Fish Out of Order, Daily Edition

I have some problems with this article. Saying that we "don't need to remember as much as a Neanderthal because [we] have a computer" is a flawed argument. Neanderthals were not carrying the equivalent of Wikipedia around in their heads. We have larger social circles than the Neanderthal had. We have highly specific skill-sets and bodies of knowledge.

Yes, humanity has specialised and within each of us is not the sum of all human knowledge - but I would say the size of a skull alone (Taylor mentions it has been decreasing over the last 30K years) does not indicate the complexity of the brain. Consider the use of tools and tactics some birds adapt, with their far smaller brains. 

I would be very surprised if, on average, humans possess less stored knowledge and memory than Neanderthals. Taylor's work is interesting, and I'm always fascinated by discussions of how humans and technology influence each other. Still, he needs to address the flaws in his logic.

Also, he says here:

"There is no way to draw a definite philosophical boundary and say, here are the characteristics that are both necessary and sufficient to define a chair. The chair's meaning is linguistic and symbolic - a chair is a chair because we intend for it to be a chair and we use it in a particular way."

I would have thought that second sentence was the philosophical boundary for what "chair-ness" is. I think one fundamental problem I have with this article is I clearly have different understandings/definitions of some words and concepts compared to the researcher in question. Perhaps I am mistaking what he is implying with the quotes in this article.

However, I do love his closing paragraph;

"Now, you might think [the death of our sun is] a ridiculously long time away, but that's the kind of ridiculous timescale palaeoanthropologists think about. I look back 4 million years and see our emergence and our evolution and then I look forward 4 million years because those are the timescales I'm used to. And in the long run, humans will go extinct if we can't get off this planet. The only way out, ultimately, is up. The Tasmanians didn't have the kind of technology that would lead them there, but we do."

Something we can agree on!

While reading this post on the end of NHS-supported naturopathy, I can’t help but draw connections to another topic close to my heart.

Read this quote;

Everything that is happening to this baby is explainable within the internal logic of the homeopathic narrative. If the symptoms get better, then homeopathy is working. If things get worse, then we have an ‘aggravation’. If things stay the same, then change the remedy. At no point would a homeopath stop and ask if they are simply observing the natural course of an illness. They are the agents of everything that happens. Belief in the pills is total. The homeopath has to keep trying different remedies and different potencies – and the patient should avoid the ‘allopath’ at all costs. And a significant part of that narrative is the evil of vaccination and medicine. Anti-vaccination views are not fringe beliefs, but thoroughly mainstream within this world. Rochelle does not have to explain why it is significant that the eczema started after vaccinations. The other homeopaths will understand that these were undoubtedly a probable cause of this baby’s distress.

It is so easy to allow your personal bias, your paradigms, your beliefs, to short-circuit your reasoning. Human beings like patterns. We look for them even when there are none. And when we ‘find’ one, we always explain it with the mental tools we use most often.

To look at it another way, an engineer of the steam age thinks with metaphors of valves and pressure, heat energy. An engineer of the digital age could easily think of the world in terms of silicon, signals, electrical energy. We interpret the world based on the metaphors, the mental patterns most entrenched within us.

This can allow us, in some cases, to assign meanings where there may be none, assuming the actions of others are all in some way connected to you. The butterfly flaps its wings… because it doesn’t like your perfume. It is all about us.

It all comes back to that topic that I love so much – your thoughts creating your reality. All our sensory perception, all the data we take in – our brains re-construct and re-enact every single bit as bursts of energy leap between neurons – and there is no way to entirely escape its bias. The cogwebs run deep. (Ctrl-F to ‘cogweb’ on that linked article, it takes a while to reach the definition. If you’re interested in learning more about cogwebs, check out Katherine Turner’s fantastic book, Brainwashing – The Science of Thought Control <- click for Google Book preview of one of the pages on cogwebs).

I love this topic. So much. Can someone pay me to write about brain science and perception philosophy all day long?