Bag of Worms Yet Words

89. Do Monkey Vocalizations and Signals Reveal Grammatical Language?

"ScienceNOW.org", Science, vol. 326, 11 December 2009, p. 1467:

An Introduction to Monkey Grammar? 
It's not quite Shakespearean word play, but a species of African monkey can modify individual warning calls to produce novel meanings, according to new research. And because the wild monkeys tack the same sound onto the end of their calls, the authors speculate that they could resemble suffixes. But it's debatable whether the sounds serve a grammatical purpose like that in human language. http://bit.ly/monkeygrammar

Chomsky's assumption, that the semantic central in humans, that generates grammatical linguistic structure, is unique to humans, is an undarwinian conceit. Granting that human language abilities required dramatic genetic mutations, forebrain development, and structural changes in human vocalization anatomy, granting that todays higher primates do not have all of these necessary structures and processes for true human language, and  granting that neither the ancestors of humans or primate had such structures, it nonetheless contradicts the process of evolution, genetic change, and natural selection, that underlay all biology, to think that higher primates and our ancestors possessed none of these capabilities.

There has, on Darwinian principles, to be a continuum between the ancestors of humans and primates and between humans and primates today that diminishes the leap between primate vocalization and human language. The discovery that monkeys have standard atoms of vocalization they can attach to calls to inflect them and that they can assign new meanings to calls on the basis of inflections indicates that the discovery of rudimentary grammatical operations is not far away.

 

88. Monarch Butterfly Navigate With Antennal Clocks

Scientists continue to discover new animal mechanisms for migratory navigation. Birds and insects use perception of the Sun's position in the sky to guide their paths. If they followed the sun exactly, however, the movement of the sun across the sky would misdirect them. They correct their direction by adjusting the sun's position with an internal biochemical clock, the circadian, or daily, rhythm. Recent research shows that in butterflies the navigation mechanism is located in their antannae, not their brains.

The complexity of astronomical navigation in insects and animals, coordinating biochemical clocks in their bodies with the movement of the major astronomical bodies, with major features of the landscape over which they travel, and possibly magnetic compasses based on alignment of iron particles in brain cells, provide an evolutionary platform by which we can understand early human navigational tools.

Early humans obviously utilized second-hand animal-based navigation by following and learning from migrating animals, such as herds of deer; but we should not doubt that humans also utilized an astronomical event calendar that was preconscious long before they could think about it with self-awareness.

The valuated phenomenal world of early humans included stationary landscape features, such as cairns and paths; astronomical time-duration events, such as the diurnal motion of the sun, the monthly phases of the moon, and change of seasons; and cosmic time-duration events, such as the motion of the constellations and planets. These events were coordinated with human perception of time motion, involving at least two separate time calculation brain mechanisms, circadian cycles, and human life course events, such as onset of puberty and women's menstrual cycle. Such complicated time-calculation would have long preceded the building of megalithic astronomical calculators, such as Stonehenge. 

From Science (vol. 325, 25 September 2009, p. 1596), "Butterfly Navigation":

"Monarch butterflies emigrate to Mexico from varioius parts of North America in the fall and navigate with the aid of Sun compass. This navigational mechanism, also employed by migratory birds, uses the circadian clock to compensate for the positional change of the Sun in the sky throughout the day. This mechanism behind time-compensated Sun compass orientation has remained obscure. [Scientsts] now provide comprehensive data showing that the mechanism resides in the antannae of the butterflies, rather than the brain, as previously thought. The 'antennal clocks' found in the monarchs probably provide the primary timing mecnanism for Sun compass orientation. These findings reveal a further function for the antannae--a function that may extend widely to other insects that use this orientation mechanism."

The longer article is Charaloambos P. Kyriacou, "Unraveling Traveling," Science, vol. 325, 25 September 2009, p. 1629 ff.

