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Learning a World
How is it that we come to be embedded in a world of meanings? If you can ask this question you have already acquired not only a lot of practical experiece with the world, but also acquired a mind that can interpret the meanings of that world and its dynamics. The process of learning a world directly from experience is so automatic and effective that we barely notice it most of the time.
Main idea is how an agent enters a world (throwness) and then gains knowledge of the world in experience. From cognitive sciences, we know that other animals come into the world with a lot more instnctual knowledge than human beings. We need many years to mature and be ready to take on the world as an adult within the social spheres available. Now we talk of disruptive change because the number and kinds of social spheres available to more and more communities on our planet is staggering. I don't like the language that describes our current moment as a singularity. In too many cases it is a reason to hype an idea and attract viewers or funding. If you take a longer view this apocolypse has been brewing for a long time. The lense of this book is focussed on the history and evolution of all of the ways that human beings have structured our world with symbolic languages.
A difficulty encountered immediately is just how much this world has evolved even in recent times when we have much better records. That's part of the long term trend, the further back you go, the less data is available. We only stated calling some kinds of historical records, data, very recently. The word relates to current methods and conventions in information systems. At the beginning, there was no symbolic language. Anthropologists study and search for artifacts of early human and use the term homonids for our species and the closely related species in the record.
Modern science is amazing in how they can use extremely subtle signs and find corelations to find meaning in even very limited examples. If you don't trust in their methods you would not believe them. Along the long path, our ancestors emerged as the only surviving species. We were not the first to make and use stone tools and the anatomical structures of speach also evolved early, long before the founders of the branch that became homo sapiens. Current work in data sciences working with large new data sets from a wide variety of DNA sources is being used to show how we still carry bits of the DNA of our Neandertal cousins.
The history of ideas starts with language and we have just shown how the origins of language are lost in a history that was not recorded. The historic period is defined by the start of a data source. It doesn't mean there were historians, that starts much more recently. If I was a historian and not a systems scientist, I would know the history of history going back to antiquity. I only know a little of this from what historians say and write. In the beginning there were no fields like history, it had not yet been invented. The point is to notice how disruptive change is a long term human phenomena, it has been growing an accellerating all along and what makes in so noticable is how much change happens in a given person's lifetime. My age cohort got calculators in middle school and later. A four function calculator was a hundred dollars. Fortran was taught in my high school using a slow speed modem that read the program from cards and sent it to a centralized system downtown that also did much of the data processing for the entire Chicago school system. I experienced the hobby and kit computer age which quickly transformed into the personal computer with the IBM PC. Now, some sociologists note the emergence of GenZ with the cohort who got smart phones in middle school.
Not only have our semantic systems, our systems of meaning in our biology and cultire, evolved ratically. Not just gradual change, but whole new kinds of systems emerging. Writing systems for both words and numbers are created in multiple places in different ways, and they are created in the context of other cultural shifts that were already underway. People were settling down and changing from being hunter gatherers to food producers. But hold on, let's slow down and look at the practical implications of this. Did the world change when we as a species developed new ways of knowing and learning things? How could it not? It may be that the current picture is wrong or incomplete. A lot of meaning is glossed over just in how we refer to the time when we settled down. Is the phrase, "hunter gatherer" even a good description of what the experience of human life was like. In some ways we can only guess, although we have strong evidence that there are no important genetic differences in the last fifty thousand years give or take a large error margin. What antrhopologists mark as the neolithic is distinctive in a large change in the number and kinds of tools humans were making and leaving behind, and we don't really know if that shift is exclusively in behavior and transmitted and evolved in culture.
Some tools ar tools for thought and it may be that once a threshold in language ability was passed, it included capacities to think and learn to modify the world to our needs. Doing is before thinking, first every human being is faced with the problems of living within the material culture available to them. We come in with certain abilities and capacities that we must learn to use through experiece. A calf of a heard species must stand in the first few hours of life to survive. Humans are nurtured for many years first within the arms of immediate family, mothers in constant attendance and siblings. Then emerging into a social world in the middle years. With the pace of change, each new generation is experiencing a very different material culture. Collectively we know more, but it is fragmented into narrow disciplines. It is said that we know more and more about less and less.
Until the shifts are experinced and integrated into each generation, a coherent response doesn't become fully established.
