Saturday, July 12, 2014

What Shapes a Culture's Cognitive Capabilities?

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson.)



Contrary to what naive economists believe, existing systems are NOT collections of fully independent, calculating agents. Rather, each is an incomprehensibly tuned syncytium, with incredibly densely engineered and deeply tuned, seemingly endless lists of interdependencies. Everything depends upon everything else. The insanely great return on coordination is the logic that drives all social species, including humans - and ESPECIALLY humans.

Therefore, the following is the type of question we should be asking about our culture, and it's political economy policies.
What Shapes a Child’s Sense of Humor?
[Hat tip to Sanjeev Kulkarni.]

This is a useful question to pose. At this stage of inquiry, the particular cognitive capability being examined almost doesn't matter. All examples are instructive when it comes to considering what aspects of context, Desired Outcomes and practice is shaping a given system's cognitive capabilities.

Next, consider the following, and keep asking the same type of questions.

A human brain is just a network of neurons.

A human culture is just a network of humans.

Does a culture have a sense of humor? How does it develop? How about all the other cognitive capabilities that both physiologies and cultures develop?

After all, a group intelligence is a terrible thing to waste. So why not examine our own, and consider how to keep adaptively shaping it?
Language, Memory, and Cognition in Infancy and Early Childhood
Old topics, by now, even if deeply neglected.

What about "Cultural Language, Cultural Memory, and Cultural Cognition in Cultural Infancy & Early Cultural Childhood?"

When does an evolving culture ever exit "childhood?" When it has stopped changing fast enough, has therefore started to die, and has spawned descendent cultures - whether it knows it or not?

Is the very fact you have to tell some adults the following ... a sign of how badly our culture has failed?
Read and talk to your kids, to enrich their cognitive development.
If we have to tell our own citizens that group & cultural & national intelligence is held in their body of national discourse, and not intrinsically in the citizens itself ... then we've already failed on an epic scale?


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Is the very fact you have to tell some adults the following ... a sign of how badly our culture has failed?

"Read and talk to your kids, to enrich their cognitive development."

No. It is a sign that our culture is succeeding. It would succeed even better if it gave those adults more money so that they could enjoy more family time.

Roger Erickson said...

We'd be succeeding, Bill, if the obvious was universally recognized as obvious, and we weren't trying to practice remedial repair after the fact.

Any parent that doesn't already know the lesson being discussed obviously didn't experience something so obvious when growing up themselves.