The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings
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“… The cultural equivalent of the genotype is the information stored in people’s brains that represents their beliefs, attitudes, values, skills, knowledge, and so on. The cultural equivalent of the phenotype is the expression of that information in the form of behavior, speech, and artifacts. It is the latter—the phenotype equivalent—that is copied during cultural transmission: we do not directly acquire neural patterns of activation in people’s brains; we copy people’s behavior, we listen to what they say, and we read what they write” (Mesoudi 2011, p. 44).
In nature, inheritance occurs in a direct order: first, genetic content is copied, and then the genotype, in interaction with the environment, shapes the phenotype, the external characteristics of organisms. Cultural inheritance is indirect: imitation, that is, copying the expression in the plane of norms, precedes the understanding of the content. An idea is passed through the medium. Understanding this difference between the direct transmission of genes and the indirect transmission of meanings was one of the initial problems of memetics, which, starting from the scientific apparatus of genetics arrived at the concept of the meme. “[A] significant worry for memetics is that when the same ideas do spread through a population, it is rarely because they are literally copied from each other” (Lewens 2018).
The evolutionary variation of meanings depends on their correct repetition by successive human generations. The inability of people to authentically repeat a meaning leads to its demise. Therefore, as Henrich shows, people tend to “over-imitate,” mimicking meanings with excessive accuracy (Henrich 2016, pp. 108-9). The ability to improve meanings (or at least not allow them to degrade) depends, all other things being equal, on the size and sociality of the human population. Thus, the size and quality of a society influence the path of its cultural evolution and the adaptive landscape of its meanings.
The difference between indirect cultural transmission and direct transmission of genes means that meanings can negatively affect human survival. If the survival of genes depends entirely on the survival of organisms that possess those genes, then meanings are not strictly tied to their carriers, allowing harmful meanings to spread throughout the human population. “…Oblique transmission opens up the possibility that some traits may spread through a population in spite of the fact that they reduce the fitness of the individuals who bear them” (Lewens 2018). Well-known examples include alcoholism and drug addiction.
The evolution of social learning went through two phases: (1) early social learning, which transmitted simple meanings that each individual could rediscover through individual learning (that is, independent discovery or invention), and (2) cultural learning, which transmitted meanings, that an individual, regardless of his abilities, could not rediscover independently in his entire life.
Social learning is characteristic of the early stages of cultural selection, when meanings were conveyed between hominids on the basis of their herding behavior, that is, their animal sociality. The early meanings themselves were still part of the animal behavior and appeared as animal signals and tools. If meanings got lost in the course of transmission, they could be rediscovered or reinvented through self-learning. In the later stages of cultural selection, meanings had left the realm of nature and formed an independent realm in which active abstractions in their shape of a word and a tool gradually decoupled from immediate animal behavior. Now meanings were transmitted through cultural learning; the complexity of meanings no longer allowed them to be simply reinvented if the community had lost them for some reason. At the same time, cultural learning enabled the transition from the collection of individual experiences to the growing accumulation of meanings from generation to generation.
Meaning as a common language of all humans
Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb noted that “the transition to human societies with linguistic communication required changes in anatomy and sensorimotor systems and an increase in cognitive ability, but the part of the transition that is most difficult to explain is how humans acquired the capacity to quickly master the complex rules of grammar when young” (Jablonka and Lamb 2006, p. 243). They suggested that this ability may have arisen in the course of the co-evolution of genes and culture. Originally, linguistic information was transmitted through social learning. However, as linguistic communication became more crucial for proto-human groups, cultural selection of individuals took place based on their ability to learn the basics of language, leading to partial genetic assimilation of those basics. Given this assumption, the question arises: how can it be that every child today can learn any of the five or six thousand human languages. The answer could be either that by the time the genetic capacity for language evolved, all proto-humans had the same language and that no change in the genetic capacity was required for further language evolution, or that the genetic capacity evolved relative to a base common to all languages.
The first option, according to which the same language existed for hundreds of thousands and millions of years in different pre-human groups, seems unlikely. The evolution of languages over the last few thousand years is well studied from written sources and shows that languages diverge rapidly as their speakers spread geographically. The second, more likely, option assumes that the genetic ability to learn languages evolved in relation to their common base. Individual languages form the plane of expression of this base. Damian Blasi and his colleagues, after analyzing the “basic vocabulary” of 40 to 100 lexical items from 62 percent of the world’s 6,000 languages, showed that there is a stable connection between sound and meaning: lexical items with similar meanings have similarities in sound. This similarity may be due to the origin of different languages from a common ancestor, to borrowings between languages, or to other reasons that make certain sounds preferable for expressing certain meanings (Blasi et al. 2016).
At one time, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently developed not only differential calculus but also the idea of a single human language based on the nature of things themselves. Newton wrote: “The dialects of each language being so divers and arbitrary a general Language cannot be so fitly deduced from them as surely as from the natures of the things themselves, which is the same for all Nations and by which all Language was at the first composed” (Elliott 1957, p. 7). Leibniz believed that there is an alphabet of human thought, made up of simple concepts or “letters” and that innate language is based on this alphabet (Wierzbicka 2011, p. 379).
Strange as it may seem, thoughts are not made of concepts, not of images, not of letters, not of words. Thoughts are made of meanings. Douglas Hofstadter says in I Am a Strange Loop (2007):
“No one has trouble with the idea that ‘the same novel’ can exist in two different languages, in two different cultures. But what is a novel? A novel is not a specific sequence of words, because if it were, it could only be written in one language, in one culture. No, a novel is a pattern—a particular collection of characters, events, moods, tones, jokes, allusions, and much more. And so a novel is an abstraction, and thus ‘the very same novel’ can exist in different languages, different cultures, even cultures thriving hundreds of years apart” (Hofstadter 2007, p. 224).
Meaning, or social and material abstract action, is the common content of all languages, it is the base in relation to which languages function as elements of the plane of expression. Meaning is connected with its linguistic expression through an active linguistic norm and is transmitted thanks to this norm. Evald Ilyenkov wrote in his Considerations on the Relationship between Thinking and Language (1977):
“The ‘deep structures’ identified by Chomsky actually take shape in ontogenesis, in the process of a child’s development before he can speak and understand speech. And one does not have to be a Marxist to recognize their obvious, one might say, tangible reality in the form of sensorimotor schemes, i.e. schemes of the direct activity of a developing human being with things and in things in the form of a purely bodily phenomenon—the interaction of a body with other bodies located outside it. These sensorimotor schemes, as Piaget calls them, or ‘deep structures,’ as linguists prefer to call them, are precisely what philosophy has long called logical forms or forms of ‘thinking as such’” (Ilyenkov 2019-, vol. 5, pp. 243-4).