Human Cultural Evolution Is Completely Immersed in Natural Evolution

2019 ◽  
pp. 110-118
Author(s):  
Jan Holmgren
Keyword(s):  
Global Warming ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Mass Extinctions ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Basic Position ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Geological Period

Human culture is presently setting a disastrous mark on planet Earth, overexploiting its resources, causing global warming, causing mass extinctions. We appear already to be in a new geological period, the Anthropocene. The natural sciences are crucial for the understanding of those processes. Equally important are decisions in human culture to act on the large challenges in humane and rational ways. Whitehead's evolutionary Philosophy of Organism, with the introduction of atomic microfeels, inspires a coherent cosmology characterized by the basic position of human consciousness. The humane aspects (pre-physical, metaphysical) of human culture (e.g. the humanities, the religions, the arts) are shown to be importantly causal in the universe. Human empathy and altruism (loving attitudes) combined with rationalism and truthfulness must be enhanced as central ambitions in human societies, not least in areas like politics and economy. The suggested worldview, accepting complementarity, is named multi-aspect monism (MAM).

The Arts

2018 ◽  
pp. 283-314
Author(s):  
Kevin N. Laland
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Precise Control ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Art And Technology ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Complex Sequences

This chapter considers the evolution of dance, which provides a wonderful case study with which to illustrate how human culture evolves. It shows that cultural evolution is a melting pot, with innovation often the product of borrowing from other domains, such that cultural lineages come together as well as diverge. This can be seen in the richly cross-fertilizing coevolution of dance, music, fashion, art, and technology, whose histories are intimately entwined. In the case of dance, evolutionary insights explain how humans are capable of moving in time to music; how we are able to synchronize our actions with others or move in a complementary way; how we can learn long, complex sequences of movements; why it is that we have such precise control of our limbs; why we want to dance what others are dancing; and why both participating in dancing and watching dance is fun. Armed with this knowledge, we can make better sense of why dance possesses some of the properties that it does, and why dances changed in the manner they did. As it is for dance, so it is for sculpture, acting, music, computer games, or just about any aspect of culture.

Imagining Sound as the Absolute

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Saam Trivedi
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Scientific Ideas ◽  
The Universe

Saam Trivedi ponders the Sangita Ratnakara by the Ayurveda physician Sarangadeva. In this thirteenth-century manuscript, Sarangadeva asserts that Sound, identical to the Absolute, is the only fundamental thing in the universe and that all other things are illusory or, at best, some derivative or other manifestation of Sound. While the twenty-first century, non-monist Trivedi is critical of this claim, he finds much to be fascinated by, and, in his dissection of the main points of the Sangita Ratnakara, he offers the reader an imagining of sonic monism that, while far-removed from the orthodoxy of today’s acoustics and natural sciences, might one day come to be seen as inspiration for the latest scientific ideas concerning sound.

The Unification of the Arts

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Brown
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Aesthetic Responses ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Dance Movements ◽  
Evolution Of Music

The Unification of the Arts presents the first integrated cognitive account of the arts that attempts to unite all of the arts into a single framework, covering visual art, theatre, literature, dance, and music, with supporting discussions about creativity and aesthetics that span all of the arts. The book’s comparative approach identifies both what is unique to each artform and what artforms share with one another. An understanding of shared mechanisms sheds light on how the arts are able to combine with one another to form syntheses, such as choreographing dance movements to music, or setting lyrics to music to create a song. While most psychological analyses of the arts focus on perceptual mechanisms alone—most commonly aesthetic responses—the book offers a holistic sensorimotor account of the arts that examines the full gamut of processes from creation to perception for each artform. This allows for a broad discussion of the evolution of the arts, including the origins of rhythm, the co-evolution of music and language, the evolution of drawing, and cultural evolution of the arts. Finally, the book aims to unify a number of topics that have not been adequately related to one another in previous discussions, including theatre and literature, music and language, creativity and aesthetics, dancing and acting, and visual art and music. The Unification of the Arts provides a bold new approach to the integration of the arts, one that covers cognition, evolution, and neuroscience.

scholarly journals Innovation from a Memetic and Evolutionary Perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-15
Author(s):  
Andrej Drapal
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Perspective ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Fundamental Mechanism

Innovation happens all around the Universe and is a fundamental mechanism of evolution. Living creatures cannot but exist and develop through innovation. Innovation happens through mutations that make sense in retrospect only. Natural selection makes certain mutations as beneficial and other as something that was already forgotten. As much as genes serve as quantized smaller units where innovation takes place in physical bodies, memes serve as basic quantized units of human culture. Memes as second replicators to genes obey similar laws of evolution and thus innovation as genes. Innovation can be propagated only by removing obstacles on one side and by allowing mutations to emerge as long as they do not destroy identity.

scholarly journals Ivan Aleksandăr (1331-1371)

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Alberti
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Amount Of Information ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
First Time

