List, here's an interesting article that resonates with ideas that I've
touched on in this forum (culture, neural plasticity, scaffolding,
bucket-of-bugs... no such thing as instinct, no such thing as a "blueprint"
that wires the brain). I'm not sure whether the author would take it as far
as I do, but definitely of direct semiotic/biosemiotic relevance:
https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/08/06/what-if-people-from-different-cultu
res-and-economic-backgrounds-have-different-brain-wiring/
Barrett's paper also got me thinking about a point that I've been mulling
over recently... the importance of initial conditions (scaffolding in the
context of chaos theory)... the idea that experiences can never occur in
isolation (objectivity), but must build on prior experiences (subjectivity):
"This leads to another significant implication-that childrearing and
early childhood experiences are more important than we thought. Not only do
early experiences shape our personality and values, they also create the
wiring that will govern our perception of the world far into adulthood."
Initial conditions are particularly important in the cultural relativism
debate, for example, where the Left entertains nonsense about more than two
genders. Initial conditions based on childhood AND the body that you inhabit
lock you into a fairly narrow trajectory, with the implication that you
cannot just wake up one morning to decide that you're a special snowflake in
the wrong body, and that you need to change genders.
sj
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