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Author: Robert Watson Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429670877 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 485
Book Description
People worry that computers, robots, interstellar aliens, or Satan himself – brilliant, stealthy, ruthless creatures – may seize control of our world and destroy what’s uniquely valuable about the human race. Cultural Evolution and its Discontents shows that our cultural systems – especially those whose last names are "ism" – are already doing that, and doing it so adeptly that we seldom even notice. Like other parasites, they’ve blindly evolved to exploit us for their own survival. Creative arts and humanistic scholarship are our best tools for diagnosis and cure. The assemblages of ideas that have survived, like the assemblages of biological cells that have survived, are the ones good at protecting and reproducing themselves. They aren’t necessarily the ones that guide us toward our most admirable selves or our healthiest future. Relying so heavily on culture to protect our uniquely open minds from cognitive overload makes us vulnerable to hijacking by the systems that co-evolve with us. Recognizing the selfish Darwinian functions of these systems makes sense of many aspects of history, politics, economics, and popular culture. What drove the Protestant Reformation? Why have the Beatles, The Hunger Games, and paranoid science-fiction thrived, and how was hip-hop co-opted? What alliances helped neoliberalism out-compete Communism, and what alliances might enable environmentalism to overcome consumerism? Why are multiculturalism and university-trained elites provoking working-class nationalist backlash? In a digital age, how can we use numbers without having them use us instead? Anyone who has wondered how our species can be so brilliant and so stupid at the same time may find an answer here: human mentalities are so complex that we crave the simplifications provided by our cultures, but the cultures that thrive are the ones that blind us to any interests that don’t correspond to their own.
Author: Robert Watson Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429670877 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 485
Book Description
People worry that computers, robots, interstellar aliens, or Satan himself – brilliant, stealthy, ruthless creatures – may seize control of our world and destroy what’s uniquely valuable about the human race. Cultural Evolution and its Discontents shows that our cultural systems – especially those whose last names are "ism" – are already doing that, and doing it so adeptly that we seldom even notice. Like other parasites, they’ve blindly evolved to exploit us for their own survival. Creative arts and humanistic scholarship are our best tools for diagnosis and cure. The assemblages of ideas that have survived, like the assemblages of biological cells that have survived, are the ones good at protecting and reproducing themselves. They aren’t necessarily the ones that guide us toward our most admirable selves or our healthiest future. Relying so heavily on culture to protect our uniquely open minds from cognitive overload makes us vulnerable to hijacking by the systems that co-evolve with us. Recognizing the selfish Darwinian functions of these systems makes sense of many aspects of history, politics, economics, and popular culture. What drove the Protestant Reformation? Why have the Beatles, The Hunger Games, and paranoid science-fiction thrived, and how was hip-hop co-opted? What alliances helped neoliberalism out-compete Communism, and what alliances might enable environmentalism to overcome consumerism? Why are multiculturalism and university-trained elites provoking working-class nationalist backlash? In a digital age, how can we use numbers without having them use us instead? Anyone who has wondered how our species can be so brilliant and so stupid at the same time may find an answer here: human mentalities are so complex that we crave the simplifications provided by our cultures, but the cultures that thrive are the ones that blind us to any interests that don’t correspond to their own.
Author: Allen W. Batteau Publisher: Waveland Press ISBN: 1478607971 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 161
Book Description
Technology and Culture provides a comprehensive overview of anthropological and other theories examining the place of technology in culture, and the consequences of technology for cultural evolution. The book develops and contrasts anthropological discourse of technology and culture with humanistic and managerial views. It uses core anthropological concepts, including adaptation, evolution, totemic identity, and collective representations, to locate a broad variety of technologies, ancient and modern, in a context of shared understandings and misunderstandings. The author draws on his own experience as an auto mechanic, computer programmer, ethnographer, and aircraft pilot to demonstrate that technologies are cultural creations, encoding and accelerating the dreams and delusions of the societies that produce them.
