Remi,
I think we are getting closer to an understanding, but we aren't there yet.
As you underlined, I equate "advantage" with "necessity". It is just plain
logic. To be an "advantage", a mutation has to be a "necessity", a
reorganisation has to be necessary, otherwise it cannot be an "advantage".In the exemple of the giraffe: It -has to be- a necessity for an animal
to graze on top of tree, if there is a mutation (like longer neck) to be
considered like an advantage by the selective force of nature.
I think there must be some difference between the French and English
connotations of "necessary." There's no way that the ability of a giraffe
to graze on the top of trees could be "a necessity" in English, because if
it were, the giraffe would have had no ancestors who could not graze on
the top of trees. It is certainly an advantage for them to be able to
find leaves that other animals can't reach, but it cannot be necessary
for them to do so. Other animals (including the short-necked ancestors
of giraffes) survive quite well without this advantage.
You:
Cockroaches are far more successful in an evolutionary sense than humans
have yet proved to be, and I don't think they have a very complex language.Me:
Cockroaches are less complex than human, but they are there for a long time.
Human are more complex, and they can live in environement where no
cockroaches are aloud, Human can eradicate every single cockroaches on earth.
It is simple, they just have to -blow- the planet, and go live on the moon, in
-controled- environnement. So I don't agree, human are more sucessful in an
evolutionary sense, if you consider futur stake.
I can't consider the future, because I don't know whether humans will survive
_as humans_ for 300 million years after the last cockroach has died. The
only evidence I can use is what has happened so far.
The coexistance of human and
cockroaches has nothing to do with competition, we don't feed on the same
source of energy.
Fair enough, but that wasn't the issue, was it? I thought (it's a long time
ago, so I may remember wrong) that the issue was whether evolutionary success
or social structure required a complex language.
But you bring up a point that is often missed, which is that the greatest
_intrinsic_ competition for resources is always with members of one's own
species, and particularly with members of one's own species that live nearby
or that are genetically most closely related. Those are the animals that
have the greatest overlap between what they want and what you want. So,
if any kind of social structure is to evolve, it must provide a greater
benefit than would be provided by killing all the nearby and the related
members of your own species. That means that social structures must have
evolved early, at least as early as the development of species that have
only a few children rather than millions of children.
Human are far more complex than cockroaches, an organism has to be complex
to depend on a complex communication language. What I explained in precedent
post is that to depend on language, we had to depend on technology first.
Could be. I don't have any strong objection to that idea, but I'm not sure
that it is provable. It would be disproved if we were to find that sea-mammals
have a complex language, as some people believe they do. But even if they
don't, and we find that humans are the only species with complex language,
I don't think we could prove that language _requires_ technology. I would
expect it to be the other way round: technological development requires
language. However, both could very well be true, in a positive feedback
loop that has not yet stopped the growth of its signal values.
I state that: language is not _required_
to support social structures, It is required to support dependancy from
technology, namely in the first historical place, to organise a social
structure to assure a continuous stock full of burning stuff to keep the
fire from extinction.
Yes, I think we can agree here, in the sense that one person who understands
fire can keep one going, or re-light one when he wants. But it's much easier
for a group to keep one going, or for some people to fetch wood while others
cook. And that is easier to organize if they can talk to each other. Of
course, at that level of technology the organization can be kept going
without language, at least not complex symbolic language. But it is hard
to imagine how technology could evolve beyond that without language.
In other word social structure -are- language.
No, I can't buy that. There are complex social structures in many species
without language. And we have only one example of a species with language,
so we don't know whether you can have language without social structure.
Ant do communicate, and their society are dependant from language. They develop
the language that was necessary to develop, nothing more, nothing less.
And in a way we (us and the ant) have common ancestor, so it is not false
to say that the language of ant evolved in human language (with certain time
and condition).
All animals communicate, in the sense that the perceptions of one individual
are influenced by the actions of other individuals. If you call all such
communication "language," I don't think you gain anything by using the word.
