Human Nature & Cultural Diversity

When, if ever, do differences of degree become differences in kind?

Category:

Education

Tags:

• nature
• culture
• humanity
• difference
• art
• music
• history
• money
• thought
• time-binding
• mirror neurons
• language
• symbols
• abstraction
• philosophy
• spirituality

[Whatever4690]

Be careful what you say haha or you will be labeled.

[Alberto2382]

Culture provides a framework by which norms shape our perceptions of the natural world, and the nature of human existence. Representational metaphors became all the more neccesary to get at the truth. Monism, dualism, and atomism, are all concepts that we inherited from the Greeks via India. Up until very recently cultural relativism started to test our notions in such a way that we see our "humanity" examing the peoples of the Amazons now we come full circle to meet the primordial instinct.

[GoldenFinchFellow]

money is an interesting human thing, I feel it developed as a way to mitigate our systematic taking from the environment which we saw was clearly causing problems the more strictly we controlled our environments as a culture. As neighboring tribes would get angry and it could cause conflict we probably had to find a way to share stored energy potential. where like squirrels and rodents often store food, they aren't manipulating the environment much so why would they feel pressure to share it.

[GoldenFinchFellow]

culturally they have a set of calls about cats. could be said they culturally dislike cats yet on YT theirs the infamous crow feeds kitten vid. had it symbiotic relationships of stealing food from cats before? was it training a hunter cat for it's self? was it just super curious of this defenseless thing too big to eat and decided to care for it? we don't know but it chose to do it and it's a rare enough anomaly of altruism that we have to take into account animals pliability as well..

[GoldenFinchFellow]

the other day my neighbors cat was hiding under the hedge trying to catch a group of chickadees at the feeder, they saw it every now and then and were panicking but still going back and fourth feeding. A crow came by and landed on the wire above the hedge and looked at the chickadees then looked at the cat. then started hawing warning calls looking at the chickadees as they moved around in the hedge. or hoping to get a meal from the cat? they harass cats all the time.

[GoldenFinchFellow]

Ravens have an interesting proto language with local dialects, corvids come together in large groups and socialize finding out good food sites by hanging out with certain individuals or groups. they'll pretend to hide food in order to sneak somewhere unseen and hide it after so no one knows. whats interesting is many similar animals to us seem to have lived symbiotically with us and us with them too maybe us relying more on them in the past then how it is now, wolfs, birds.

[GoldenFinchFellow]

now the conversation is getting very interesting :) this one seems much more honest to me in terms of how we are in general not in relation to other animals. I think culturally we are facing a strange dualistic problem of our cultural ways of controlling our surroundings is in conflict with the planets limits. no other animal has to look in it's own face like that to survive.. you should research crows there's 2 good documentaries on them made lately. one on "the nature of things"

[pangeaprogress]

very good thoughts on the various perspectives to be explored here

[HigherPlanes]

So a human is defined by culture. Without culture you just have an humanoid with the potential for intelligence. But say for example you take an empty humanoid and fill them with intelligence from an alien culture, which is completely plausible, what will the humanoid be called?