(2007-10-17) Shalizi Cultural Software

Cosma Shalizi provides

• a couple links on Cultural Evolution, Memetic-s, etc.

• a review of J M Balkin's Cultural Software ISBN:9780300084504 - Balkin's main problem is that of shared cultural meaning --- how it is that multiple people can share pieces of Culture, and how this shared culture can change over time. Many proposed solutions have invoked supra-individual entities --- traditions, collective consciousnesses, Zeitgeisten, social totalities, cultures-as-such. Balkin rejects them all. He is too polite to their proposers to put it this way, but as explanations for collective phenomena, they are on all fours with saying that opium puts people to sleep because of its dormative virtue. Rather, as he puts it, the true solution is to be found below the level of the individual, rather than above it. It consists in taking his title quite literally. Computer software is information that instructs computers on how to process information. Cultural Software is information that changes how people process information.

• notes that Balkin's book is now a free EBook. I think he succeeds, but what he ends up with is 190-proof Liberal evolutionary Naturalism, which is mostly what I believe anyway. (He doesn't make much of the way he's recapitulating both the origins of American Pragmatism in evolutionary and psychological science, e.g. this, and its outcome in a liberal social philosophy, but I can't imagine it's escaped his notice.)