[Fis] Cultural Acceleration?

Fri Jun 12 00:44:55 CEST 2020

good points, pedro.  for those who want more, these points are elaborated in your new paper in the journal biosystems.
one note on memory decay.  new generations can see and hear what previous generations bequeathed in ways that were impossible 150 years ago.  before recordings of music, one generation could not hear the musicians of previous generations.  now new generations of kids can hear frank sinatra, fats waller, louis armstrong, elvis presley, and the beatles.  and thanks to video recording and youtube, they can see deceased icons like walter cronkite and edward r. murrow.
new generations can even imprint on the figures of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s in ways no previous generation could.  several friends in their 20s have introduced me to films from my youth--the 1950s and 1960s--films i never saw but that have become formative influences in their lives. 
so the persistence of cultural memory has increased since the days when oral history, sculptures, and books were the only technologies for keeping long gone elders alive.
with warmth and oomph--howard

-----Original Message-----
From: Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
To: fis at listas.unizar.es <fis at listas.unizar.es>
Cc: farah at howardbloom.net <farah at howardbloom.net>; Howard Bloom <howlbloom at aol.com>
Sent: Thu, Jun 11, 2020 7:40 am
Subject: Re: [Fis] Cultural Acceleration?

  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  Sent: Thursday, June 04, 2020 12:33 PM To: 'fis'  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
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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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group

pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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