Cultural Evolution: Expressive culture before practical culture [Progress]

I'm jumping this to the top to accommodate some additional remarks about progress which I've placed at the end. [Latest update: Monday morning, 30 Sept., at 9:19 AM.]

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Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. 

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

The ‘collective mind’, the mesh, the cultural reticulum (to use my current technology) is the medium in which culture evolves. By that I mean the “connected” minds/brains of individuals in a given society. I’ve put connected in scare quotes to indicate that the connection is not permanent, hard-wired, as it were, or necessarily synchronous. Face-to-face interactions are synchronous, but temporary, and the connection is through sound, sight, and possibly touch, odor, or even taste. But one can be connected through written documents, paintings, sound recordings, and so forth. In those cases, the connection with others will be asynchronous and could be quite scattered. And so forth.

Cultural beings thrive or fail in the mesh. Cultural being is my current term for the cultural analog of the biological phenotype. As such it is the mental trajectory of a collection of coordinators (the cultural analog of the biological gene). That is most obviously true for expressive culture – stories, dance, charms, pictures, music, and so forth – but true as well for all manner of practical devices and practices.

And, yes, I know this is a bit dense with strange terms. They’re all defined on this page with discussion scattered, alas, throughout this blog and in working papers.

Moving on, we’ve got to make a distinction. For the moment we’ll call it a distinction between expressive culture and practical culture. Expressive culture–song, dance, art, stories, religion, etc.–lives in the reticulum. It speaks to our need for meaning and coherence in the world. Practical culture, on the other hand, supports the body in one way or another, providing nutrition and protection. The devices and practices of practical culture, however, must be consistent with the designs of expressive culture.

Expressive culture leads

Not only that, but I posit a principle for consideration:

Expressive culture leads; the seeds of practical culture are always in expressive culture.

But is that true? I don’t know.

It was suggested to me by the following passage from David G. Hays, The Evolution of Technology, Chapter 5, “Politics, Cognition, and Personality”:

In reading to prepare to write this book, I have learned that the wheel was used for ritual over many years before it was put to use in war and, still later, work. The motivation for improvement of astronomical instruments in the late Middle Ages was to obtain measurements accurate enough for _astrology_. Critics wrote that even if the dubious doctrines of astrology were valid, the measurements were not close enough for their predictions to be meaningful. So they set out to make their instruments better, and all kinds of instrumentation followed from this beginning. (That from White, MRTe*). Metals were used for ornaments very early – before any practical use?

In its original manifestation the compass was a divination, or future-predicting, instrument made of lodestone, which is naturally magnetic." (George Basalla, p. 172; in BIBLNOTE*)

I suspect that we could get many further examples, up into the growth curve from rank 2 to rank 3.

In fact, someone in the future may look back on psychoanalysis and remark that its origin was in parapsychology – dreams were interpreted first for divination, second for diagnosis of pathology.

Here is my first point: The driving force behind progress in social organization, government, technology, science, and art is the need to control anxiety, to satisfy the brain's striving for understanding.

To take a political example: In the origin of government, is the key problem why men choose to follow leaders, or how men succeed in making themselves into leaders? [Not a sexist formulation; just the way things happened.] For most of my life, I took for granted the first answer. Recently I recognized the second problem and adopted it. Ethnographies (culture reports) from hunting-and-gathering societies show absolute egalitarianism. But more: They show an absolute unwillingness to rise above one's fellows in any respect whatsoever.

Here and there we find a clue as to the kind of child-rearing practices (sometimes brutal) that produce such adults.

Since the earliest community leaders were war leaders, who gradually came to exercise some authority between wars, perhaps the answer to the key question is this: The first leaders draw their ability to accept the responsibility of leadership from success in war, from religious experience, and from innate genius or special accidents of handling in early childhood.

And now to find more examples where practical technologies and practices are preceded by their appearance expressive culture.

What does this imply for Collier/Cowen's Progress Studies?