The long reign of Ivan Aleksandăr (1331-1371), the penultimate emperor of Bulgaria prior to the Turkish conquest, was marked by a series of successful military campaigns against Serbia and Byzantium and above all by an intensive cultural production, largely fostered and funded by the sovereign himself. The central decades of the fourteenth century were of crucial importance for the later cultural evolution of Bulgaria and the whole of Orthodox Slovenia, despite which to date ample and exhaustive studies on the figure of Ivan Aleksandăr are lacking. There is, in effect, a considerable amount of information at disposal, although it is scattered over the literary sources, the colophons of the manuscripts, the epigraphic documentation and also, obviously, the official deeds promulgated by the Emperor. Through the analysis of this varied documentation, this book attempts to reconstruct the figure of the sovereign, the context in which he lived and worked, his greatness and his mistakes and his parallel activities as a strategist and an illuminated patron of the arts. For the first time, the Italian reader can find collected and translated all the manuscript sources relating to the Bulgarian sovereign. The book is completed by an appendix with the original texts of the Slavonic-ecclesiastical tradition.

scholarly journals Dynamically remembered present: Virtual memory as a basis for the stories we live

2013 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelius W. Du Toit
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
Virtual Memory ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Universe

In this article memory was viewed as a crucial key to the discovery of reality. It is the basis of historical research at all levels, hence it is not confined to a function of human consciousness (brain operations): its physical vestiges are discernible in the universe, in fossils, in the DNA of species. Memory inscribes information in various ways. On a human level it is not recalled computer-wise: imagination, emotion and tacit motives play a role in how we remember. The article investigated the way in which memory underlies the operation of every cell in any living organism. Against this background the role of memory in humans and its decisive influence on every level of human life are examined. Gerald Edelman’s work in this regard was considered. Marcel Proust’s focus on memory is an underlying thread running through his novels, unrivalled in literary history. Some prominent examples were analysed in this article. In light of the foregoing the role of memory in religious experience was then discussed. The virtuality of memory is encapsulated in the statement that we remember the present whilst reliving the past. Memory characterised by virtuality is basic to our autobiographic narratives. The nature of memory determines our life stories, hence our perception of the human self as dynamically variable and open to the future.

Hugh of St Victor, Dominicus Gundissalinus and the Place of the Mechanical Arts in Medieval Architectures of Knowledge

2021 ◽  
Vol 153 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-318
Author(s):  
Alexander Fidora ◽  
Nicola Polloni
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The One ◽  
Mechanical Arts

This contribution engages with the problematic position of the mechanical arts within medieval systems of knowledge. Superseding the secondary position assigned to the mechanical arts in the Early Middle Ages, the solutions proposed by Hugh of St Victor and Gundissalinus were highly influential during the thirteenth century. While Hugh’s integration of the mechanical arts into his system of knowledge betrays their still ancillary position as regards consideration of the liberal arts, Gundissalinus’s theory proposes two main novelties. On the one hand, he sets the mechanical arts alongside alchemy and the arts of prognostication and magic. On the other, however, using the theory put forward by Avicenna, he subordinates these “natural sciences” to natural philosophy itself, thereby establishing a broader architecture of knowledge hierarchically ordered. Our contribution examines the implications of such developments and their reception afforded at Paris during the thirteenth century, emphasising the relevance that the solutions offered by Gundissalinus enjoyed in terms of the ensuing discussions concerning the structure of human knowledge.

Evolution of the arts

2021 ◽  
pp. 45-72
Author(s):  
Steven Brown
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Geographic Location ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
Fields Of Study ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Species Specific

This chapter examines both the biological and cultural evolution of the arts. Biological evolution of the arts deals with how humans evolved the species-specific capacities to create and appreciate artworks, while cultural evolution is about how artworks themselves, as cultural products, undergo changes in persistence over historical time and geographic location. The study of biological evolution includes both phylogenetic (or historical) and adaptationist (or Darwinian) approaches. The study of cultural evolution of the arts reveals the importance of a ‘creativity/aesthetics cycle’ in which the products of human creativity get appraised for their level of appeal by the aesthetic system, allowing them to either be transmitted to future generations or die out. This unification of creativity and aesthetics has far-reaching implications for both fields of study.

A Naturalistic Intrinsic Value Theodicy

2019 ◽  
pp. 236-258
Author(s):  
Scott A. Davison
Keyword(s):  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Survival ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
Intrinsic Values ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe

The theodicy explored in Chapter 13 is naturalistic in the sense that it does not appeal to the existence of good things or events or processes that cannot be studied using the natural sciences. More specifically, unlike most of the theodicies that are typically discussed in the literature, this one does not involve any claims about human survival of death, the existence of a soul, libertarian human freedom, or divine intervention, miraculous or otherwise. The theodicy explored here involves the following claims: Everything that exists is intrinsically valuable to some degree; the universe as a whole is a thing of immense intrinsic value; the immense intrinsic value of the universe as a whole provides God with a justifying reason for creating it; the evil in the world is offset by the intrinsic values of the creatures affected together with the intrinsic value of the world that comes from its regularity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document