I don’t understand. These statements don’t seem to be much related to each other, nor do any of them seem in any way related to the post they are replying to. I notice that I am (very) confused, especially since the “moral enforcement machinery” I refer to can be observed in animals without language, and so is not exclusive even to language-using humans, let alone civilization.
(Let alone the whole allegory of the cave thing, which is part of Plato’s notion of forms, which in the LW canon are explicitly understood to be an inversion of reality: we observe the jagged imperfect real world and extrapolate in our minds the “perfect” forms as a means of abstraction and data compression. This is the exact opposite of the situation in Plato’s cave.)
Animals have civilizations, they are mostly limited to regional ecosystems. We just don’t deal with animal civilizations on the same level as human-exclusive civilization concept.
The allegory is a story with many different points presented. I should’ve explained the aspect I was talking about. I was referring to the overall relationship between the different elements: the cave, outside the cave, the people inside the cave and the stuff they were doing inside the cave. The outside is the larger set, the cave is a subset, and the people are the individual elements, or leaf nodes. The sets themselves don’t interact directly with the leaf nodes, but they determine the relationships that leaf nodes form by just the set of leaf nodes themselves. They would have their own relationship graph. You have 3 different types of scenarios where the relationship between the sets significantly changes the relationships of the leaf nodes. 1. all leaf nodes exist within the smaller set. 2 Some leaf nodes are inside the smaller set and some outside, which breaks down to whether outside leaf nodes also form sets of their own. 3. All leaf nodes are outside of the smaller set (i.e. in the allegory, that’s when the cave people went outside, which marks the end of the allegory). You can think of these 3 different scenarios as separate, or you can think of them as one snapshot of a temporal progression. This pattern can be imposed on human civilization to explain the relationships within it.
Sorry, I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with the comment you originally replied to (which is about the behavior of individual brains), or even the post in general.
I probably misunderstood your comment and the original post too. Sorry about that. I find most of the stuff on this site pretty confusing. I was trying to talk about specific things that you guys have mentioned, but it probably is out of context.
I don’t understand. These statements don’t seem to be much related to each other, nor do any of them seem in any way related to the post they are replying to. I notice that I am (very) confused, especially since the “moral enforcement machinery” I refer to can be observed in animals without language, and so is not exclusive even to language-using humans, let alone civilization.
(Let alone the whole allegory of the cave thing, which is part of Plato’s notion of forms, which in the LW canon are explicitly understood to be an inversion of reality: we observe the jagged imperfect real world and extrapolate in our minds the “perfect” forms as a means of abstraction and data compression. This is the exact opposite of the situation in Plato’s cave.)
Animals have civilizations, they are mostly limited to regional ecosystems. We just don’t deal with animal civilizations on the same level as human-exclusive civilization concept.
The allegory is a story with many different points presented. I should’ve explained the aspect I was talking about. I was referring to the overall relationship between the different elements: the cave, outside the cave, the people inside the cave and the stuff they were doing inside the cave. The outside is the larger set, the cave is a subset, and the people are the individual elements, or leaf nodes. The sets themselves don’t interact directly with the leaf nodes, but they determine the relationships that leaf nodes form by just the set of leaf nodes themselves. They would have their own relationship graph. You have 3 different types of scenarios where the relationship between the sets significantly changes the relationships of the leaf nodes. 1. all leaf nodes exist within the smaller set. 2 Some leaf nodes are inside the smaller set and some outside, which breaks down to whether outside leaf nodes also form sets of their own. 3. All leaf nodes are outside of the smaller set (i.e. in the allegory, that’s when the cave people went outside, which marks the end of the allegory). You can think of these 3 different scenarios as separate, or you can think of them as one snapshot of a temporal progression. This pattern can be imposed on human civilization to explain the relationships within it.
Sorry, I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with the comment you originally replied to (which is about the behavior of individual brains), or even the post in general.
I probably misunderstood your comment and the original post too. Sorry about that. I find most of the stuff on this site pretty confusing. I was trying to talk about specific things that you guys have mentioned, but it probably is out of context.