Walter Logeman: Journal
So much on my mind – I can’t keep up with it!
Books to read on relationships – “Marriage is the medium”
I have been reflecting on the role of evolution in relationships.
An hypothesis follows and then a long list of books. Continue reading “Evolution and human behaviour and culture.”
Been posting a few items about books here. Very casual. Hardly posted a thing this year, and see post on Evernote below re that. Feel some motivation coming on.
The motivation is to post book covers and snippets because I am loving my ebooks – have for years. I don’t really want the paper books anymore. But I miss the affordance of the stacks of books lying around unread. They are now just a line of links on a screen and sometimes I can’t even recall why I have the book sample or who recommended it. There are so many samples, just a list! So I’ll post unread books here, awaiting reviews.
Once paper books are read they can go on a shelf somewhere. Even the pile in the garage. I can look at them when I tidy up, and think, oh yes I remember that.
OK, so there is a purpose for the blog, to notice what I have in my ebook library in some sort of meaningful way. So out with Evernote for books – and onto the blog with them. Expect more flimsy post with cover pictures.
I will update posts too, I often do that here, they need edits and additions as they go up very rough.
I tried Goodreads for this purpose, however for some reason I am more attracted to my own blog, at least first. Social media can come later, if at all.
~
There is already plenty here in the blog to stir reminiscences. There are references to books back to 1999. As I went back to look I found a dead link to this item
Malcolm Gladwell on Blockbusters and books. Collaborative filtering!
web.archive.org/web/20000301085403/http://www.gladwell.com/1999_10_04_a_sleeper.htm
Just six authors–John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Dean Koontz, and Danielle Steel–account for sixty-three of the books on the list. In a world more dependent on collaborative filtering, Grisham, Clancy, King, and Steel would still sell a lot of books. But you’d expect to see many more books like “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”–many more new writers–make their way onto the best- seller list. And the gap between the very best selling books and those in the middle would narrow. Collaborative filtering, Hagel says, “favors the smaller, the more talented, more quality products that may have a hard time getting visibility because they are not particularly good at marketing.”
It seems he was wrong though.
Must revisit, interesting. What has happened 15 years later to those lists?
Kevin Kelly Interview – transcript:
http://edge.org/conversation/the-technium
Sums up many of his ideas. I find his clarity inspiring. There are just some ideas he explains well.
with new tools:
So you have the power to do evil expanded. You have the power to do good expanded. You think that’s a wash. In fact, we now have a choice that we did not have before, and that tips it very, very slightly in the category of the sum of good.
Does it? I can’t quite make that moral leap, but what is clear is that there are more options. For the baddies too! The root of evil may be ignorance and there fore as knowledge tools improve so does good?
I like this idea too:
It may be that for us to really master the issues of attention management, critical thinking, learning how technological devices work and how they bite back, all this techno-literacy may be something that we have to spend several years being trained to do. Maybe you can’t just learn it by hanging around people who do it or else just hanging around trying to learn it by osmosis. It may require training and teaching, a techno-literacy, and learning how to manage your attention and distractions is something that is probably going to require training.
I think the same about relationship. We now have so many relationship tools that need teaching that we need, as he puts it (in relationship to new media):
We know that from plenty of studies of literate and illiterate people from the same culture—that reading and writing changes how your brain works. That only came about because of four or five years of deliberate practice and study…
I get inspired like this with Kevin Kelly usually because I like what he says about the future and tools, but sense that I have a psychological perspective that he, and the whole Edge buch miss.
The evolution of psyche.
Then I want to get writing.
I also like:
There’s this conundrum, this dilemma of remaining different while connected, because if you’re just different but not connected, there’s no power in that, and that’s actually easy to do, but can you remain different while connected? You’re different in certain degrees, yet you’re part of the uniform standard. So it’s like you don’t want to make up new words that don’t mean anything. You want to write a book that uses the standard words in the dictionary, so you’re going to be different while connected to the standard. You’re connected to the English language, but you’re going to be different with what the words say.
I suppose that is what we get heretics, they speak to powers they are connected with. Not just to the desert.
I now want to read the “new economy”
Kevin Kelly (What does Technology Want? p196) quotes George Lucas:
Just maybe that is about to change (Perhaps on December 21?? 🙂
I think we are in a rapid change right now. It will be more visible soon. I think the feminist consciousness, the decline of religion, urbanisation, education are all leading to a shift in consciousness that means there will be ever more psychotherapists.
See also:
The book by Kevin Kelly “What does technology want continues stimulate my thinking.
He is eloquent on the evolution of tech. To make his case he draws on parallels in biological evolution. He comes up with principle after principle that are deep insights into any change process. He reminds me constantly of Frederick Engles and on the dialectics of nature. There are principles of change that go beyond one sphere.
