> Subject: Re: [Fis] Cultural Acceleration?
>
> Thanks Krassimir for your interest. This other link should work (free
> access for 50 days):
>
> https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1bBBC14z5HxIgJ
>
> Below I have included two of the paper's Concluding Comments.
> Seemingly, very few authors have explored the limits of cognition.
> According to Booker (2004) and Yates (1988) it is one of the weakest
> points of our whole scientific system. Factically, how do we transcend
> the limits of our individual capabilities? What collective tricks --or
> surrogates-- have we developed?
>
> /3. Cognitive limitation and forgetfulness underlie cultural
> dynamics./Maintenance, decay, and replacement of cultural items are
> necessarily linked to forgetfulness and to the limited cognitive
> capability of individuals. As intuited by J.L. Borges (1944), there
> cannot be an unlimited capability for individual memory. The term
> /cognit/, crafted by J. Fuster (2003), is proposed in order to
> visualize an order of magnitude for such individual capability. What
> could be the average global cognits maintained by an educated
> individual? What kinds of cognits are needed to navigate in a cultural
> niche, or to follow a particular way of life? How could this cognitive
> limitation relate to the evolution and renewal of cultures?
> /5. A new, astonishing fact in the succession of generations. /With
> the industrial revolution, a threshold was crossed regarding the
> “adjacent possible” and an exponential course was ignited for the
> economy, creating a higher number of new material and mental
> structures that have continued multiplying on an exponential basis.
> Each passing generation has been able to substantially and
> systematically increase the whole contents of its material world,
> adding up an entire new world to the received one. But the sheer
> amount of new habits necessary for social life in industrial and
> postindustrial societies has forced individuals to generationally
> absorb an almost duplicate amount of cultural presences, of cognits,
> in their inner mental spaces.
> Best wishes
> --Pedro
>
> El 04/06/2020 a las 23:55, Krassimir Markov escribió:
> Dear Pedro and Jaime,
> Thank you for the interesting links.
> Unfortunately, the paper "SOCIOTYPE AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION ...” is not
> in open access and I could not read it.
> If it is possible to send me a copy I shall be very grateful.
> Friendly greetings
> Krassimir
> *From:* Pedro C. Marijuan <mailto:pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 04, 2020 12:33 PM
> *To:* 'fis' <mailto:fis at listas.unizar.es>
> *Subject:* [Fis] Cultural Acceleration?
> Dear FIS Friends,
> Jorge Navarro and me have just published a paper entitled "SOCIOTYPE
> AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION : The acceleration of cultural change alongside
> industrial revolutions"
> The link is this: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2020.104170
> And the Abstract is below.
> It contains a series of hypothesis that can be useful for our
> discussions. I will post some of them in next days. Also Howard Bloom
> has published in the same Special Issue of BioSystems (Evolutionary
> Dynamics of Social Systems) a very intriguing essay on "biopolitics",
> about the bacterial roots of the new autocracies. More will follow...
> /*Abstract: *The present work explores, from the vantage point of the
> sociotype, the dramatic acceleration of cultural change alongside the
> successive industrial revolutions, particularly in the ongoing
> information//era. //Developed within the
> //genotype-phenotype-sociotype////conceptual triad, the
> sociotype//means the average social environment that is adaptively
> demanded by the “social brain” of each individual.//For there is a
> regularity of social interaction, centered on social bonding and
> talking time, which has been developed as an adaptive trait,
> evolutionarily rooted, related to the substantial size increase of
> human groups. A quantitative approach to the sociotype basic traits
> shows fundamental competitive interrelationships taking place within
> an overall “attention economy.” Approaching these figures via the
> Planckian Distribution Equation, they can be connected with many other
> competitive processes taking place in the biological, economic, and
> cultural realms. Concerning culture, the cognitive limits of the
> individual, which we consider commensurate with the sociotype general
> limitations, impose by themselves a strict boundary on the cultural
> items effectively handled by each individual, fostering the overall
> competition and decay. Further, the emergence of differentiated
> generations with ample discrepancy in styles of life, social
> aspirations, and dominant technologies would represent a systematic
> bias in the competition and replacement of cultural items.
> Intriguingly, the cultural acceleration detected in modern societies
> alongside the successive industrial revolutions, with an ostensible
> climax in the ongoing fourth industrial revolution –the information
> era– might be itself a paradoxical consequence of the sociotype’s
> dynamic constancy./
> Best regards--Pedro
> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
>
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es <mailto:pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
> http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
>
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es <mailto:pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
> http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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--
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------
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