87. I Knew Before I Knew

The brain is an integrated kluge of separately evolved brain organs. The higher brain integrates, but does not render inoperative all lower brain functions. The lower brain can perceive and feed contents into consciousness without self-awareness being aware of what it is being informed. Instance: I was flossing my teeth, preparatory to brushing. As flossed, a narrative thought sequence occurred to me. I recalled that several months ago, my wife offered me a chewy candy. I accepted, remarking at the time that this candy had pulled crowns off my teeth and I probably shouldn't eat one. I did; and a crown flipped off. I remembered this conversation and event while I was flossing. A short while later, I would guess at ten seconds later, a crown came off a tooth. I was surprised and dismayed; it was unexpected. Nonetheless, it seems clear in retrospect that my sensory system had perceived some sign that the crown was loose and informed my conscious mind of the fact by replaying memories of the previous occasion in which a crown came off. My lower brain was aware of the impending loss of the crown, from some sensory signals involved in flossing and sensing my teeth; my higher brain and self-consciousness were not aware until after the crown came off and I felt it rattling around my mouth. I knew what was going to happen, before I knew it had happened, without being aware that I had the foreknowledge.

Presumably, this foreknowledge provided by the lower brain organs was related to some action systems. By informing me of a previous event with a loose crown, perhaps my lower brain was asking me to stop flossing, because continued flossing would flip off this loose crown. I did not pay attention until too late. Earlier in human evolution and in the evolution of other vertebrates with lower brain functions, the lower brain must have organized action in this preconscious way, in the absence of higher brain function and self-consciousness.

We know that there are lower brain visual perception pathways that do not involve the higher brain. They can perceive and initiate motor response without the person being conscious of what is happening. What is interesting to me, about this case of lower brain perception, is that the lower brain apparently fed a memory narrative to the high brain consciousness in an effort to intervene in my doomed course of action.

86. Beneficial and Harmful Bacteria in the Human Body and Family-Kin Genetic Relation

See my discussion, here. There appears be some concordance between the genetic line distinguishing family and kin and persons not genetically related, and the cultural line of cooking and cleanliness practices, as these relate to ingestion of bacteria through feces.

85. The Event Driven Life

What would life be like in which the basic ur-value of path is missing? It would have to be an event-driven life, organized by conditioning, around the other basic values. A dog's life is probably the closest to an event-driven life that we can observe easily. Of course, we are only speculating, as we have no direct observation of a dog's experience of its own life. But to appearances, a dog lives from event to event. It remembers fearful events, which condition its behavior. It remembers pleasant events, such as eating. For instance, once having been attacked by other dogs who emerged suddenly from behind an opaque fence, my dog forever avoids walking close to an opaque fence. Once having been given a treat at 4 PM, my dog forever seeks me out at exactly 4 PM, even accounting for daylight savings time changes, for her treat. These are simply conditioned behaviors related to basic value of  exchange. There is no apparent evidence that my dog connects these events with a path value, or a story about herself, or a notion of her life's journey. She doesn't appear to have a life-path value. (I don't know how I would test for the existence of such a value, I confess.)  Perhaps her sleep pattern is indirect argument that she does not have a notion of her path or journey. For she sleeps between the major events of her life--morning food, morning exercise, afternoon treat, evening food, evening exercise. Being asleep she obviously has REM sleep and dreams; but if her dreams are anything like human dreams, they do not have a coherent narrative, but largely jump from one fear imagery to another fear imagery, with occasional imagery of pleasure (she will sometimes smack her lips as if eating, but his is rare).

Per our darwinian assumption--that higher primates share in kind if not in quantity--human characteristics, we should expect to see some rudimentary source for a path value even in my dog. Where might it lie? Perhaps it lies in my dog's perception of pack leader activity. At home, my wife and I are the pack leaders. My dog clearly anticipates our activity at certain times of the day, such as my wife taking our dog with her to a horse boarding stable and my giving my dog a treat at 4 PM. So here expectation of a future event brought by a pack leader might constitute a rudimentary path, a segment of a path so to speak. If such expectation bridge sleep periods, perhaps we could say that a path from event to event exists in her mind.

84. The Shift in Values in the Evolution from Paleolithic to Neolithic Human Society

In The Nature of Paleolithic Art (University of Chicago, 2005) R. Dale Guthrie summarizes scientific research (anthropological, archaeological, ethnology, DNA) regarding the shift, 10,000-12,000 BP (years ago Before Present), from paleolithic society of the late Pleistocene to neolithic society in the Holocene.  He also proposes the role of climatic/environmental change in nature of human society.