Today it is this S curve that grabbed me.
You would need to read the chapter to fully get it, but take the example of rail road air as the three levels of technology that work together to ensure that transport increased at a constant level, of say miles, speed and lower costs.
What I do is relate this to the evolution of psychotherapy. Or lets call it conscious intimate relationships. A mere 40 years ago there were about 10 therapists/counsellors in Christchurch, now it is more like 400. What is that curve about? The psyche is on the move!
I imagine the three technologies are:
Analytical psych
Humanistic Psych
And now still in the lower reaches of its s curve, relationship psych
Freud, Moreno, Jung… methods are known by their founders.
This is because they are working in the realm of relationships. They are included in the science.
They are not working with things.
Marx is the same.
The objective thing they are working with is not objective in the way things are – at least things on the surface are objects.
In so far as we are part of such a modality we are part of a community around that person. We are part of a community of practice. A language community.
The Buddhists have lineage, so do psychologists but we don’t acknowledge that so easily.
It would be better to acknowledge our whakapapa in the psychological realms of our work in a more conscious way.
Later: Sunday, 7 January, 2018
Love that idea of our psychological whakapapa. Maybe there is a whakapapa of science too?
I think I’d like to research and rewrite the Moreno one. I think it is not so much existential as relational .
Science Weekly Extra: Craig Venter on the science of synthetic biology
Really quite an amazing story.
I could well get a little bio printer in my lifetime for body bits. (that might have been another podcast) Almost certainly I’ll print out my very potent flu jabs.
Loved this discussion:
Bryan Boyd Interviewed by Kim Hill
Here is the book:
I will read the book. But as I listened I was burning to join in on the discussion. I have since my days studying under Prof. Robert Bigelow in the late 60s at Canterbury had an understanding of “gene pools”. The concept makes sense of how some things might benefit the survival of a species even when individuals do not have more babies.
Brian Boyd touched on this lightly in the interview, I’ll be interested to see if he does this more fully in the book.
The point is this: if lyrical poetry (or anything else) is useful to the group then only a few need to have a gene for it, and even if they individually don’t have more babies, the group as a whole might survive and a neighbouring group who does not have that gene in their pool might not.
I’ve been thinking about this in relationship to the purpose of monogamy. It seems that it has a special place in healing wounds from childhood. But this typically does not happen till after the crucial childbearing years, in the second reflective half of life. I think of the powerful impact even one or two healing couples can have in a group. They can foster relationship education as well. They might influence psychological health, and more robust grandchildren.
PS
Bigelow’s book here: Amazon – The Dawn Warriors
I’ve been reading Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants. One of the central thesis of the book is that evolution is not only driven by adaptation. There are two other forces at work: structural forces, ie the laws of physics and contingency, luck. What if Beethoven did not have a piano?
I’ll post the picture that impressed me again:
This is a central idea (from the book):
The progression of inventions is in many ways the march toward forms dictated by physics and chemistry in a sequence determined by the rules of complexity. We might call this technology’s imperative.
What is stirring me to write this post is that I listened to a podcast today on Tech Nation, Moira Gunn interviewing Adrian Bejan – details
It is uncanny, and totally in line with the Kevin Kelly theory of what is inevitable that these tow come up with the same ideas. This is the time when we make a shift from classical darwinism, to incorporate something marx might have called dialectical materialism.
More about & by Adrian Bejan here:
TEDxBucharest – Adrian Bejan – YouTube
Interview with ‘Design in Nature’ Author Adrian Bejan, Part One …
His book on Amazon:
This theory, Bejan calls it “Constructal Law” governs everything. From his book:
The constructal law is revolutionary because it is a law of physics—and not just of biology, hydrology, geology, geophysics, or engineering. It governs any system, any time, anywhere, encompassing inanimate (rivers and lightning bolts), animate (trees, animals), and engineered (technology) phenomena, as well as the evolving flows of social constructs such as knowledge, language, and culture. All designs arise and evolve according to the same law.
What excites me is that the same law – or rules of complexity, a law about change really, governs the psyche too. I think Jung was onto this with archetypes. These structures are universal across cultures.
Saturday, 02 July 2022
I’m reading his “The Physics of Life — The Evolution of Everything”. Its at odds with what I’m thinking now. It’s not remotly dialectical. It’s all billiard balls. Nevermind. One day I may sort this out. Just annoying right now.
Amazon
I’ve quoted a few things from this book on the blog already, so click the tag, Kevin Kelly and you will see my notes as I read the book.
I think its profound.
Its not just about the evolution of technology. He revises biological evolution in a radical way. Its not just him though, he draws on many latest developments in the field. The main thrust is captured in this image from the book.
