The Mysteries Of The Living Brain

February 10, 2014

Instantly, some progress is being to close this grap, and to unravel The Mysteries Of The Living Brain (see, e.g, 4, 64)
But even as scientists begin to write ethnografies for robots and to explore mathematically , biologikathe structure of “memory” (61, 64, 79)-of internal models of reality-many facet of mind resist formal represrntation. Interestingly, it is not the high intelletive logical functions of mind, but the evolutionarily old, unconscious, “automatic” functions that resist analysis.
That suggests that there may be some fundamental obstacles, perhaps more evolutionary than Godelian”, to our laying bare in any formal way what humans “know” that enables them to do what they do, George miller’s warnings vividly suggest the dilemma ;
Given that we can knoe rules that have not yet been formulated [as in our implict knowledge of grammatical rules], couldwe know rules that govern the operations of the human mind that the human mind, given its present level of inteligence an symsolic machinery, cannot make implicit? (58, pp.192)
The point is not to digres about artificial intellgence researh,but  to warn that despite a vast concentration of brainpower, the possibility of analyzing a cultural system in any omplete sense and discoveringfand describewng its stucture remainsa far on the horizon-and may forever remain so. To abstractout a levelof “cultural symbols”in theway Shnedier proposes seems tp me to offer aspurious sense of escape from this dilemm. That the anthropologist’s mind can invent such a “level” attests to remarkable powers that make humans human: but it does little to clarify how they perceive, think, and act.
It is partly Geertz realization that the cultural grammars of the “ new ethnographers” are so impossible to achieve in the face of what humans know about their world-the subtle shading of understanding and mood and meaning that defy representation in formal algorithms-that leads him to explaination. I disagree with him if that means abandoning cyberneticians the task of progressively tilling in those segment and sectors that yieldto understanding they will do so less well wihtout our collaboration than they would if we shared wiht them our insights into the varying patterns and richness of cultural exprecience. But i agree withj him that at those enterprises real humans in real settings.
6. A final urgent argument for embedding an ideational conceptual of culture in the real social and ecological world is that “culture”like other heuristic concepts of social science, should be potentially self-exthinguishing like the linguists notion of competence, it may in the longr run turn out to be a scaffolding that needs to be dismantled when more solid and enduring structure can be built.
It remains an open question to what degree human action actually is guided by a general conceptual code, a theory of the world and the game of social life that an be disentangled from the particularities and immediacies of each individula’s unique experience and life space. John haviland’s recent study of gossip in Zinacantan from cognitive perspective poses important doubts:
We ordinarily have thought of one’s cultural competence composed of codes . . . .the conceptual schemata have, we assume, an indepedent existence prior to any particular configuration of animals, any set of actual kin, any actual political operation . . . but in the gossip the . . . contingencies determine the general principle-for they are all there is. In gossip, the world becomes more than ideal schemea and codes . . . much of an actor’s cultural competence rest on a vast knowledge contingent  fact, raw unconnected trivia  . . .
   Wacthing people operate on their cultural rules through gossip also shows us folly of our belief that culture providessets of ideal rules which apply to particular configurration of poeple, places, things, and events. The contingencies of life themselves restructur the rules, even change them in time . . . in gossip  . . . . one’s whole understanding of the cultural code depends on the particular setting, on the configuration of past experince and knowledge, which is suddenl relevant to the application of rules and standart to the fact in question (43, pp, 279-280)
  Do human actors conceptualize”the system” in some systematic way an use this generalized model to guide action and understanding in concret situations? If not. A generalized composite model of cultural competence will in the long run serve us badly in understanding performence in the concret settings of real life. We do not yet know.
Haviland reaches a conclusion similar to Geertz : that at least for the present. We can best aspire to understanding and interpretation. Not to prediction and explanation (Gossip. At once text and native commentary on texts. Offers particularly rih insight) moreover, it may be precisely in exploring the phenomenological world of the familiar and immediate, the everyday and mundane, that we stand to gain the most crucial knowledge of how humans perceive, understand, and act.
CONCLUSION
We need to work, i think, on many fronts. Interpreting cockfight in Bali and Gossip in Zinacantan illuminates the human condition from one important perspective, even though-or pershap because- what makes it possible for anthropologists and participants cannot be neatly codified. Studies of ritual and ecological adaption in new guinea illuminate another side, an interconnectedness we would, wiht less broad view of the systematic complexity of nature, have missed. At the same time, attempts to map cultures as ideational systems in the light of an emerging understanding of mind and brain should enable clearer insightinto organization of experience and the nature and depth of variation in te thought worlds of men.

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