Author: Sigmund Freud Publisher: Namaskar Book ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 115
Book Description
Delve into the depths of the human psyche with "Civilization and Its Discontents" by Sigmund Freud. Explore Freud's groundbreaking exploration of the tensions between individual desires and societal norms, and uncover the hidden forces that shape human behavior. As you immerse yourself in Freud's seminal work, prepare to confront the complexities of civilization and the inherent conflicts that arise from our primal instincts. From the pursuit of pleasure to the repression of desires, each page offers profound insights into the human condition and the challenges of living in society. But beyond the surface analysis of human behavior, "Civilization and Its Discontents" delves into deeper themes of morality, culture, and the quest for meaning. Freud's provocative ideas challenge conventional wisdom and invite readers to question the foundations of civilization itself. Yet, amidst the complexities of human existence, a profound question emerges: How can Freud's exploration of the unconscious mind help us navigate the challenges of modern life and find greater fulfillment and happiness? Engage with Freud's thought-provoking ideas as you explore the tensions between individual freedom and social order, between instinctual drives and moral constraints. Whether you agree or disagree with Freud's conclusions, "Civilization and Its Discontents" offers a fascinating journey into the depths of the human psyche. Now, as you delve into "Civilization and Its Discontents," consider this: How will Freud's insights into the nature of civilization and human nature reshape your understanding of yourself and the world around you? Don't miss the opportunity to explore the complexities of human existence with "Civilization and Its Discontents." Acquire your copy today and embark on a journey of self-discovery and intellectual exploration that will challenge your assumptions and expand your horizons. ```
Author: R. Alexander Bentley Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262036959 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 176
Book Description
How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. Today, we are following social media bots as much as we are learning from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an Internet of people and devices, after millennia of local ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children are learning more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004391169 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 311
Book Description
The contributors to this volume share the assumption that popular narrative, when viewed with an evolutionary lens, offers an incisive index into human nature. In theory, narrative art could take a near infinity of possible forms. In actual practice, however, particular motifs, plot patterns, stereotypical figures, and artistic devices persistently resurface, indicating specific predilections frequently at odds with our actual living conditions. Our studies explore various media and genres to gauge the impact of our evolutionary inheritance, in interdependence with the respective cultural environments, on our aesthetic appreciation. As they suggest, research into mass culture is not only indispensable for evolutionary criticism but may also contribute to our understanding of prehistoric selection pressures that still influence modern preferences in popular narrative. Contributions by David Andrews, James Carney, Mathias Clasen, Brett Cooke, Tamás Dávid-Barrett, Tom Dolack, Kathryn Duncan, Isabel Behncke Izquierdo, Joe Keener, Alex C. Parrish, Todd K. Platts, Anna Rotkirch, Judith P. Saunders, Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, Dirk Vanderbeke, and Sophia Wege.
Author: Elizabeth A. Williams Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022669304X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 444
Book Description
Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents, Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science. Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself..
Author: Robert Markley Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 9780801852268 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
The recognition that cyberspace is a fiction -- a narrative that creates a coherence it would like to imagine "really" exists -- is crucial to any theoretically sophisticated critique of the limitations of this consensual hallucination and the discontents it imperfectly masks. In this groundbreaking volume Robert Markley and his co-authors set out to discover why "cyberspace provokes often-rapturous rhetoric but resists critical analysis." Taking a variety of approaches, the authors explore the ways in which virtual realities conserve and incorporate rather than overthrow the assumptions and values of a traditional, logocentric humanism: the Platonist division of the world into the physical and metaphysical in which ideal forms are valued over material content. Cyberspace, David Porush suggests, represents not a break with our metaphysical past but an extension of its basic theistic postulates. Richard Grusin argues that the claims for new forms of electronic communication depend upon the very notions of authorship -- and subjectivity -- they claim to transcend. N. Katherine Hayles examines debates about cybernetics in the 1950s to demonstrate that the history of mind-body ideas in the age of computers and feedback loops is itself conflicted. David Brande analyzes cyberspace as an extension of the logic of late twentieth-century capitalism. And Robert Markley explores the entangled roots of cyberspace in the philosophy of mathematics. "One of the ironies of our culture's fascination with cyberspace is that our material and psychic investments in Virtual Reality suggest that the death of print culture -- or its disappearance into the matrix -- has been greatly exaggerated.... Cyberspace is unthinkable, literally inconceivable, without the print culture it claims to transcend. It is, in part, a by-product of a tradition of metaphysics that, boats against the current, bears us back relentlessly to our past." -- Robert Markley, from the introduction
Author: Barbara Stark Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 131629899X Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 307
Book Description
In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud argued that civilization itself is the major source of human unhappiness, inhibiting instincts and generating guilt. In Globalization and its Discontents, Joseph Stiglitz shows how the 'economic architecture' that produced globalization has also driven the backlash against it. This book brings together some of international law's most outspoken 'discontents'; those who situate their malaise in international law itself. Their shared objective is to expose international law's complicity in the ongoing economic and financial global crises and to assess its capacity - and its will - to constructively address them. Some, like Freud, view that which holds us together as an inevitable source of discontent. Others, like Stiglitz, draw on the energy of the backlash. How have these crises affected particular groups, sovereign states, and international law itself? How have they responded? When does crisis serve as a catalyst, and for what?
Author: Robert Watson
Author: Robert Watson
Author: Allen W. Batteau
Author: Sigmund Freud
Author: Sigmund Freud
Author: R. Alexander Bentley
Author: 
Author: Elizabeth A. Williams
Author: Robert Markley
Author: Kevin MacDonald
Author: Barbara Stark