The Pleistocene was the glacial era in which anatomically modern humans--homo sapiens--left Africa, about 70,000 BP and emerged in the Middle East, Eurasia, and south Asia by 40,000 BP. (See Wikipedia Homo Sapien.) Homo sapiens replaced other hominid branches, notably the Neanderthals, with whom they co-existed for thousands of years without much, if any,  interbreeding.

Until the neolithic, homo sapiens existed mainly along the fringers of the vast glacial zone that spread across the northern hemisphere from northern North America in the east to Europe in the West. They lived in low population density scattered in hunter-gatherer bands not likely to have exceeded 30 persons. Intrabands members were genetically related families. Women married outside their bands of birth, but bands were not matrilinear. Band society was horizontal with gender specialization of roles. Adult men hunted the large mammal fauna of the glacial epoch. Women and children stayed in camp. Bands migrated frequently, at least seasonally, following animal herds (mammoths, horses, bison, etc.) Social roles were primarily cooperative, rather than competitive. Warfare does not appear to have been practiced. Archaeologists have discovered no paleolithic fortifications. There are no paleolithic artistic depicts of shields.

The famous paleolithic cave paintings are the most famous "artistic" products of this culture, but it is likely that other art products, such as personal body ornamentation and clothing ornamentation, which do not preserve well archaeologically, were also well practiced.   Cave art was--Guthrie's somewhat controversial but convincing thesis--literal and realistic. The most skilled cave art representations of animals are exceedingly accurate, undoubtedly the result of years of careful observations of game by hunters. They are abstract only in the sense that not every detail of observed animals are depicted in painted images, only the features of high interest to the hunter-artist. (The main purpose of Guthrie's book is to explain the nature of the paleolithic cave art.) 

Neolithic society emerged suddenly, in a matter of a few thousand years, out of paleolithic society. Neolithic society was built on much higher population density and permanent (or semi-permanent) habitation. Neolithic people lived in tribal villages with as many as 200 or more persons. They practiced agriculture and technologically enhanced "farming" of, especially, fisheries. The fishhook was a neolithic invention. Villages were organized around long-term (annual) storage of surplus foods. Village society was vertically organized. Archaeological evidence of burials indicates stratification and hierarchical organization of authority. A village had a tribal chief. Competition replaced cooperation among men, and a warrior class probably emerged. Warfare was practiced.

Neolithic art was dramatically different from paleolithic art. Neolithic art was formalized, abstract, and stylized. It was linked to social identities. There is indirect evidence it was related to ceremonial rituals and practices.  The art does not show the careful observation of nature or the literal representation of nature of paleolithic art. Neolithic art is highly abstract and symbolic ina modern sense. The images do not provide a guide to specific flora and fauna, but point symbolically to concepts shared by the culture which produced the images. Scenes of battles, with warriors holding spears and shields, are common in neolithic art. We do not know how literal accurate the battle depictions are (numbers of persons in a battle and their formation, for instance.)

The shift in social organization and in artistic style indicates a profound shift in human values from the paleolithic human to the neolithic human. Guthrie proposes that the shift in climate from the glacial epoch to the Interglacial Era (the one in which we now live) is mainly responsible for the shift. The shift occurred suddenly. An unusual alignment of Saturn and Jupiter slightly changed the Earth's orbit, and also the sun's position, to bring the earth closer to the sun. The earth as a result received more sunlight and began to warm. The glaciers retreated. Vegetation grow abundantly. Greenhouse gases increased, further increasing the warmth, leading to greater rainfall. The resulting climate is called the "Climatic Optimum". The large mammal herds of the pleistocene epoch declined, and smaller, more abundant fauna replaced them. Humans invented new technologies to farm the abundant wildlife and harvest vegetable foods. With abundance of food and less stressful climatic conditions, human reproduction and survival increased and, as a result, human population increased. The increased human population organized itself into sedentary villages.

