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> The culture, language and customs of contemporary California surfers and German football hooligans seems very different How so? Apart from the obvious perso

> The culture, language and customs of contemporary California surfers and German football hooligans seems very different How so? Apart from the obvious personality stereotypes you're drawing upon - chill vs aggressive, which exist in every culture, Germans and Californian cultures aren't that different. They have stop signs, alcohol laws, churches, jewellery stores, maps, family gatherings, weddings, funerals, christenings, horoscopes, sporting allegiances, dress codes, toilet and expectoration norms, sexual mores and food preparation standards. So too did the ancients. I'm wondering how different you imagine these were? I mean, their technologies, foods, footballs and built environment were different, as they are with Germans and Californians, but to what end, culturally?

nwienert 6y ago
Depends on how much you weigh Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis, but certainly since reading his work I’ve at least upped the prior that the answer is “incredibly different”. Another datapoint are the many remote and isolated tribes with wildly different cultures, for example not having the concept of object permanence.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  > I’ve at least upped the prior that the answer is “incredibly different”. How so? Care to elaborate a little?
  - nwienert 6y ago
    Read the book! Edit: super short summary, it’s possible before ~800 BC many people experienced hallucinations due to not having a theory of mind, oftentimes in the form of gods speaking to them quite literally. Which if you consider how embedded our theory of mind is now vs how prevalent and seriously belief in gods were previously, combined with how common hallucinations in children (Tulpas) and many mental “disorders” are, seems plausible. At some tipping point, trade, large scale civilization and theory of mind coalesced to suddenly remove this as a common mode of thought. I mean try to imagine living in a small tribe with no written language, no idea that you have a brain, a strong belief in the reality of god(s), no concept of science or logic, and many nights spent in the dark sharing ghost stories, and yea, it seems not that far fetched that you’d have a vastly different experience of reality including experiencing many things as not even being from “yourself” as opposed to manifestations of your own brain talking to itself in the form of your beliefs (gods).
okareaman 6y ago
Seems like redefining the word "different" to be essentially meaningless. Yes there are similarities, but that doesn't mean they aren't different.
- SkyBelow 6y ago
  Differences are relative, and the concept of difference is somewhat meaningless without reference to a scale. Is an ant and a pencil roughly the same size? Day to day scale, no? But larger scale than that and the importance of the difference increases. Consider an approximation for pi. Even the best approximation is an infinite number of digits off, but we have many that are so good even if we were dealing with resolutions of sub atomic particles at the scale of the universe, our those approximations are more than accurate enough. But if we were dealing with some math questions about the nature of numbers created from pi, even the best approximations are still not good enough to provide answers.

nwienert 6y ago

Depends on how much you weigh Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis, but certainly since reading his work I’ve at least upped the prior that the answer is “incredibly different”. Another datapoint are the many remote and isolated tribes with wildly different cultures, for example not having the concept of object permanence.

wombatmobile 6y ago
> I’ve at least upped the prior that the answer is “incredibly different”. How so? Care to elaborate a little?
- nwienert 6y ago
  Read the book! Edit: super short summary, it’s possible before ~800 BC many people experienced hallucinations due to not having a theory of mind, oftentimes in the form of gods speaking to them quite literally. Which if you consider how embedded our theory of mind is now vs how prevalent and seriously belief in gods were previously, combined with how common hallucinations in children (Tulpas) and many mental “disorders” are, seems plausible. At some tipping point, trade, large scale civilization and theory of mind coalesced to suddenly remove this as a common mode of thought. I mean try to imagine living in a small tribe with no written language, no idea that you have a brain, a strong belief in the reality of god(s), no concept of science or logic, and many nights spent in the dark sharing ghost stories, and yea, it seems not that far fetched that you’d have a vastly different experience of reality including experiencing many things as not even being from “yourself” as opposed to manifestations of your own brain talking to itself in the form of your beliefs (gods).

okareaman 6y ago

Seems like redefining the word "different" to be essentially meaningless. Yes there are similarities, but that doesn't mean they aren't different.

SkyBelow 6y ago
Differences are relative, and the concept of difference is somewhat meaningless without reference to a scale. Is an ant and a pencil roughly the same size? Day to day scale, no? But larger scale than that and the importance of the difference increases. Consider an approximation for pi. Even the best approximation is an infinite number of digits off, but we have many that are so good even if we were dealing with resolutions of sub atomic particles at the scale of the universe, our those approximations are more than accurate enough. But if we were dealing with some math questions about the nature of numbers created from pi, even the best approximations are still not good enough to provide answers.