thanks again. I really appreciate these mini lectures.
Vico's focus on 'making by makers' as some sort of foundational metho-epistemo-ontological axiom, is a very common self-idolatrous mistake (though often more emotional than metaphysical), even if we blame/credit-shift "creator-as-design/maker" to a deity's remit (gods we have made in our own image… —as makers). A mistake that we likely first made in the paleolithic. It will be an error hard to reframe, linked as it is to cultural histories [mythopoetic artefacts like stories) by the combination of our bias for agency, and our inclination to make stuff up. We so often want the glory, but not the blame, and so settle for a smokey sunset into dystopia, just so we can be right, or righteous— scared of our dreams.
You make a good point. I think it goes a lot deeper than the Paleolithic, though during the Paleolithic it took a much more sophisticated turn with the resources of language and art put at the service of these instincts. The elaboration of biologically ancient cognitive biases by the later emergent intelligence does indeed make it enormously difficult to reframe. I think the only real reframing possible is an evolutionary one, which we can allow to occur over biological scales of time, or over which we can choose to assert our control, engage in intelligently directed selection, and eventually give ourselves a framing of a different kind. But this process is fraught with perils, and potentially horrors we cannot now imagine. There will be no human unity on the kind of framing toward which we should select ourselves, but in scattered post-terrestrial diasporas there might be both the social will and consensus to choose a definite future.
thanks again. I really appreciate these mini lectures.
Vico's focus on 'making by makers' as some sort of foundational metho-epistemo-ontological axiom, is a very common self-idolatrous mistake (though often more emotional than metaphysical), even if we blame/credit-shift "creator-as-design/maker" to a deity's remit (gods we have made in our own image… —as makers). A mistake that we likely first made in the paleolithic. It will be an error hard to reframe, linked as it is to cultural histories [mythopoetic artefacts like stories) by the combination of our bias for agency, and our inclination to make stuff up. We so often want the glory, but not the blame, and so settle for a smokey sunset into dystopia, just so we can be right, or righteous— scared of our dreams.
You make a good point. I think it goes a lot deeper than the Paleolithic, though during the Paleolithic it took a much more sophisticated turn with the resources of language and art put at the service of these instincts. The elaboration of biologically ancient cognitive biases by the later emergent intelligence does indeed make it enormously difficult to reframe. I think the only real reframing possible is an evolutionary one, which we can allow to occur over biological scales of time, or over which we can choose to assert our control, engage in intelligently directed selection, and eventually give ourselves a framing of a different kind. But this process is fraught with perils, and potentially horrors we cannot now imagine. There will be no human unity on the kind of framing toward which we should select ourselves, but in scattered post-terrestrial diasporas there might be both the social will and consensus to choose a definite future.