Taking environment out of Man

[Steve Johnson <***>]

JudithRosen:

> So what it boils down to is that you can take the
> organism out of its 
> environment, but if you want to understand the "why"
> of things 
> regarding that organism, you have to recognize the
> fact that you can't 
> take its environment out of IT.

SteveJohnson:

What would this principle say when applied to humans?
Clearly the environment that humans have created for
themselves in the last 5,000 years is vastly different
from the environment that is encoded in humans by the
evolutionary process that created us. 

Is our predicament exactly like a labrat? The rise of
civilization took the human animal out of the
environment but it cannot take the environment out of
it? 

Can we speculate that the high rate of mental illness,
obesity etc is the result of discrepancy between the
predictive models encoded into humans and the
enviroment that they have to operate in?

Every animal has some freedom to choose its
environment which in turn can affect the survival rate
of its offspring and hence influence the genetic
makeup. But it seems that humans are unique in that
the civilization changes our environment much faster
than the ability of the evolutionary process to encode
it back into the genome. Thus the discrepancy between
Man's internal models and its environment is
exponentially diverging. Is this the sign of emergence
of new type of individual?


Lastly, RR in Essays has a chapter on evolution where
he points out that in talking about evolution one
should be careful to look at the correct individual
that "evolves". That is, depending on what type of
evolution you're talking about it may be different
individuals that are evolving: the organism, the
genome, the ploidy of the genome etc.

Who is evolving in this case? The human society? It
seems like a good candidate. The society can encode
the changes much faster through laws, constitutions
etc. For example, the evolutionary enconded models
often lead humans to engage physical violence,
stealing etc but society imposes its models through
policing, legislating.

- Steve


 









--- Judith Rosen <***> wrote:

> Dave Macy wrote: ...while speaking with a guy who
> had a
> Ph.D. in philosophy he asked, "where is the
> beginning and ending of
> organism?"  I still think it's a pretty good
> question.
> 
> It IS a good question, but the thing about it that
> sets off 
> experimentalists and reductionistic scientists is
> that it seems to be 
> self-contradictory to think of a discrete system,
> like an organism, in 
> terms of environmental connectedness. Particularly
> since we take 
> organisms out of their natural (evolutionary)
> habitat all the time and 
> they do just fine (er, that is... as long as we
> maintain their 
> particular basic requirements... which refers back
> to aspects of their 
> environment, doesn't it).
> 
> The perspective RR offered was one that tied it all
> together in a 
> scientific manner: He said that organisms
> incorporate multiple aspects 
> of their evolutionary environment into themselves.
> He referred to such 
> incorporated aspects as "information" encoded into
> their organization. 
> There is also information regarding the relation
> between environment 
> and "self". [In this situation, "self" can refer
> either to aspects of 
> the individual (organism) or to species aspects
> (organism as part of a 
> whole species) . One example would be reproductive
> information of both 
> genders encoded into each individual when the
> species is bi-gender. 
> This can be seen in things like male deer going into
> rut at the same 
> time of year that female deer are about to go into
> estrous.] 
> Collectively, he referred to all of this encoded
> information as a set 
> of "internal predictive models".
> 
> What this means is that there are semantic elements
> to organism that 
> cannot be understood without taking into account
> knowledge about the 
> referents. In each species, that means evolutionary
> environment and 
> whole species (interestingly, the chicken-and-egg
> conundrum disappears 
> when we do so). The aspects of organism structure,
> behavior, etc which 
> reflect this information will be unfathomable
> without an understanding 
> of these relational aspects. How do we make sense of
> gills unless we 
> take into account an environment of water, for
> instance?
> 
> So what it boils down to is that you can take the
> organism out of its 
> environment, but if you want to understand the "why"
> of things 
> regarding that organism, you have to recognize the
> fact that you can't 
> take its environment out of IT.
> 
> Judith
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: David Macy
>   To: ***
>   Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 6:30 PM
>   Subject: Re: [ROSEN] where mind begins and ends
> 
> 
>   Hey Steve,
> 
>       You know it used to be that articles like this
> would not have 
> phased me.
>   Now though, that I'm really beginning to
> appreciate the 
> inseperabilty of
>   mind and soma (or mind and somas), this kind of
> thing will probably 
> begin to
>   irk me.  I was telling Judith once that while
> speaking with a guy 
> who had a
>   Ph.D. in philosophy he asked, "where is the
> beginning and ending of
>   organism?"  I still think it's a pretty good
> question.  I mean don't 
> these
>   guys consult their own cognitive psychologists?  
> Do you think if 
> you
>   spanked them they could tell you then where
> consciousness resides?
> 
> 
>   David
> 
> 
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: "Steve Johnson" <***>
>   To: <***>
>   Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 10:58 AM
>   Subject: where mind begins and ends
> 
> 
>   > This is one of those self-congratulatory
> reductionist
>   > articles but still I thought is of general
> interest to
>   > thie list.
>   >
>   > - Steve
>   >
>   >
>   > Sometime in the next decade or so,
> neuroscientists
>   > will likely identify the specific neural
> networks and
>   > activity that generate the vague but vital thing
> we
>   > call consciousness. Delineating the
> infrastructure of
>   > awareness is biology's most difficult problem,
> but a
>   > leading researcher like Christof Koch, Gerald
> Edelman,
>   > or Stanislas Dehaene could soon solve it.
> Science will
>   > then possess what might be called a
> "consciometer"-a
>   > set of tests (probably an advanced version of a
> brain
>   > scan or EEG) that can measure consciousness the
> way
>   > kidney or lung function is now measured.
>   >
>   > http://www.slate.com/id/2120872/
>   >
>   >
>   >
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