Not All Tools Are Chipped And Carved
Irradiated by LabRat
A large underdose of sleep and and equally substantial overdose of caffeine (feeling my heart whanging off my sternum while still no sharper than I had been was depressing) has left me feeling somewhat like this*. I am sure the high-spirited New Mexico spring wind currently blowing every plant gamete in the state through the air is not helping either.
Go read this, which I am currently entirely too stupid to have meaningful commentary on. I am still very taken by the notion of viewing certain human developments as cognitive technology, however. I’m also very curious as to whether art might fall under the same category, as it represents a handy way for humans to rotate ideas and concepts in a representation of space that can be shared. Or that might be the juniper pollen talking.
*Read the original context, it’s completely hilarious as Allie Brosh usually is.
March 21st, 2011 at 9:46 pm
Interesting.
Not having words for numbers does not prevent mental arithmetic … but it does make it damned hard to pass data on to others.
The Pirahã cannot time bind numbers … they can’t pass information like the number of moons in a given year down to grandkids. Which would make developing agriculture impossible.
March 22nd, 2011 at 12:53 pm
I’ve often thought about how technology puts a limit (or rather, removes limits) on our thinking. I honestly don’t think that there could be religion without speech, and I don’t think civilization could start without religion. (It could very well be as outdated as communal cisterns, but there had to be communal cisterns to get started.) Religion and law (closely related), by the same token, has been restricted by technology. Before writing, the sorts of laws set by Hammurabi and the Torah could only be properly propagated by writing. The Protestant personal Jesus couldn’t be well spread without the printing press and general literacy.
I’ve been putting a lot of thought into how the internet, constant communication and near omnipotent recall are going to impact how we think in the near future. (Of course, I think of the next 200 years as the “near” future, so keep that in mind.)