I note in the first place that Hays's examples (in that first paragraph) are all old. I note, however, that in a fairly standard account the rise to Rank 3 culture in the West began in the visual arts with the sciences emerging later. The following table lists some representative figures and dates:

This is not quite the phenomenon Hays was pointing out, which is specific to particular devices, but supports a general view that change expressive culture precedes change in practical culture.

Just how prevalent is that dynamic and does it still hold in the modern world, and in what way? I"m thinking, for example, of Neil deGrasse Tyson's recent talk on Mars settlement. He notes that, despite all the inspirational rhetoric that accompanied it, the political motivation for the Apollo project came from Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. But he also pointed out an inspirational series of articles that appeared in Collier's Magazine in between 1952 and 1954. What effect did they have on the nation's appetite (and aspirations for) venturing into space? I note as well that Walt Disney used his Sunday evening television program (which premiered in 1954) to evangelize for space exploration. I wonder if Tyson and others have been under-valuing or misunderstanding the role of that inspirational rhetoric. And then we have some anecdotes mentioned by Frederik Schodt in his history of Japanese robots, Inside the Robot Kingdom (Kodansha America 1990). In the early days of industrial robotics a new robot would be welcomed to the production line by a blessing ceremony officiated by a Shinto priest. Hmmmm.... Is THIS why "moonshot" has become a metaphor for high risk/high gain endeavors despite the fact that, technologically, the Apollo program wasn't all that risky? We pretty much had the technology in hand; we just had to develop the will to implement and deploy it.

Finally, consider the Technological Singularity, that point in the future when machines will surpass us in intelligence and all sorts of awesome things – whether good or bad (for us) it’s hard to tell – will come to pass. Judged as practical goal setting and prognostication it leaves something to be desired. Taken as expressive culture though, more akin to art and religion than to science and technology, it makes sense.

To see what I mean compare the state of our knowledge with respect to establishing permanent settlements on Mars with the state of our knowledge regarding computational superintelligence. As far as I can tell the only gap in our knowledge about Mars settlement concerns human ability, both mental and physical, to last. We have already sent humans to the moon and back, and we’ve landed exploratory unmanned vehicles on Mars where we’ve been able guide them in doing useful work. Lastly, we have had humans orbit the earth in a space station for months at a time, in one case for a year. That’s a long time, but not as long as a Mars mission. In short, we know a lot. We also know that it will be very expensive.

But machine intelligence, that’s a roller coaster ride. Starting in the early 1950s the federal government funded research into machine intelligence. The objective was a practical one, to translate technical documents from Russian to English. That enterprise went bust in the mid-1960s and was defunded. Good old-fashioned symbolic AI was riding high in the early 1980s and commercial ventures were formed (e.g. Symbolics, to manufacture LISP machines). Then AI Winter set in. The business is now riding machine learning and neural nets in a truly spectacular up-phase. But a self-driving car is a long way from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). We don’t really know how these marvelous sports do what they do. Common sense reasoning, one of the problems that laid waste to symbolic AI, is still problematic. We lack anything like a coherent theory that moves from sensory processing and motor action through cognition and speech to abstract reasoning. We have no theory on which to base our super-intelligence.

But wait! I get it. We don’t have to have such a theory. The computer will think it up for us.

Ha!

When it comes to creating human-class intelligence, we don’t have a viable theory. We don’t know what we’re doing. That’s very different from the situation we face in thinking about settling Mars. The idea of the Technological Superiority belongs to expressive culture, not engineering or scientific culture.* But who knows what practical developments will come out of this fundamentally expressive (religious) ambition.

Moreover, there are constraints on practical things

So, yes, as Hays suggests, we have anxiety and the need to control it through understanding. But, when it comes to the creation of practical devices, we have constraints as well. The devices, or social practices for that matter, must actually work as intended. And that, I suspect, imposes more constraints on them than the medium does on expressive culture. Expressive culture has more freedom to wander and explore than does practical culture, or so I’m maintaining at the moment.

And what of politics?

Expressive or practical culture? Something of both I would think.

All of this bears further investigation. 

More later.

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*See, for example,  Sabine Hosenfelder debunks "tech-bro monotheism".