From: Van oost Kenneth (kennethvanoost@belgacom.net)
Date: Sat 15 Feb 2003 - 11:00:46 GMT
Grant,
> Just as the ax made cutting down trees easier and log houses feasible, the
> ax did not create itself. Thus the ax became an important part of the
> environment of the humans who had them but could not have come into
> existence without human enginuity. Some human conceived and made the
first
> one and changed his environment with it. Others learned from him and the
> meme spread. But it was humans who spread it and provided the environment
> for it to exist in -- not the meme.
>> " Yes it did " as the final endresult of some linear process_ beginning
with the problem how to knock down trees for shelter, timber, wood
and building material, in the understanding that our ancestors knew what
these were. The primate, has maybe tried to ' cut it ' down with his
silex- stone tool for all we know !
You don 't have to take the history of the axe for granted as it is pre-
sented in every tool gifted book.
Culture demands inventivity in the acknowledgement of new problems.
We, the humans possesses the sensitivity to know what is problematic
( sensitivity to problems).
The axe is a logical tool to overcome a certain problem, made by
humans hands, but nevertheless... have you never wondered how
nice/ why an axe fits so neat our desire to chop down trees !?
Why an axe and why not a kind of ' knife ' slizing it up !? And I
don 't have it here about the chainsaw...
Stone after stone, tool after tool, we ' improved ' what was
original ' something infinite simple ', like Bergson wrote.
The axe ' created ' itself, presented itself along the ways from
our first desire to bring those trees down to the specific tools
that are around today.
You seem to indicate that humans created the axe first and than
searched an use for it !? The enginuity you talk about have to
have a decent bias. People has to be faced with problems ever
before their minds starts making memes.
To get people to imitate, thus to learn from eachother you have
to have the ability to do so, where in the first place those this
ability, evolutionary speaking, comes from if you exclude ' for-
sight ', and for what reason would it emerge otherwise !?
IMO, than memes, or what we call memes, would be around
ever before humans were aware they existed, ever before we
were conscient of ourselves and ever before we had perspective
of things.
In a sense it was the meme of ' cutting down trees with axes' that
provided the environment for it to exist in, humans spread it_ used
as they were as vehicles to get the meme propagated.
Regards,
Kenneth
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