The question of interest to us here is, where did the new values of the neolithic, tribal, village society come from? Guthrie argues that neolithic values must have arisen on a paleolithic platform--a platform of human genetics, human nature, social organization, and cultural practices. We must assume, for instance, that neolithic religious beliefs (in the supernatural) were built on some form of paleolithic belief in the supernatural, about which we have little material evidence. Similarly, the neolithic religious concept of supernatural agencies (by gods, for instance, and other non-human entities) must have been built on paleolithic beliefs, about which we have, again, little evidence. (A few paleolithic burial sites have been found, but they contain few artifacts. Guthrie argues that burial must have been practiced at least for practical, if not religious, reasons.)

The values embedded in the paleolithic platform would, in turn, have been built on the biology of homo sapiens as large mammals and higher primates. The nature of homo sapiens as higher primates and large mammals, living among other large mammals which they hunted, is one of Guthrie's main themes. In terms of my speculation in this values journal, homo sapien values would have been built around the five major ur values: objective-object, frame, metric, path, and transaction.

In other posts, we will explore (1) how these five ur values would have instantized and materialized in the pleistocene world and (2) how they would have been transfigured but remain present in neolithic values.

83. Children and Symbolism

Analyses of symbolism by historians and philosophers of art, anthropologists, and cognitive archaeologists often carry the bias that adults make symbols, because symbolism is an intellectually freighted meaning-making activity. Langer's Philosophy In A New Key corrects this bias, because she sees presentational symbol-making as an innate, constant human activity going on in all human minds from earliest childhood to oldest age.

R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art (University of Chicago, 2005), "The Lost Children of Paleolithic Archaeology" (pp. 115-117), corrects this bias in the Ice Age art of the Mammoth Steppe. To his analysis, children were responsible for a large percentage of the paintings and drawings and for many hand prints and artistic beginner's sketches.

Analysing symbolism from the point of view of the child, who thinks with symbols (and not just language symbols), invents symbols, communicates with nonlinguistic as well as linguistic symbols, and uses symbols  and materializes symbols in play, helps us to understand that symbolism is an elementary mental (and not necessarily cognitive, in the sense of higher reasoning) function. In the child, symbolism would be closer to the lower brain, in the sense of being less censored and repressed by the languaged based higher brain.

82. Symbol

Susanne K. Langer. Philosophy In A New Key; A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. (1942, Harvard University Press; reprint, 1958, The New American Library, Mentor Books).

A symbol is related to a sign in its form and function, but a symbol is more complicated than a sign. A sign is an object [e.g., material object, or event, or a bodily gesture or expression] that points to another object.

A symbol is two things at once.  A symbol points, functioning sometimes as a sign and sometimes simply by referring, to an object or to an idea about an object. A symbol also is an idea that represents an object;  (pp. 28,37, 61, 67, 70). When we say that an idea "represents" an object, we mean that the idea, as an abstraction, contains enough of the characteristics of the object that a person can think about the idea, rather than thinking about the object itself.

Suppose we are driving a car and see a traffic picture for Los Angeles. The picture depicts a stylized arrow pointing right and has the name "Los Angeles" printed underneath the arrow.  We know the picture is a sign that points to Los Angeles [a sign that points to a road that will lead to the city named, Los Angeles].

We might drive down that road, going toward Los Angeles, and see another traffic picture. This picture has a stylized depiction of a cuckoo bird and has the name "Los Angeles" printed under the depiction of the cuckoo bird. This picture is not a sign like the previous traffic sign with the arrow. This picture does not point literally in a geograhical direction toward the physical city named, Los Angeles. This picture is, rather, a symbol. Seeing the picture, the picture invokes in the viewer a popular, somewhat funny, idea about Los Angeles. The idea is that the people who live in Los Angeles are a little crazy. So a symbol is an object that "points" to an idea about another object, in the sense of bringing that idea into the mind of the viewer (this function is also called denoting, about which, see below). The symbol is not literally pointing to the idea, but is invoking by association the idea that Los Angeles has weird people living in it. This kind of "pointing" is also call "representing"; so we say that the symbol represents the city [represents an idea about the city]. Langer says, the symbol is a vehicle for thinking about something (p. 63); in this case, the symbol of the cuckoo is a vehicle for thinking about the city, Los Angeles.