It's too broad. I would rather restrict "language" at a minimum to the
performance of actions that are intended to influence the actions of another
individual--in other words the control of one's own perceptions through
the actions of other individuals. I'm not sure ants do that, though they
may. But a better restriction involves some kind of symbolic representation.
Some animals can certainly do this, using arbitrary shapes or sounds to
represent perceptions that are quite unlike the shape or sound--a yellow
square to represent "sleep", for example. Now, you might say that honeybees
do that kind of representation in the dance. I think they do. Maybe ants
also do something similar.
But I am a bit mystified by what you mean when you say "the language of
ants evolved in human language".
fruit of Goudsblom genius, when he simply argue that the task to get
combustible was the first real organised work to appear.In order to make that claim, one has to define "organized work" in such
a way as to make it true. One has to define it so that the setting of
guards by a baboon troop is not "organized work", nor is the coordination
of hunting pack animals, nor is the bees' cooking of invading wasps.Me:
All right, in place, let say: "culturaly organised work"
What does adding "culturally" gain? You then have to define "culture" in
a way that makes the same distinction. It still seems pretty arbitrary
to me. Isn't the baboon troop "culturally organized?"
ยทยทยท
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I think we understand the situation sufficiently similarly that we can
perhaps get back to the social implications of PCT and technology.
What I was originally suggesting was that everyone (every animal) all the
time is acting to bring his/her/its perceptions toward their reference
values. These actions are performed with a certain amount of power, not
all of which is used to affect the aspects of the world that are incorporated
in the controlled perceptions. In other words, some of the power of action
has effects that don't directly influence our controlled perceptions. It
goes into "side effects".
If it takes only a certain amount of power to control a particular perception,
then if one exerts more power, the extra is going into the side-effects.
All of our actions might be influencing the physical world in ways that
affect the controlled perceptions of other people or animals. Our actions
are therefore potentially disturbances to other people's controlled
perceptions. The other person will act to counter the effects of our
action--perhaps not directly, since the other person's controlled perception
may be influenced by many variables besides the one we disturbed. The
other person's actions may disturb our own perceptions, and will do so
if he/she/it negates the direct effect of our own action on the physical
world. That's a conflict situation.
Conflict is difficult enough to deal with, but it's much harder to deal
with the consequences of side-effects. Imagine that I move a box, to make it
easier to dump papers into the box. I don't know that you were using the
box to hide from someone's view. You get angry with me and hit me, for a
reason that is quite incomprehensibe to me... How do we deal with this
kind of problem? I claim that we have evolved systems to deal with it--
social conventions. You ask me to put the box back, or ask why I moved
it, and I ask whether there isn't something else you could use, for example.
The issue of technology comes in when you realize that technology allows
one to use more power in controlling one's own perceptions. The side-effects
are magnified. I run a factory to produce paper, and I simply do not know
that what runs out of the factory is killing the fish in the river that
supplies your band with food. I could not do that without technology, and
I don't need to do that with technology, but it happens without my knowing
it is happening. You and your band may have no idea why there are no fish
and why the other animals are disappearing or having distorted children.
Technology increases the range of influence of the side effects. So we
need the conventions--the conformity with rules and regulations--to reduce
the impact of those side effects. As a papermill owner, I must check to
see whether I am polluting the river, and stop if I am. It limits my
freedom to control my perceptions, but it helps you to control yours.
And limiting your freedom helps me to control mine.
The more power we have as individuals, the more important it is to ensure
that our actions don't conflict, and that our side effects don't disturb
other people's controlled perceptions. Of course it is impossible to
reduce the effects to zero, or even close. But social structures that
work, work because they do minimize the cross-disturbances. Such "minimizing"
structures survive longer, because the people in them do less reorganizing
than do people in structures that allow more cross-disturbances. It's
the same principle as in reorganization. If control is good, things don't
change. If control is bad, things change more or less randomly.
If it is true that being able to control one's perceptions is linked to
one's happiness (or perhaps contentment), then living in a stable social
structure with well entrenched _moral_ (not legal) rules is likely to
be happier than living in the libertarian Wild West. Or so it seems to me.
Martin