How important are systems of naming and classifying things to creating our sense of what is real?

[Advertising my academic blog again.]

Last week I wrapped up a section on the mind for my blog about human nature and its connection to evolutionary and social narratives. The new section is going to tie that together with what I wrote about culture. Here is a summary about what's been covered so far, in case you might be interested:

A quick review: We've looked at how how evolution reveals patterns of organization leading to the replication of information in organisms and how these same patterns reveal the capacity for creativity at different levels of organic complexity. In other words, two essential elements for narratives that exist from single celled organisms to sophisticated multicellular forms. We've looked how perception has a sensory input from the biochemical and anatomical side as well as cultural input from the mental and social side, and how the patterns for replicating information and a capacity for creativity at the social level gives rise to narratives about the path and purpose to life. We were most recently looking at some of the building blocks of the mental and social aspects of perception and cognition.

To see where things go from there or how it began, you can start with the latest entry:

 Weaving the World Through Names and Stories

That's it for now.

Be well.

Affective states, adaptive scenarios, and how biology and culture are framed in anthropological debate

[Intellectual type stuff ahead.]

Facebook surprises me sometimes when halfway (or more) intelligent or respectful threads emerge on complex or contentious topics. But it does happen! So I got involved just a bit. The issue was whether a particular affective state (in this case a particular emotional response) was adaptive and whether one could test a hypothesis for its evolutionary origins. Part of it was also whether every aspect of human life should have some kind specific evolutionary explanation.

My comments are stitched together here:

Speculative philosophy informed by science is useful and inevitable, as are generalized summaries of experimental results integrated into a broadly accepted metaphysics. But they can be misrepresented and over-used. The grey area between these things and the actual scientific processes of observation, correlation, and explanation, and experimentation seems inevitable as well. And on a related note, the price you pay for trying to have a theory that consumes everything is the risk of intellectual indigestion.

As to the specific type of study that might test the idea of loneliness as adaptation, I am sure one could extrapolate out from a proxy representing key variables or processes, but it would need to be really clever. If you could assign a marker for loneliness to non-human primate behavior in an appropriate taxon, you might have the start of something. But that is one really huge "if". Does anyone know if this adaptive loneliness idea has literature attached to it beyond "it appears it may be beneficial so it is probably an adaptation"? How do the authors frame their argument?

Brief notes about ideas I am going to forget

[I get ideas from time to time. Some are even good ones.]

Here are some thoughts related to my current writing project about human nature that I will want to think more about later. I'm saving them here for now and inviting people to think about them and share their thoughts if they wish.

1. Many emotions measure the distance between preference/expectation and perception.

Regret is how things were versus how they could have been. Disappointment is how things were/are versus how they should have been. Satisfaction is how things were matching how things should have been. Anticipation is how things might be matching how thing should be. Dread is how things should be versus how they could be. And so on.

2. Human sociality is largely based upon our own perception of our social image in our subjective sense of reality.

In other words, people construct a sense of reality based on their experiences and choices and assume that it is reality itself. There may be an acknowledgement of subjectivity on ones own part as well as that of others, and certainly because we share experiences through direct exposure and through language we have something of an inter-subjective sense of how things are. Yet our own inner sense of how things are is still unique and what we rely upon most, sometimes accepting and sometimes rejecting new perspectives offered by others.

When it comes to the essential need to be a social being, we may have different preferences that are culturally and individually informed about certain details of our social image, but core needs remain in terms of being acknowledged and accepted as part of a larger sense of social validation. Yet, since we see the world at larger, including its social dimension, from a personally subjective point of view, we still see ourselves, including how we think others see us, based on our own sense of things.

This is similar to Charles Horton Cooley's conception of a looking glass self, wherein we shape our sense of who we are as well as how we act based upon how we think others will see us. But I'm saying that as we do this our idea of how we think others will perceive and judge us is to a significant degree our own projection. Surely informed by social interaction, but nonetheless strongly personal.

I was thinking of this in terms of social media like Facebook and Twitter. On one level, we post things for others to see and react to and are mindful of what people may think. Thus we shape and craft an image we think sends the right message about who we are to our audience. A good example of the looking glass self idea. Yet we also seem to want or need to validate and approve of our own sense of self even if we aren't sure if anyone is actually paying attention.

3.  ...