Radical Failure
Signs, Signals and Systems
How is it that we come to be embedded in a world of meanings? If you can ask this question you have already acquired not only a lot of practical experiece with the world, but also acquired a mind that can interpret the meanings of that world and its dynamics. The process of learning a world directly from experience is so automatic and effective that we barely notice it most of the time.
Main idea is how an agent enters a world (throwness) and then gains knowledge of the world in experience. From cognitive sciences, we know that other animals come into the world with a lot more instnctual knowledge than human beings. We need many years to mature and be ready to take on the world as an adult within the social spheres available. Now we talk of disruptive change because the number and kinds of social spheres available to more and more communities on our planet is staggering. I don't like the language that describes our current moment as a singularity. In too many cases it is a reason to hype an idea and attract viewers or funding. If you take a longer view this apocolypse has been brewing for a long time. The lense of this book is focussed on the history and evolution of all of the ways that human beings have structured our world with symbolic languages.
A difficulty encountered immediately is just how much this world has evolved even in recent times when we have much better records. That's part of the long term trend, the further back you go, the less data is available. We only stated calling some kinds of historical records, data, very recently. The word relates to current methods and conventions in information systems. At the beginning, there was no symbolic language. Anthropologists study and search for artifacts of early human and use the term homonids for our species and the closely related species in the record.
Modern science is amazing in how they can use extremely subtle signs and find corelations to find meaning in even very limited examples. If you don't trust in their methods you would not believe them. Along the long path, our ancestors emerged as the only surviving species. We were not the first to make and use stone tools and the anatomical structures of speach also evolved early, long before the founders of the branch that became homo sapiens. Current work in data sciences working with large new data sets from a wide variety of DNA sources is being used to show how we still carry bits of the DNA of our Neandertal cousins.
The history of ideas starts with language and we have just shown how the origins of language are lost in a history that was not recorded. The historic period is defined by the start of a data source. It doesn't mean there were historians, that starts much more recently. If I was a historian and not a systems scientist, I would know the history of history going back to antiquity. I only know a little of this from what historians say and write. In the beginning there were no fields like history, it had not yet been invented. The point is to notice how disruptive change is a long term human phenomena, it has been growing an accellerating all along and what makes in so noticable is how much change happens in a given person's lifetime. My age cohort got calculators in middle school and later. A four function calculator was a hundred dollars. Fortran was taught in my high school using a slow speed modem that read the program from cards and sent it to a centralized system downtown that also did much of the data processing for the entire Chicago school system. I experienced the hobby and kit computer age which quickly transformed into the personal computer with the IBM PC. Now, some sociologists note the emergence of GenZ with the cohort who got smart phones in middle school.
Not only have our semantic systems, our systems of meaning in our biology and cultire, evolved ratically. Not just gradual change, but whole new kinds of systems emerging. Writing systems for both words and numbers are created in multiple places in different ways, and they are created in the context of other cultural shifts that were already underway. People were settling down and changing from being hunter gatherers to food producers. But hold on, let's slow down and look at the practical implications of this. Did the world change when we as a species developed new ways of knowing and learning things? How could it not? It may be that the current picture is wrong or incomplete. A lot of meaning is glossed over just in how we refer to the time when we settled down. Is the phrase, "hunter gatherer" even a good description of what the experience of human life was like. In some ways we can only guess, although we have strong evidence that there are no important genetic differences in the last fifty thousand years give or take a large error margin. What antrhopologists mark as the neolithic is distinctive in a large change in the number and kinds of tools humans were making and leaving behind, and we don't really know if that shift is exclusively in behavior and transmitted and evolved in culture.
Some tools ar tools for thought and it may be that once a threshold in language ability was passed, it included capacities to think and learn to modify the world to our needs. Doing is before thinking, first every human being is faced with the problems of living within the material culture available to them. We come in with certain abilities and capacities that we must learn to use through experiece. A calf of a heard species must stand in the first few hours of life to survive. Humans are nurtured for many years first within the arms of immediate family, mothers in constant attendance and siblings. Then emerging into a social world in the middle years. With the pace of change, each new generation is experiencing a very different material culture. Collectively we know more, but it is fragmented into narrow disciplines. It is said that we know more and more about less and less.
Until the shifts are experinced and integrated into each generation, a coherent response doesn't become fully established.
Radical Failure
Signs, Signals and Systems