longer.blue

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/seguimon1.bsky.social/post/3lxzes5d33k2e "Biological reductionists" will just say that culture is just biology or purely a product of it. I'm interested in reasons why that's wrong, and I'd like to know about more good ones. I'll briefly list some I've come up with so far. 1. Cultures rely on psychological powers, which conceptually do not require our current biologies, and maybe also not any other biologies at all. 2. Cultural artefacts are subject to environmental processes which apply to them but not to the traits of organisms: while we can persist, they may not, and vice versa, yet they do not count as traits or phenotypes. 3. They are not simply Dawkinsian extended phenotypes, because their persistence and spreading does not necessarily have a causal correlation with the population-relative fitness of their constructors' genes. 4. From a more comprehensive "reductionist" view, culture (and/or science) involve "bottom-up" influence from abiotic factors in accordance with physical and chemical principles which govern them, including through organisms alone (which rely on such factors for their genesis and survival) and not just through their examinations and uses of things in the world. So even in this really silly picture, culture (which would include social institutions aimed at consciously reinforcing whatever's "natural", including those involved in creating intellectuals who tell us that we can't and/or shouldn't change any of that) could at least partially involve physics bypassing the particular aspects of our biologies to lead to causation at the ontological "level" where we can find everyday human psychology. I really want some more rigorous arguments than this if we can make them at all. I've never been a fan of orthodoxies, especially with much of what dominates in every walk of life being increasingly made to exclusively serve elites by repurposing and/or initial design! This sadly applies to science, dominated by elitist interests from the more familiar corporate and military ones to the intellectual ones which among other things gave rise to an intellectual victory for Eugenics in the early 20th century.