demiurgentg

[demiurgentg]

Not my normal sort of post, but my poor family has had enough of my complaining on other sites.

I'm so fed up of this cold.

Pros:

Both nostrils are working

I feel way better than I did yesterday

Cons

The cough has turned aggressive

I only slept about six hours and I probably need way more than that

#Sick #complaining #big self pity party

[demiurgentg]

Damnit. I've changed my mind. All social animals have some sort of cultural rules/ social norms/ learned behaviours.

Without self awareness, how can you follow those rules?

Chapter four of Laland today (in fairness it was alongside a bunch of other stuff... But also in fairness I read it enthusiastically and could have carried on but chose to play a game instead) and had another random thought.

Self awareness.

It's been in my mind for a week or so now for reasons unrelated to this project and I wondered (as occasionally I do) if non human animals might be self aware.

For the first time ever, I'm pretty confident the answer is no.

This answer is based somewhat on the assumption that some of my previous ideas are right, but it boils down to this: self awareness enables us to critically assess our behaviour.

But what's the point of that? And why couldn't other species need it?

It's the flip side of empathy.

This is kind of my answer to all the questions I've come up with in this thread, and I feel it's currently incomplete. But if empathy is indeed key to community building - fairness on behalf of others means you can build trust to a degree not usually found in competitive breeding species - then it's not enough to just "give a shit" as it were. One must also tailor ones actions to be appropriate to the situation.

Culture will build from there very quickly (providing the rules and standards that makes it easy to interpret behaviours), but the initial impulse to care and self correct has to be internal.

So now I have that question hanging over me... I really need to get back to the original one and work on that some more.

[demiurgentg]

Chapter five of Darwin's Unfinished Symphony is underway and hit a sentence that triggered an old, old memory.

Motivation, rather than cleverness or ability, is what explains patterns of innovation here

A long time ago, possibly even before I started my career as a learning technologist, I saw a presentation about the value of YouTube as a teaching tool. The speaker was enraptured with his own son's success in learning an obscure skill from a single, low quality, YouTube video. His argument was that it proved you could learn anything that way, and we didn't even have to worry about the quality of materials.

My gut told me something was missing, but it was at least a few hours - possibly a few days - before I realised the single most significant thing he hadn't said.

Motivation.

His son had heard about this type of throat singing and *wanted* to learn it. There were no local experts, so he sought online. This was the only resource he found. He watched it many, many times until he learned.

If he hadn't wanted to learn, he never would have looked

If he hadn't wanted to learn fervently enough to overcome the initial hurdle, he would have stopped looking when there were no easy resources

If he hadn't wanted to learn well enough to get it right, he'd have watched once and wandered off after a few strange noises.

What made the difference was never the technology. It was always his motivation. It was always him, driving himself forwards, because he *wanted* this skill.

In Aesop's fables, there's a fox who wants a bunch of grapes. He keeps trying to get them, but they're too high. Eventually he claims they're sour and he never really wanted them in the first place, and slinks off.

Obviously the fox wanted the grapes. But is he wrong to claim he never wanted them? Because he's proven he never wanted them *enough* to keep trying past a certain point. And does that alone truly earn him the somewhat judgemental moral "many people belittle or despise that which they cannot attain", or is there an argument that he's avoiding the sunk cost fallacy, and bolstering his stance by guarding against future temptation?

When motivation is survival, there are almost no limits to the extremes we push ourselves through. When motivation is indulgence, there are many limits.

A lot of the experiments discussed in the last few books I've read use food, and eating related behaviours, to ensure participation. But it's food in a high stress, unfamiliar - albeit predator free - environment, and I'm not sure how the differences impact the accuracy of the results. Chapter four discussed the evolutionary differences between three- and nine-spined stickleback fish that significantly informed their learning strategies. Well, that all came down to predators, and there were no predators in the test environment. What about babies? And hunger? If you're eating frequently, or moving through feast and famine stages, I feel like your relationship to food is going to change.

I no longer know where I'm going with this post.

Edit: I should finish chapters before saying they're missing stuff. They've not introduced predators, but they are looking at correlations between feeding success and innovative behaviour over longer periods (skinnier fish are less complacent, and try new things more). There's also some gender based observations which is discussed as related to babies.

#darwin's unfinished symphony #laland #research

[demiurgentg]

Chapter four of Laland today (in fairness it was alongside a bunch of other stuff... But also in fairness I read it enthusiastically and could have carried on but chose to play a game instead) and had another random thought.

Self awareness.

It's been in my mind for a week or so now for reasons unrelated to this project and I wondered (as occasionally I do) if non human animals might be self aware.

For the first time ever, I'm pretty confident the answer is no.

This answer is based somewhat on the assumption that some of my previous ideas are right, but it boils down to this: self awareness enables us to critically assess our behaviour.

But what's the point of that? And why couldn't other species need it?

It's the flip side of empathy.

This is kind of my answer to all the questions I've come up with in this thread, and I feel it's currently incomplete. But if empathy is indeed key to community building - fairness on behalf of others means you can build trust to a degree not usually found in competitive breeding species - then it's not enough to just "give a shit" as it were. One must also tailor ones actions to be appropriate to the situation.

