I love that you brought up bleggs and rubes, but I wish that that essay had a more canonical exegesis that spelled out more of what was happening.
(For example: the use of “furred” and “egg-shaped” as features is really interesting, especially when admixed with mechanical properties that make them seem “not alive” like their palladium content.)
Cognitive essentialism is a reasoning tactic where an invisible immutable essence is attributed to a thing to explain many of its features.
We can predict that if you paint a cat like a skunk (with a white stripe down its back) that will not cause the cat to start smelling like a skunk, because the “skunk essence” is modeled as immutable, and modeled as causing “white stripe” and “smell” unidirectionally.
Young children have a stage where they start getting questions like “If a rabbit is raised by monkeys will the rabbit prefer bananas or carrots?” and they answer “correctly” (in conformance to the tactic) with “carrots” but they over apply the tactic (which reveals the signature of the tactic itself) in some cases like “If a chinese baby is raised by german parents who only speak german, will the chinese baby grow up to speak german or chinese?”
If you catch them at the right age, kids will predict the baby grows up to speak chinese!
That is “cognitive essentialism” being misapplied because they have learned one of the needed tactics for understanding literally everything, but haven’t learned some of the exceptions yet <3
(There are suggestions here that shibboleths and accents and ideologies and languages and so on are semi-instinctively used by humans for tracking “social/tribal essences” at a quick/intuitive level, which is a whole other kettle of fish… and part of where lots of controversy comes from. Worth flagging, but I don’t want to go down that particular rabbit hole here.)
A key point here is that there is a deep structural “reasoning behind the reasoning” which is: genomes.
Genomes do, in fact, cause a huge variety of phenotypic features. They are, in fact, broadly shared among instances of animals from similar clades. They are, in practice, basically immutable in a given instance of a given animal category without unusual technology (biotech or nanotech, basically).
To return the cat and skunk example, we can imagine a “cognitive essentialist Pearlian causal graph” and note that “white stripe” does NOT causally propagate back into the “genome” node, such that DO(“white stripe”=True) could change the probability in the “genome” (and then have cascading implications for the probability of “skunk smell”).
More than that, genomes use signaling molecules which in the presence of shared genomic software have somewhat coherent semantic signals such as to justify a kind of “sympathetically magical thinking”.
For example, a shaman might notice that willow trees fall over when a river overflows its banks during a flood, and easily throws new roots out of their trunk and continue growing in the new configuration and think of willow trees as “unusually rooty”.
Then the shaman, applying the magical sympathetic thinking law of “like produces like”, the shaman might make a brew out of willows hoping to condense this “rooty essence”. Then they might put some other plant’s cutting, without roots, in the “rooty willow water” and hope the cutting grows roots faster.
And this works!
Here is one of many youtube videos on DIY willow-based rooting mix, and modern shamans (called “scientists”) eventually isolated the relevant “signaling molecule” (ie the material basis of its magico-sympathetic essential meaning within plant biology on Earth) which gains the imperative meaning “turn on root growing subroutines in the genomic software” in the presence of the right interpretive apparatus, in the form of indole-3-butyric acid.
Note that it is quite common for specifically hormones to have about this size and shape and ring pattern. They are usually vaguely similar to cholesterol (and they are often made by modification of cholesterol itself) and the “smallness” and “fattiness” helps the molecules diffuse even through nuclear membranes, and then the “long skinniness” is helpful for reaching into a double helix and tickling the DNA itself.
Here is a precursor of many animal steroids, (sometimes called lanostane) with locations that can be modified to change its meaning helpfully labeled:
I claim that the first chemical (the one that only as a C and D ring, with the standard nitrogen at 15, and a trimmed 21, a ketone 24, and a hydroxyl 25, that willows have a lot of) is a ROOTING HORMONE that “means” something related to “roots”.
Compare and contrast “morphology” (the study of parts of words) and note also that Hockett’s “design features” that offer criteria for human language that are mostly missing in animal communication include arbitrariness (which hormones have), displacement (which hormones have), and so on.
I claim that indole-3-butyric acid is, roughly, an imperative verb in the language of “bio-signaling-plant-ese” whose meaning is roughly, this:
Also, the meaning is preserved for other plant species that “share” the same “genomic culture” (shared culture being another of Hockett’s “design features” in human languages)… in this case: the “meaning” of the relevant molecules that willow tends to be rich in, is “culturally” shared for mint!
I will close by saying that I think that a mixture of math and biochemistry and rule-utilitarianism is likely to offer a pretty clean language for expressing a “deep and non-trivial formula with useful etymological resonances” for explaining exactly what reptiliomoprh, and mammalian, and primate, and human benevolence “is” (and how it should be approximated in morally good agents acting charitably in conformance with natural law).
For example, if there is a “chemical word” that means “grow roots please!” in plant biology, then this complex of four amino acids in specifically this order (which is recognized by various chemical receptors) is also a word for something like “care for that which is close to you and person shaped and can’t care for itself, please!”:
Calling it a “sick burn” was itself a bit of playfulness. Every time I re-read this I am sorry again to hear that we lost Golumbia 🕯️
The thing I think is true about Minecraft is that it enables true play, more along the lines of Calvinball where the only stable rule is that you can’t have any other rules be the same as before.
This is a good essay on what children’s cultures have lost, and I think that Minecraft is one of the few places where children can autopoetically reconstruct such such culture(s).
This is precisely the value of Minecraft I think, and why it is a cultural phenomenon. You can choose your own mods, you can make your own mods using open source tools, you can invent any story. Such, I suspect, is how real “play play” (with other people who will quit if it isn’t fun) mostly works, and is related to why reading a novel isn’t as fun as writing a novel with your friends.