[MD] Distinguishing Levels

[ian glendinning]

David M, DMB,

But isn't this just the chicken and egg question of evolution.
One doesn't "come from" the other either way round - Intellect and
Society co-evolve.

I just don't see social culture without intellectual culture - they
are both just different aspects of cultural communication and
evolution of ideas. (Aspects in the sense we "classify" certain kinds
of thought and communication as one or the other, but they are just
thoughts evolved over generations of communication.)

Maybe one day as Gene suggested, Intellect might evolve as a species
distinct from society, but for now there is no such thing as an
intellectual thought free of social culture.

See the Charles Whitehead paper lower down this (very long) page of
abstracts on the Science of Consciousness.
http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/abstracts.htm

Collective Deceptions in Western Science
by Charles Whitehead

[QUOTE]
Is western science just one more mythological scheme with no more
validity than, say, the belief in witchcraft, as some postmodern
anthropologists claim? This is surely going too far. The postmodern
assertion that there is 'nothing outside the text' is worse than
theoretical nihilism – it denies the terrible human costs of
real-world events and processes.

Science is certainly not a mythological scheme. Science is based on
testable hypotheses and repeatable observations, whereas mythology is
based on out-of-body experiences or other ritually altered states. But
this is not a valid reason to deny that science is embedded in
political and economic processes and that anthropological analysis can
help scientists to transcend the problems of cultural distortion.

A typical objection to such analysis is: 'What can anthropologists
tell us about natural science? You do an experiment and you get an
empirical result. How can anthropology change that?' This is the wrong
question of course. Culture does not affect empirical findings as
such. But it does determine the choice of experiment, the
interpretation of the result, and the tendency to ask the wrong
questions such as the example just given.

Cultural distortions are most pernicious in the field of consciousness
studies. Apart from the physicalist paradigm itself, a central problem
affecting all the behavioural sciences is the absence of any coherent
theory defining human behaviour. This is not the result of simple
ignorance or incapacity but of active and ingenious falsification –
you could say that it is the 'job' of human culture to falsify our
perceptions of ourselves and the world we live in. 'Collective
deceptions' were at one time necessary to coerce our social but
selfish ancestors into collaborating in a non-selfish system, and
western science has not yet freed itself from them.

In fact, in reacting against a vitalistic worldview,
post-Enlightenment science created new deceptions of its own. Those
affecting consciousness studies most directly include physicalism,
cognocentrism, logocentrism, individualism, and 'genocentrism' (the
last being in direct conflict with Darwinian principles).

Once you start to ask the right questions, it becomes easy to show
that commonly held scientific assumptions are self-contradictory and
rooted in vested political and economic interests. Human cultures
everywhere maintain fictive schemes which could aptly be described as
'wholly believed-in make-believe', and this is itself a widely
accepted definition of the hypnotized state.

Suggestibility is in fact a precondition of human culture, but as long
as we continue to act out our make-believe fantasies in the real
world, we will continue to add to the dangers that we created in the
first place. It is high time we all took active steps to stop
investing in our own collective dream-worlds.
[UNQUOTE]


Ian

On 6/4/06, David M <davidint at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi DMB
>
> do you not see any intellect involved in the creation of these
> myths/rituals? Where do they come from prior to becoming
> repeated?
>
> DM
>
>