Culture will build from there very quickly (providing the rules and standards that makes it easy to interpret behaviours), but the initial impulse to care and self correct has to be internal.

So now I have that question hanging over me... I really need to get back to the original one and work on that some more.

#laland #darwin's unfinished symphony #culture #empathy and self awareness #evolution of community

[demiurgentg]

You know how sometimes you have ideas that you have *no idea* how to go about investigating and then someone says something that alludes to your idea and it's not helpful in furthering your own thoughts so it's mildly infuriating?

The other day it occurred to me to wonder how many revolutions (industrial, economic, social, etc) follow a communication development. The industrial revolution I was taught about at school kick-started in 1760, according to Wikipedia. Also according to Wikipedia it succeeded an agricultural revolution, which is credited from 1550s onwards. The first mainstream British newspaper was apparently 1702 although pamphlets, articles and "relations" were distributed from the very early 1500s.

I have reason to believe (Georgette Heyer was most successful as an author of Regency fiction, but her historical research is spoken of very respectfully. No citations, because I don't think I stand on extremely solid ground here) that "gentlemen farmers" - landed gentry who took a sincere interest in farming developments - used these pamphlets. I have no specific pamphlets to refer to, and no evidence to support their contribution to the first agricultural revolution, but this was the birth of my idea.

And now Laland (I'm only on chapter three, it's been a busy few days) is talking about models of social learning and *not referencing* communication between generations - no mention of oral or written history that allows individual "innovation" based off of *reported* rather than *observed* success.

I said to my husband yesterday that if this turns out to be the "revelation" of the book I'll be both happy and annoyed.

#writing #research #laland #darwin's unfinished symphony

[demiurgentg]

My mind screams empathy

Today I've made a start on Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind and - perhaps unfortunately - an idea I had previously is colouring practically everything Laland has written.

I started this journey because I suddenly saw the importance of community as a "character" in stories, and wondered where it came from. Well, my reading suggests our history of stories is closely tied to our history of communities and social development (although correlation and causation don't appear to have been proved) and perhaps the stories we tell are purely the result of the community niche we've constructed? Perhaps to our brains, stories without community evolution are unsatisfying?

Then a few weeks ago, while I was thinking about those early stages of building community, I realised that the multi-species sense of fairness only applies to the self. To build an effective community, you need to care about fairness *as it affects others*. I figure this is a definition of empathy, and being able to see another point of view.

And what is a story, if not another point of view?

So I'm reading Darwin's Unfinished Symphony, and I'm not even through the first chapter, but several times now I've read a sentence and my mind has asked "have you considered the impact of empathy on this statement/ situation/ question/ interaction?"

Preconceived notions can *really* weigh you down. If I can't let go of this idea, I'll never be able to take on new ones.

Le sigh.

Edit:

Ha! Pp19-20 and we're onto the ultimatum game. See? Humans punish people who aren't empathetic in their offerings.

#Darwin's Unfinished Symphony #laland #evolution #empathy #stories

[demiurgentg]

The honest octopus

So I've been doing a lot of academic type reading lately and I'm sort of splitting what I learn into two categories:

Factual stuff for my research project

"but what if?"'s inspired by factual stuff that can lead to fiction

A month or so ago I read Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans and this week I'm reading Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness and here's my latest idea that would be *brilliant* if it were real, and I'm sure will be viable for a plot point.

But first, you need a little background info.

I'm Adam's Tongue, I was exposed to the idea of "cheap signals" in non verbal species. Basically, signals have to be trusted to be valuable, so most signals are resource expensive (peacocks wave a giant tail to show their health, and it's trustworthy because you have to be healthy to produce such a tail, let alone wave it about). But cheap signals - like words - can be lies, so why would anyone have any conversations in the first place? It's not exactly the reason no other species bothered with speech, but you can see the dilemma, right?

From Other Minds, I've been learning about octopuses, and cephalopods generally. Couple of things I've learned, in no particular order;

They're not very social creatures. They connect to mate, then separate. They don't mutually groom, co-habit, or generally seem to seek close contact with each other.

They colour change. As in, their skin turns all different colours in sequences that sometimes seem to be patterned, and sometimes not. Their eyes, incidentally, seem to be colour blind.

Their nervous system is more physically distributed than ours. They have a central brain, but most of their thinking is done in their tentacles (and possibly skin).

So here's the thing...

Maybe it's because I was a kid in the nineties, but the way the octopus colour changing is described sounds an awful lot like a mood ring.

And while their nervous systems are radically different to ours, I'm going to assume that squid ink, and squirting it as a fear response, is evidence of bodily fluids that change depending on mood. So, while they may not have pheromones (I'm 95% sure they haven't been mentioned in this book) they likely have some chemical that reflects/ affects/ directs their current mood.

So it seems to me there's space in the universe for a fluid dwelling species which is slightly psychic, communicates through skin colour, and absolutely refuses to become involved with any species that is so dishonest as ours.

Now I just need a plot, and a story, and a character...

