Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Idea Life

Children of the mind, ideas have a life of their own, just as flesh-children, grown up, pursue their own life. Like flesh-children, ideas come in an enormous variety of types of character and personality, the latter manifesting as rhetorical forms. Rhetorical in its most inclusive sense.

Ideas require resources to generate them, and resources to keep them alive and functioning. Ideas die when they can't function. They function imperatively to reproduce themselves, populating any hospitable environment, symbolically encoded. Just like cockroaches, humans, and other species of organisms, they function as living systems.

Living systems function as complex adaptive systems, hierarchically structured into levels, each encoded in a different symbol system. At the organism level, matter and energy manifest. At the idea level, energy but not matter manifests. Both levels process information. Organisms and ideas both function autonomously, as do the sublevels that generate them.

Ideas adapt to their environments. They sit silently enlettered in unopened books. In conversations they interpenetrate and morph...

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Thoughts about Paleofantasy-01

In Paleofantasy:  What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live, Marlene Zuk writes:

“Some of this nostalgia for a simpler past is just the same old amnesia that every generation has about the good old days actually being all that good.”

I have no nostalgia for living in pre-agricultural times. I would like to incorporate those aspects of our human ancestors' lifestyle that I remain adapted to, however, as fetus, infant, child, adolescent, and mature and elderly adult—and to avoid those I’m maladapted to.

I do not feel malevolent enough toward humanity to promote eating cereal grains so that natural selection and other evolutionary forces can perform the numerous subversive effects possibly required to re-engineer the human species into long-lived, healthy bread eaters.