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100_MILLENNIUM_MIND

                                             August    31, 2012
                                             December   6, 2013
                                             September 26, 2023


                                                 More about Joseph Carroll's
                                                 review of Steven Pinker:
                                                 "Steven Pinker’s Cheesecake
                                                 For The Mind" (1998)
Joseph Carrol brings up some
material from a book called                                    http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Carroll_C98.html
"The Prehistory of the Mind",
by Steven Mithen":                                             BLEAK_DINER

  "Pinker’s hypothesis about the pleasure
   of art reflects a prejudice common to
   evolutionary psychology-- the idea that
   only those functions that evolved in
   the distant evolutionary past have any
   particular adaptive status."

   "Evolutionary psychologists tend to
   regard the EEA ["environment of
   evolutionary adaptedness"] as a
   relatively static condition in which
   the human mind was fixed and finished
   sometime before the past 100,000 years
   or so."

   In contrast Steven Mitchen: " ... describes
   the cultural revolution that took place about
   40,000 years ago and that introduced complex
   multi-part tools and the elements of higher
   culture, including art, religion, and more
   complex forms of social organization. How to
   account for this explosion of creative
   activity? Mithen postulates an organically
   based cognitive development in which the
   previously separate domains of the mind became
   accessible to one another. He argues that the
   domains devoted to technical understanding,
   social interaction, and natural history              SYNCRETIC
   blended together, and that out of this blend
   there emerged an entirely new range of            I speculate: there may be
   creative cognitive activity. Mithen describes     other fusions of domains
   this new capability as 'cognitive fluidity,'      that can achieve further
   and he argues cogently that it is the basis       advances.  And I remind
   for all our more imaginative, inventive           that we have cognitive
   cultural achievements."                           domains that extend beyond
                                                     the individual.
                                                     
 So there's an argument out there that the           
 evolution of human intelligence may have    BELL_TOLLING                                                      
 been later than is often supposed...                
       
           (But hell, what's
            60 millennia                       I further speculate: 
            here and there?)                      
                                               There may be parallels here    
                                               to the realm of software       
                                               design, where the strategy     
                                               of sub-division into components    
                                               is often fetishized into an    
                                               obsession with bullet-proof    
                                               encapsulation.                 
                                               
                                               There are cycles of over-design
                                               and balkanization followed by
                                               periods of unification...
                                                       
                                                  I'll look up the relevant 
                                                  xkcd one-of-these-days.




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