Greetings Economists, On Dec 29, 2006, at 12:19 AM, Rui Correia wrote:
the San people (often referred to as 'Bushmen', as depicted in the film "The Gods Must be Crazy") to track the movement of enemy. The San can 'read' impressions on the ground and with accuracy tell you the weight of the person (or animal) the speed of the movement, how long ago the print was made (even accounting for wind) etc. Also, once shown how to operate a mortar launcher and getting used to the hyperbolic curve of its trajectory, they were able to fire these into the enemy with a precision greater than veteran special forces aided by calculating devices.
Doyle; One way to characterize this in terms of neuroscience is the so-called binding problem. When we look at contemporary media the information it generates is missing massive elements of which the San are mentally trained in. They are immersed in the 'whole' of the landscape or world surface. This wholeness of experience is then looked for in cognitive theory as what binds mental processes into a single entity. There are of course illusions that indicate where the boundaries of consciousness is. The wholeness is only approximate for mental life, but that approximation is a condition of human cognition before we had a culture of information to supplant the direct apprehension of the world. The San is familiar with throwing to hunt, and therefore judging a throw in the world as it is experienced. One can mathematically simulate the concept, but the sheer computing power of human brain in real time can judge by experience as well as or better in a local place the act of throwing as does our best computing techniques. The binding problem is related to key questions that Socialist have struggled with, the totality, the whole of society. No media, no text, is able to bind information like cognition. We can apprehend the problem, do advances, and understand the need. In these times, mobile computing stands in for the binding problem. Some video games Wii hand controllers begin to encroach on motion judgment as a part of the media game, but as is obvious the game is detached from the world landscape, and is not bound to that sort of knowledge. So the San apprehends the world in a whole, directly. This comes back to the question I raised earlier, we make language the central feature of cognition (a human chauvinism about cognition), but cognition consists of different types of intellectual work. Motion work as done in the parietal lobe, assisted by the cerebellum is central to all physical labor. Nor is that mental work something to articulate via words to the degree of that we actually know (cognate) how our bodies do the work. To repeat, language as constituted has definite limits in how much information it can carry, but the mental apparatus functions at a scale vastly superior to what words can do. It is the connection process of language that holds culture together, but the application of human cognition to 'work' is not tapped out by reproduction of words via text. thanks, Doyle