#writing #research #octopuses as mood rings

[demiurgentg]

My Christmas card design this year was "elegant simplicity" and it came together rather nicely, if I do say so myself. The factory production line was still a little tedious, but we got there in the end!

#christmas cards #homemade cards #handmade christmas #handcrafted #handmade cards

[demiurgentg]

Note to self: empathic species would have no storytellers.

#fiction #ideas for aliens #they probably wouldn't have songs either #they'd have music though #they'd damn well better have music...

[demiurgentg]

Now I'm writing an academic paper about my idea... Things are escalating a bit quickly.

But hey! I get to write a paper!

#writing #academic writing #when ideas bite back #i need a reminder on how to research #oh God are citation standards any different these days?

[demiurgentg]

Alright, I have a problem.

I've been reading a lot on story craft and it's given me an idea. I first asked "why those seven story types?" And I sort of have an answer. It's not concrete yet, but I'm working it out.

And in working it out, I've radically changed my perspective on how you should go about writing a story.

And unfortunately for me, the only way I can go about the "new" way is to plot. Properly plot.

I'm a lifelong pantser who reluctantly shifted to plantsing recently. And now I have this new idea, I have to be sure my story is properly constructed before I can write it.

Which, I will admit, seems sucky to me.

Worse, I sketched out a kid's book in my mind (because kid's stories are the hardest, y'all) and verbally told it to someone. They were far more impressed than I expected.

So this bastard "new" way that involves all this bloody plotting work... It has proven initially successful. So I need to put proper time into it.

Damn.

#writing #storycraft #plotting not pantsing #wish me luck

[demiurgentg]

My "how to understand science of storification well enough to write good" collection of books is expanding rapidly and I regret nothing.

They're variably good, and specifically as I read through the same structures described in different ways, I have ideas for improving my latest.

Two days ago, my MC's actions in act two got a new motivator - it won't change any scenes, just a few key phrases for *why* she's doing things, and adding a few lines for *how* she's now going about things. And then there'll be a huge fight that leads to act three.

Today, her major freak out moment (where she gets the last chance to run away and not learn anything) was embellished by an additional "resolution" moment, where something is made better and she gets external support.

I should really give proper credit to those books and I will, but they're currently far away from me.

#writing #editing #guides to writing actually help #reading about story patterns is telling me stuff i already saw but didn't understand #so when they tell you to read to become a better writer #i think they expect you to see these patterns and adopt them yourself #i totally didn't do that

[demiurgentg]

This is so frustrating. All day I've been teetering on the brink of exhaustion and now I'm finally in bed and can I sleep? Can I bollocks.

Gah to my brain. Gah, I say.

#insomnia sucks #insomnia bites again #I'm not a violent lady #but I will absolutely stab the anthropomorphized embodiment of insomnia right through the eye

[demiurgentg]

First insect bite of the year is on my little finger in the center... Segment? What are they called?

Anyway, I can't find my bite treatment and I put on deep freeze to soothe it (and also prevent me from chewing my own finger off) so now I know how deep freeze tastes (not as bad as you might think)

Such a little thing to have so much itchiness.

#insect bites #here comes summer #amputation is always an option

[demiurgentg]

I accidentally made a friend today.

I'm not very good at friendsing people. My particular blend of introversion, generalised anxiety disorder (thankfully now under new management), ridiculous short term memory (personally I attribute this to decades of panic attacks undermining my brain's best efforts to catalogue anything), and niche interests/ obsessions tends to get in the way of forming relationships.

But a few days ago I showed off my new kitchen to a neighbour who's in the early stages of remodeling, including/ highlighting my cooker backsplash I made. (Picture below featuring clutter)

Anyway, the lady was very nice about admiring it and when I explained my process she offered me some materials! Because she's a textile worker in the space industry and has access to textures/ finishes that I can only dream of!

And so I popped round today and she has the most amazing craft room. I thoroughly heart it. And we chatted about stuff and she's both fun and awesome.

And social anxiety bedamned, whether she likes it or not she's on my Christmas card list, invited to my hobby groups and I'm sure other things.

#i bet she finds me too much #but I'm totally setting some of her samples on fire #because they don't send flammables into space #i want to know what happens... #and also there's a layered blanket sample that has an awesome effect when you treat it like book edge art

[demiurgentg]

I missed the one chance to share the blazing animation so here's a screen shot instead...

#200 days #Duolingo #learning Spanish #super proud

[demiurgentg]

Tonight Himself and I drank wine and are a very lovely brie on our back patio.

Because, after the many efforts I put in to redecorate it, we got some free furniture and it's... Livable again.

So, it's all painted (floor is lovely green, uprights and trellis a lovely chocolate brown) and we carried in the free furniture. And then dragged in some old mats.

Then ate wine and drank cheese. Or similar. Who knows?

No photos, and obviously we still have to screen the damn thing, but it's progressed enough to be christened.

And... And I suppose this shouldn't please me so much, but it does... Himself observed it's much nicer and less cluttered now that it's not full of random stuff he couldn't find a better place for.

We grow and progress.

#renovations #diy patio job #no photos #half a bottle of wine down #this could be more confusing than i currently think...