Werewolves and Human Universals - Unoptimized Evolution

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Timestamps:
00:00:43 The Search for Society and Donald Brown's Human Universals
00:05:40 Wolves and Folklore - a theory werewolves
00:08:15 Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred
00:11:04 The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection by Ronald Fisher and the birth of Modern Synthesis
00:13:16 How magic becomes religion and science
00:19:09 Origins of the Sacred, sacred origins of language
00:20:05 Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins, donation economies, and sacred origins of feasts
00:22:40 The Hand by Raymond Tallis, language of the hands
00:24:47 The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, creativity
00:26:16 The Talking Ape by Robbins Burling, problems with language evolution theories

[@magouliana32]

Aristotles academy was named the Lyceum for a reason.

[@jamyangpelsang3099]

Since you mentioned how the claim that some cultures lack a comprehension of time based on their language is probably an exaggeration, I would love to know your thoughts on the movie Arrival which takes the linguistic relativity hypothesis (or “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” as the film calls it) to the sci-fi extreme while also possibly incorporating elements of Zen Buddhism and Nietzscheian philosophy.

[@Unoptimized]

It's strange that an alien could show us how their language is at once superior in terms of temporal description and at the same time the filmmakers are using English to explain this so it makes perfect sense to the average person. The protagonist is also able to use this new language to fix a problem. Chimpanzees and bonobos, when taught any symbolic signaling system, do not go and solve previously unsolvable problems with it. They don't take it home and show how useful this new signaling system is. They use it to get things from researchers and that's the extent of it. So I don't believe that a species can really bestow any higher level benefits of their signaling system to a "lower" species, when this is exactly what the aliens do to the humans in Arrival, demonstrating the superiority of human language in understanding new realities.

[@jamyangpelsang3099]

@@Unoptimized I also found that to be pretty far-fetched ignoring everything that was already out there that is lol
To be able to suddenly perceive time as flat simply by learning a language from a species that possesses a higher temporal comprehension of reality sounds linguistically backward. The alien language could probably allow understanding of flattened space-time by analogy but to be able to actually see it literally would mean the language itself somehow largely determines perception which is probably an overgeneralization. That human-to-primate example would be the best proof for this as you mentioned. Still a very cool sci-fi idea and the only form of linguistic science fiction I've personally ever come across.

[@Unoptimized]

Yeah except scientific equations already do this right? Human language is fully capable of discussing dimensions beyond the third, even if they may not be as important as they're claiming.

[@jamyangpelsang3099]

@@Unoptimized pretty much, it’s possible to mathematically map out geometry on theoretically an infinitely high number of spatial dimensions and even maybe temporal dimensions. Humans adopting “extra-temporal” perception from merely learning the language of a more evolved species would be like a blind cave animal acquiring vision from simply learning the language of a more intelligent daylight based organism.

[@Unoptimized]

I made this case in my white paper. You simply can't transpose the analogy to apes because they don't have language. Every possible thing we can hypothesize is already linguistic and useful in some way. But teach a bonobo some lexigrams and they don't find them very useful outside.

[@SummonMi]

Is there a way to reach out?

[@Unoptimized]

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