Category: Art of Violence
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We Are Not Scientists, Only Ideologues
There is no such thing as a mere scientist, or a merely scientific work. We have a myth that “science” and “scientists” operate objectively, but science does not operate, and we are not scientists. We are all operating as ideologues, with lofty ideals. Science is the slag we leave behind. Alchemists sought eternal youth and…
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How to Re-define Violence
I’ve lamented multiple times about how poor our language is when it comes to describing violence. People will say that soldiers killing each other in battle is “murder,” that a man walking toward a police officer with knife in hand “wasn’t doing anything,” that “silence is violence,” or that abortion is “child sacrifice” (in child…
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A Thorndike Approach to the Science of Violence
I just finished Lynn Thorndike’s History of Magic and Experimental Science, an 8-volume series with 5706 pages total (not including indices). I started reading it April 18, 2023 and got through three quarters of it in 8 months. I finished it today August 6, 2024 almost 8 months later. So on average, to finish this…
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The Recursion Solution
I’m now reading Elementary Structures of Kinship where Claude Levi-Strauss claims that the defining moment which transitioned man “from nature to culture” was the incest taboo. Others like Freud and Robin Fox have claimed the same. To them, the minimum human property (MHP) is “the incest taboo.” Linguists and scientists like Deacon, Wrangham, Chomsky, and…
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Kubrick Was Wrong About Apes
I think Kubrick’s 2001 would have been more correct if this ape had been smashing another ape skull. Kubrick was a fan of Raymond Dart and Robert Ardrey (author of the African Genesis and The Hunting Hypothesis). These men held that the defining moment of the “transition” from ape to man was our ability to…
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A Stuntman’s History of Violence
The city… is the source of violence, or the product of violence? Lewis Mumford’s The City in History says that the city acquired a propensity for a particularly harsh kind of violence with unlimited expansion due to the emergence of kings. Smith’s The Aztecs details the violence of the Aztec Triple Alliance and how it embarked…
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Machines Can’t Be Domesticated
In Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization the author writes that the machine was unique in that it was a human creation that could exist outside our own existence. For a while I thought that machines were simply a subset of language, but it seems there’s a differentiation worth making here. Humans encapsulate recursion into language,…
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Words Are Liminal by Nature
Much of modern science is an attempt to track data points between A and B. These are assigned values, numbers, etc. For example, if you select the color just at the transition between green and light blue you get a hex value of #00BBAA, aka verditer. It would be pointless for most people to know…
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From Violence to Sacrifice to Cooking
Richard Wrangham wrote in Catching Fire that the use of fire is what made us more human, or perhaps “transitioned” us to becoming human. Its ability to shrink the overall size of food and increase calorie density supposedly aided in brain growth. James George Frazer’s compilation of myths of the origins of fire is more…
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There Is No Bridge to Human Language
The standard model roughly goes along these lines: chimpanzees have hoots and grunts for conveying information, and so our shared, last common ancestor (LCA) evolved cognitively due to some external stimuli, allowing them to communicate more detailed information, producing human language’s words and symbols. Edward Gibson recently said on Lex Fridman that we invent words…