A symbol is also an abstraction. It does not contain all the features of the object to which it refers and which it represents. It is not a mental or material replica of its object. The symbol contains one or a few features recognizable as properties of the object to which it refers. Take another example of Los Angeles. Los Angeles is often pictured [symbolized] as a landscape profile, with a cluster of skyscrapers in the foreground and the profile of mountains in the near background. Here, only three characteristics of the city are present in the symbol: the skyscrapers, the mountain range, and the nearness of the skyscrapers to the mountains.

Words are symbols. There are three kinds of word symbols--verbal, gestural [performed], and written [drawn, printed]. A verbal word is a pattern of sounds emitted by a speaker. The spoken word represents an idea that is in the mind of the speaker. When heard by a listener, the verbal word invokes an idea in the mind of the listener. When the speaker says, "cuckoo", the speaker might have in her mind a (mental) picture of a cuckoo bird. When the listener hears the spoken word, "cuckoo", the listener's mind calls up a (mental) picture of cuckoo bird. The listener knows that the speaker also has a picture of a cuckoo bird in her mind; so the speaker has communicated to the listener that she, the speaker, is thinking about a cuckoo bird. Langer says, the verbal word-symbol is a vehicle for communicating an idea about something (pp. 61); in this case, the verbal word-symbol communicates an idea about the city, Los Angeles.

A gestural or performance word is an act. For instance, in a conversation, one person asks of another, where are you going? The other persons answers by raising her hand to the side of her head and with a finger drawing a circle in the air. Most persons in such a conversation would recognize the gesture as signifying "cuckoo-land", that is, Los Angeles.

Signs and symbols perform three functions. They denote [denotation], connote [connotation], and signify [signification] (pp. 64-66, 73-74, 100, 104,236-240).  Denotation is the function of referring to a specific object [person, place, thing, event, state of affairs, etc.] by a proper name (e.g., "Turin"--a city in Italy). Connotation is the concept of the object being denoted. Connotation is what you need to know in order to know what it is that has a name, i.e., what has been denoted. Suppose I tell someone, go say hello to Harry. To understand this instruction, you must know that "Harry" refers to--denotes--a specific person; you must also know what a person is. For instance, you must know that proper names like Harry are generally reserved to human beings with unique personalities, that is, persons. Understanding the person-hood of the person named Harry is necessary to know that "Harry" refers to a person, not a rock, or a momentary cloud formation, or the sound of a truck backfiring. Signification is the association of emotion or pragmatic concern to an object or experience. Generally, signification says that the symbol is meaningful, that it related to something else--it denotes something that has connotation.

Langer's central thesis is that there are two kinds of symbols: discursive and presentational (pp. 75-94, 127-). Discursive symbols are symbols that, to be understood, must be spoken of and/or thought about in a sequence or side-by-side with one another. Words are discursive symbols. To be understood, they have to be strung together in a sentence. If spoken, the word-symbols are expressed sequentially, one after the other. If the words are expressed in a printed sentence, they are read as a group, one beside the other.

Many philosophers believe that only language-based sentences of word-symbols can carry ideas. Langer does not agree. She argues that there are pre-rational symbols, which she calls presentational symbols. Presentational symbols are the non-linguistic, pre-linguistic organization of sensations into concepts, or categories. Presentational symbols bring together feelings [emotional valuations] and images [and other sensory reports--sounds, touches, temperatures, etc.] in similarity groupings (direct resemblence, analogical, and metaphorical groupings) of sensations. Presentation symbols combine concrete representation of a material world as reported by the senses with rudimentary, implicit abstraction through grouping.

Langer argues that presentational symbolizing is a distinct realm of thought. The mind continually engages in presentational symbolizing. Presentational symbolizing is going on even when the mind is also consciously thinking using discursive symbols. Some of the products of presentational symbolizing bubble up to the language-based thinking processes of the mind. In this way, presentational symbols are intermediate between the material world as reported by the senses and the highly abstract, language-based thinking. Most presentational symbols, however, express themselves in ritual [i.e., performance], art, and music.  Presentational symbols are our basic, human connection to the material world. They are the basis of experience and of rational thought.

81. Natural History and Values

Ref:

Holmes Rolston III. Genes, Genesis and God: Values and Their Origin in Natural and Cultural Human History. Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh 1997.

80. Mediation of Sexual Behavior By Pheromones and Mediation of Territoriality

We know that human sexual behavior is mediated by pheromones; we know now that mediation by both aerosol and contact hormones is intricately complicated, far beyond what human consciousness can identify. The pheromone control of animal sexual behavior is undoubtedly even more complicated. All this being so, I assume, because in evolution reproduction is central. Food is also central to maintaining life, of course, so presumably food behavior is mediated by pheromones. For instance, in pack mammals, dominance hierarchy establishes food acquisition behavior and feeding order. Since territoriality is important for the organization of both sexual behavior and food behavior, I infer that territoriality must also be intricately mediated and to a large degree controlled by pheromones, beyond the marking behavior that I have discussed so far. The world of experience realized by animals, proto-humans, and humans is built upon a rich, dense, complicated, territorially bounded universe of unconscious hormone and pheromone mediated, ecologically situated behavior.

79. Sign

Susanne K. Langer. Philosophy In A New Key; A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. (1942, Harvard University Press; reprint, 1958, The New American Library, Mentor Books).

"The use of signs is the very first manifestation of mind. It arises as early in biological history as the famous 'conditioned reflex,' by which a concomitant of a stimulus takes over the stimulus-function. The concomitant becomes a sign of the condition to which the reaction is really appropriate." (Pp. 35-36.)

Traditional illustration: As a natural behavior, a dog salivates when it smells/sees food. This behavior is natural and innate. The food is an unconditioned stimulus and the salivation is an unconditioned response. If a bell is rung at the moment the dog smells food and begins to salivate, and this arrangement is repeated a few times, the dog will begin to salivate without the presence of food, or when the smell of food is (experimentally) suppressed. The bell is a conditioned stimulus.

In Langer's view, the bell is a sign pointing to the food.

For the animal, conditioning is learning by association.

Langer casts her discussion of conditioning into mentalistic language by saying that, when the dog responds to the bell with salivating, the dog is responding to a sensation (the bell). Thus she has "interiorized" associational learning, putting learning inside mind, where mind is in a Cartesian dualism.

"... the use of signs is certainly a mental function. It is the beginning of intelligence. As soon as sensations function as signs of conditions in the surrounding world, the animal receiving them is moved to exploit or avoid these conditions." (P. 36.)

Further, the animal can build up a repertoire of signs  which are conditioned stimuli (a sign-language [but not language in the sense that humans have language]). Learning signs as conditioned stimuli can proceed by trial and error. (P. 36.) The animal has the opportunity to adapt to a complex environment and/or a changing environment through such associational learning.

Not all signs are external objects (or sounds or odors or events, etc.). Langer says, expressions, e.g., facial expressions (p. 47), and gestures (p. 53) can also be signs.  (See how she uses the term, expressions, when discussing Carnap and Russell; p. 79.) A person might have the facial expression of an upward pulled mouth with teeth partially exposed.  Or make a gesture with the hand. Expressions and gestures are, for Langer, free signs, in the sense that they do not come with pre-determined referents. By Langer's argument, I would, with the same logic, argue that "feelings" (emotions) can be signs. (P. 47.)  The organism can associate those free feeling-signs with whatever referent it wishes. In this freedom of assignment lies the essence of play with signs that allows signs to become symbols.

Emotions have evaluative function in the lower brain. When humans see a face or body type and posture, the lower brain evaluates what it sees as hostile or hateful or friendly, etc. This evaluation is prior to analysis using logic and prior to language treatment of the image. Emotions are therefore signs, in Langer's theory, pointing to behaviorial responses. Today, studies have shown that emotion reaction is to generalized (rather than specific) facial and bodily contortions and arrangements. Our brain can identify a friendly smile in a round, white face with lots of hair on the head, as well as an oblong, black face with little hair on top, etc.  In Langer's view, this generalized ability to read faces is reading abstractions. Further, the emotions are pointing to future behavior on the part of the persons whose face and body are being viewed and to future response to the emotion on the part of the viewer. These characteristics would make emotions symbolic in function rather than signs for pointing (see below).

Signs have special characteristics that distinguish them from symbols. In nonhuman animals:

• Signs are specific, not general. The sign itself is not abstract. It is a concrete bell.
• A sign refers to a specific, concrete referent. The bell is a sign pointing to concrete food of the sort with which the dog is familiar (or to which it innately responses when it smells it).
• Signs point to objects or conditions that are present (not elsewhere, or  future or past [this is ambiguous in Langer]).
• Signs do not point to abstractions, that is, signs do not point to ideas.
• Signs provoke behavior. (P. 36.)
• Animals "do not distinguish between natural signs and artificial or fortuitous signs" (p. 59)
• Words cannot be signs for animals; presumably Langer means that words, as arrangements of sound, can be signs (just as the wind could be) for animals; but words, as bearing language meaning, cannot.

Among humans, signs take on different capabilities.

• Signs are used to "represent" things (p. 37), not simply to point to ("indicate") them.
• Signs can refer to things past, present, and future (p.58).
• Signs can refer to things, events, and conditions (p. 58).
• Humans distinguish between natural and artificial signs (p. 58-59).
• Signs are guides to practical activities (p. 59).
• Words, as bearers of language meaning, can be signs.

When Langer discusses signs as so used by humans, she says they are "signs" (putting the word in quotation marks), or " 'substitute signs' " (putting the term in single quotation marks--quoting someone else?), that is, not really signs at all, but symbols.

Signs (along with symbols) have meaning. Regarding signs, the meaning of a sign is its meaning to some other organism and is the referent of the sign. (Pp. 36-37, 55, 56-57.) Meaning is a function of signs, not a property or quality of them (pp. 56-57).

Objects, events, conditions, etc., have significance as they are signs (or symbols).(Pp. 58-59.)

Experience is the product of prior-existing signs (and/or symbols). (Langer made this point as a remark and I can't find the page reference! P. 60?) In this sense, experience is what we have learned, as signs and symbols are the basis for all learning.

78. The Mount Toba Eruption and the Population Bottleneck

From the Wikepedia article on the Mt. Toba supervolcano eruption:

According to the Toba catastrophe theory, 70,000 to 75,000 years ago a supervolcanic event at Lake Toba, on Sumatra, reduced the world's human population to 10,000 or even a mere 1,000 breeding pairs, creating a bottleneck in human evolution. The theory was proposed in 1998 by Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

...

Some geological evidence and computed models support the plausibility of the Toba catastrophe theory. The Greenland ice core data displays an abrupt change around this time, but in the corresponding Antarctic data the change is not easily discernible. Ashes from this eruption of Lake Toba, located near the equator, should have spread all over the world.

Genetic evidence suggests that all humans alive today, despite their apparent variety, are descended from a very small population, perhaps between 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs about 70,000 years ago.

Using the average rates of genetic mutation, some geneticists have estimated that this population lived at a time coinciding with the Toba event. These estimates do not contradict the consensus estimates that Y-chromosomal Adam lived some 60,000 years ago, and that Mitochondrial Eve is estimated to have lived 140,000 years ago, because Toba is not conjectured to be an extreme bottleneck event, where the population is reduced to a small number of breeding pairs.

Gene analysis of some genes shows divergence anywhere from 60,000 to 2 million years ago, but this does not contradict the Toba theory, once again because Toba is not conjectured to be an extreme bottleneck event. The complete picture of gene lineages (including present-day levels of human genetic variation) allows the theory of a Toba-induced human population bottleneck.

Recent work by archaeologist Michael Petraglia suggests that in fact modern humans survived relatively unscathed in at least one settlement in India.

Values genetically incorporated into prehuman and hominoid brains, as a general adaptation of many branching pre-human species, would have been made extremely uniform as a result of the population bottleneck.

77. Sign and Symbol

Susanne K. Langer. Philosophy In A New Key; A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. (1942, Harvard University Press; reprint, 1958, The New American Library, Mentor Books).

In Philosophy In A New Key, Langer argues several large theses. She argues, first, that non-linguistic play and manipulation of symbols is the general source of human mental life, including logical reasoning with language and mathematics. The implication of this thesis is that that human cognition is not fully expressed by and is not confined to language. Symbolization is " 'the essential act of thought' ". (She quotes A. D. Ritchie, The Natural History of the Mind; p. 34.) It is "the essential act of mind" (p. 45).

Her second thesis is that there are two kinds of symbols, discursive and presentational. Discursive symbols are "the vehicle of propositional thinking" (p. 66). Words are discursive symbols.

Presentational symbols are abstract presentations of objects. Out of the continual flux of senations that come from the sensory organs to the brain, the mind constructs images (whether visual or aural, etc.) of an "individual object" (pp.89-90). These images are abstract symbols, because they are abstracted from the changing forms of sensations. They are not, however, general symbols, but individual symbols. (They cannot be translated, as general, discursive symbols, like words, can. A picture, which is a presentational symbol, cannot be translated.)

Presentational symbols that are the basic sense-experience available to the mind. "The symbolic materials given to our senses, the Gestalten or fundamental perceptual forms which invite us to construe the pandemonium of sheer impression into a world of things and occasions, belong to the 'presentational order'. They furnish the elementary abstractions in terms of which ordinary sense-exerience is understood." (p. 90). They are the source of ritual and art. Presentational symbols are not pre-rationa and are not non-rational; but they are prior to the kind of rational thinking that language and other manipulation of discursive symbols involves. Her word is, that presentational symbolization is "pre-rationative" (p. 46).

Her third thesis is that symbolization is a basic, and uniquely human, need. It occurs for no practical reason or functional reason. Symbolization occurs all the time and constitutes the most pervasive, continuing, universal human mental activity. The need to symbolize produces a continual stream of symbols in an activity that is closer to spontaneous and unintentional play, than to goal-directed reasoning. (Pp. 45-47.)

Her goal in this work is ambitious. She believes that the notion of human cognition based on symbolization, especially her thesis--that basic mental activity springs out of a continual, free, playful stream of presentational symbol-making--would create a "new conception of 'human mentality' " (p. 32).

Langer's work draws upon the generation of science and scholarship in human and primate anthropology, sociology, philosophy, art criticism, and psychology prior to the completion of the writing of this book in 1941. She reaches from Peirce's pioneering research on signs to Cassirer's work on symbols. She cites the central German language scholarship. She is particularly influenced by Wittgenstein's Tractatus and by Gestalt psychology. Her work is therefore dated. In the several decades after its publication, several revolutions in academic theorizing changed the fields she touched. Wittgenstein changed his basic theory in Philosophical Investigations; Chomsky changed linguistics with his theory of a universal, innate, semantic structure; Derrida introduced deconstruction to semiotics. Nonetheless, Langer's work remains valuable as a coherent exposition of signs and symbols and their integration into a general theory of human mind. Her work provides a means of raising questions about my own theory being developed in this values journal.

Revised. April 18, 2009.

76. A Landscape Is A Body Action Arena

The values that create a landscape are themselves created by body activity of the organism--animal or early human or human. The activity might be as simple as urinating; it might be as complicated as constructing a cairn of rocks. The values are subsequently encountered also through body activity.  The valuated landscape constitutes in a sense a 'body action arena'. (I am avoiding phenomenological term 'world'.) The construction of this world is non-conscious on the part of the animal/humanoid actor. It occurs within a Darwinian natural selection situation (competition for survival, selection of chance structures and behaviors in a reproducing population). In any eventual conscious realization of this landscape, the existence and activity of the acting animal/humanoid must have a position in the structure of that consciousness.

75. A 'Landscape' Is A 'State of Affairs'

A landscape is a demarcated geological-biological environment. The demarcations are "values" (objects, paths, frames, etc.), which can be as simple as biological markings. The landscape is, from our theoretical-analytical point of view, an organism's valuated world. For the organism which lives within the landscape it has created, the landscape is a "state of affairs". That is to say, the valuated world is a fact.