One of the best videos ever on being a polyglot

Open Forum
21

The way I remember it, he proclaims no to be deterministic and pays lip service to the role of contingency but, in practice, his conclusions are absolutely deterministic because he rules out any possibility of things having been different by stressing the disadvantages of every possible alternative to Western dominance. Africa couldn’t’ve because …, China couldn’t’ve because …

22

" Sure I agree empathy is part of evolutionary package, but that is not the whole package. Other values coexist, and sometimes it is not easy nor simple to figure out which overrules which. " - I never said empathy was the only value people could have, but it´s the reason why people care about what happens to others even when it has no direct effect on them themselves. People can have all sorts of values but in the end any value will be linked to whether it makes people feel good or bad in some way, whether the people who hold the values are aware of it or not.

23

Hi, Jokojoko83!

  1. I am only an amateur in these topics,
    Don’t worry about it. At the end of the day, we all are (more or less) :slight_smile:

  2. my term “absolute” was certainly inappropriate. Transcendental would be equally inappropriate.
    We could generalize this view by saying that we try to create narratives about “dynamic contingency”. That is:

  • Operational processes that can be called “systems”, “complex systems”, “discourses”, etc. and develop dynamic stabilities (“attractors”,“eigenvalues”, “identities”, etc.)
  • Their trajectories aren’t predetermined, completely random (quasi-entropic) or chaotic (in the sense of “deterministic chaos”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory(). In other words: Their future is open so that the results they produce can be surprising to observers and to themselves.
  • These processes occur within space and time
  • They can increase (and reduce) their level of complexity (= negentropic order)
  • There is no “essentialist” (deterministic, absolute, transcendental, foundationalist, etc.) formula to fully grasp them.
    etc.

Examples:

  • Biological processes based on natural evolution
  • On a social level: Processes based on social, media, and technological evolution
  • On an individual level: Neurological / psychological processes of schema, pattern, frame, etc. processing,

Some tools we have to create such narratives in a non-deterministic or non-essentialist way are:

24
  1. Reg. “tabula rasa” / “Could it be better described as “time/space-independent”, within the time scope of Sapiens history?”
    Yes, it seems that a “tabula rasa” view of the brain/mind is no longer plausible.
    As neuroscience suggests, there are some basic distinctions like “mobile / non-mobile” that are inherited. And this could contribute to the fact that probably all (?) language communities distinguish between processes, e.g. as verbs for actions and natural processes, and entities that act or are acted upon, i.e.: subject and object positions.

However, the position of “time/space independence” regarding socio.-cultural patterns isn’t plausible because the dynamic generation of stabilities (“identities”, “structures”, “patterns”, etc.) happens always within natural and socio-cultural evolution.

25
  1. something deep and common to all human endeavour.
    Yes, but it’s probably highly abstract like the requirement to make a distinction if we want to generate something as something, that is: to be able to construct any “reality”.
    This is exactly the main topic of “distinction-based approaches” like Derrida, Luhmann, Baecker, Spencer Brown, etc.

Or to put it differently. The common denominator of all information processing entities, esp. minds and social systems like organizations, would be that they have to process “distinctions” (= distinction-based information). See esp., Spencer Brown’s proto calculus: Laws of Form - Wikipedia
In contrast, the concrete distinctions (such as mobile/non-mobile, verbs/non-verbs, the Big 5 traits in psychology, etc.) would be “contingent” with respect to natural and sociocultural evolution.

This leaves the question open: Are there alternatives? I’d say yes:
a) Infra or flat distinctions, that is “differences” that aren’t “distinctions”. For example in the case of simpler organisms like plants, ants, etc.
b) Maybe Gotthard Günther’s kenogrammar / polycontextural logic. See, for example: https://www.rudolf-matzka.de/dharma/semabs.pdf

But, these are topics that are difficult to digest even for many scientists. This is a bit like the experience of modern physics when it moved from a Newtonian to an Einsteinian and quantum physics paradigm.

Have a nice day
Peter

26

Oh wow… That was mind-blowing. As a native Persian, I can verify his claim about Persian poetry. I’m impressed!

27

Very nice video! Thanks for sharing it!

28

This is my reaction to his video.
https://learnlanguageslive.weebly.com/my-goals/my-reaction-to-learning-languages-ruined-my-life