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
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .