Thread "Sexism in comics and pop-culture?" in forum "Comic Talk and General Discussion *"

Posted at 5:07AM, Jul. 24, 2015

Bravo speaking with a crumbly English accent said:
'Twas ever thus!

XD
Sorry, I don't mean to make fun but that quote has been going around in the humour centre of my brain for days.

You make good points about repeating patterns but taking it to the nature level is a step way too far. As always.
I think part of the issue here us that humans are a highly culture based species: we grab onto ideas and concepts and turn them around and over and over for thousands of years till we think they're a part of us, like racial superiority or sexisim, religion, gods, souls, even langauge, the drive to refine technology, wear clothes, and rational thinking.
We copy ideas, sythasise them and pass them on to others and down through generations, like the flu virus…
It's Dawkins' greatest contribution to popculture: the meme.

Posted at 5:07AM, Jul. 24, 2015

By innate to the species I'm saying Society is a part of our nature. As uou habe said humans are social creatures. Societies face similar problems. It makes sense the same solutions would pop up without it being genetic but the ideas being passed on in a fashion similar to how a gene is passed on. The meme.o

Posted at 6:07AM, Jul. 24, 2015

I'm re-reading a fascinating book called 'I am a Strange Loop' by Doug Hosfstadter. He hold to the standard thinking that the physical part of our minds seems to do a lot of the 'pushing around' of behavior (causing us to act and think in all our myriad ways)… But, when our minds developed abstract thinking (ie. the ability to create mentally symbolic representations of real things) a paradigm shift occurred…
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It's currently impossible to reduce a mental symbol to its physical constituents (and due to the nature of how symbols reside in the brain, it may never be possible). There's no such thing as a 'Grandmother Cell' (a particular neuron that is responsible for remembering your grandmother) - symbols are not stored in distinct one-to-one physical patterns…
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But the really interesting part is it seems that our mental symbols (a emergent non-physical thing) can also do the 'pushing around'! My memory of my grandmother can induce a desire to see her, and I might just go get in the car and go do that!
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So… Culture!
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What is Culture but a giant collective mish-mash of symbols?! Clearly some powerful symbols, and while I'm not backing away from my previous assertions on the power of biological drives (I still believe they are the kick-starters of lots of our less-savory behaviors), I absolutely do believe that symbols (ie. culture) can certainly overpower them, perhaps much more than I was initially allowing!!

Posted at 6:08AM, Aug. 18, 2015

KimLuster: That's interesting! I wasn't aware of Hofstadter's book, but reading up on it, the argument sounds much like functionalism: Things can be causally effective not only due to their physical properties, but also due to their functional ones.

For example, there is nothing which all instances of any given word have in common which could be spelled out in purely physical terms - some are written in ink, some are contrast between pixels, and so on, not to mention all the (actual and potential) differences between typefaces -, but what they have in common is that they are used as the same word. This applies to all symbols (and symbolically mediated classifications, such as those pertaining to matters of gender, to tie this back to the thread's topic); and what lends disparate physical properties their symbolic ones is culture. So, yes, I agree: Culture is certainly causally effective by itself (i.e. not just in virtue of being physical).

Posted at 2:08PM, Aug. 18, 2015

Abt_Nihil: certainly worth a look! The author is essentially trying to say that 'Conciousness' is akin to a feedback-loop: mental symbology is an emergent phenomenon brought into being by the chemical and electric interplay of the brain's cells (standard thinking), but then the emergent mental symbols themselves seem to have a 'distinctness', a sort of existence impossible to describe using normal physical and biological terminology. Moreover, the symbols themselves seem to have causal power, the ability to make other parts of the brain 'do things', to make muscles move, the body performs actions…
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Who's pushing who around up there? :D Great reading! I certainly embrace parts of it - still deciding on the whole…

Posted at 1:08AM, Aug. 19, 2015

It sounds plausible to me, the way you describe it - except I think it's not just the brain from which these properties emerge, but also the interplay between people. So it's not really a loop to me, and only "emergent" in a not-quite-so-strange way.

Posted at 11:08AM, Aug. 19, 2015

Absolutely!
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You may be thinking something totally different but to me it kinda fits in with meme-theory. What is a meme but a symbolic mental pattern that is shared, passed along, edited, by lots of people? They can be thought of a mental viruses: they seem to want to propogate and spread, and just stick around! Almost like they're alive somehow…
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Even so, the idea of feedback loops is strange. Anyone who has ever played around with two mirrors, angling them just right where they reflect each in nest frames, seemingly to infinity - that still brings chills to me when I do it. Like I'm peeking into a hidden reality…

Posted at 4:08AM, Aug. 20, 2015

I'm also fascinated by both the meme-idea and infinite loops/recursion. I just think that minds aren't infinite loops. They are recursive, but finitely so. Physical processes can cause you to have certain mental properties, which in turn can cause physical processes, and so on - but not ad infinitum, at least not practically. Much the same way, I believe that you believe that I believe that you believe memes are fascinating. We can have higher-order beliefs such as these, but not infinitely higher orders. (But perhaps mirrors are this way too, since reflections have to stop at small enough scales, don't they?)

Posted at 10:08AM, Aug. 20, 2015

Yeah, it does seem there are limits - it may be that true infinite 'things' only exists as a mental concepts, or mathematical contructs like Pi or Phi…
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Even the illusory infinite feedback loops like the mirror-trick, or a microphone near a speaker. I'd imagine the mirror-illusion comes to an end once one of the reflections nears the size of a single photon… and of course the mic/speaker deal meets its physical limit in the volume capacity of the speaker (speakers can blow - this I know ;))

Posted at 8:08PM, Aug. 20, 2015

I'd guess the mirror trick ends when the light is too scattered and difuse to make another reflection- So it's like with your your mind loop thing: Things influence each other but they do so imperfectly, leading to errors that build and build till it's just meaningless blur.

Posted at 2:08AM, Aug. 21, 2015

Exactly, it's basically like information: Natural boundaries being noise (as Oz said, scattered light) and the limiting properties of the bearer (as Kim said, photons).