The Wild Region in Life-History

I don't know much about the wild-region, as discussed in the book The Wild Region in Life-History, but it is an interesting approach to a problem that I've been thinking about from a completely different direction.

See, it turns out that memories aren't simple things, that there isn't a single sort of memory or a single way of encoding memory traces. The distinction between episodic memory and semantic memory (and any other variety of non-episodic memory that a psychologist might investigate) are a distinction between those memories with traces in the medial temporal lobe and those which are encoded through other mechanisms.

If we accept a multiple drafts picture of the mind, there's not guarantee that there even are discrete physical tokens corresponding to the neural "engram", the physical memory trace. It may be the case that information, in the sense of causal processes orginating with the distal object of perception go there own ways once they get into the nervous system. Some bits about go off to the area looking to recognize spatial orientation, other parts go off to process colors, to serve as memory cues, to answer questions in concert on with other processes ("what's that smell?") or "Seeing the turkey" becomes a relatively distributed task, not distributed in the sense of not correlated to a physical structure, rather decomposed into a set of functions which correspond to what the various parts of the nervous system actually do (as oppossed to what we tend to think they do when we're doing whatever it is that we might be doing, such as looking at freshly roasted turkeys.)

There's always the functional answer, that what's human is what tends to do human things. Some form of this answer has been popular, even dominant, since the time of Aristotle. This answer is good for a lot of practical purposes, but the functions that we find important might not correspond to the one's that our brain is actually carrying out. It also opens an interesting discussion about the relative worth of various functions. Not all of the functions develop in the same way or at the same time. Depending upon what we want to consider the valuable aspects of human development, the critical functions could be formed either early in pregnancy or not for several years after birth. (A lot of what I'm thinking about here is motivated by a book I'm reading right now called The Development of Implicit and Explicit Memory by Rovee-Collier and others).

Which brings us to the question of "who are we?", the cognitive and physiological data is obviously of critical importance, so is the input of naive or folk phenomenology (what we get when studying phenomonological experience without using words like alterity), and more developed phenomenological theories as well. None of these however can be decisive. It would be nice if the anatomical evidence could provide knock down evidence to answer these questions but, for reasons I've been hinting at, there's no probably no "I" operating at a much lower level than my entire self. (In other words, there's no smaller "me" somewhere inside pulling my strings.)

I was recently having a discussion with someone about physicalism and after-death experience. (I am now convinced that these two topics have even less to do with each other than they may at first appear.) He didn't quite pick up on how odd this formulation was, since by dead, he meant not exhibiting life-signs (heart beat, brain functions), while the functions that are of most interest or value tend to be the one's that allow experiences, the traditional life-signs are just more easily observable functions that tend to correlate strongly with having experiences (rather having experiences tends to strongly correlate with having a heart beat). Of course, there's no evidence that there was any experience during the period of clinical death, just after the fact memories.

In any case, continuity of memory seems a critical part of self-identity. I don't care to examine this at the moment since it would require a consideration of Locke and Hume. In any case, this brings us back to the wild-spaces, a phrase taken from Merleau-Ponty. Once again, I'm reminded that I should get around to reading Merleau-Ponty. The anatomical evidence seems to converge with the historical debate, memory by itself is insufficient for telling our stories in a useful way, perhaps the wild region could be useful in this regard as well.

Just a thought.

The fun part of writing my most recent post was imaging all the different ways in which it would be terrible to live a Little House lifestyle. The boredom. The threat of disease bandits and indians. The possible run ins with US Army forces trying to stop you from stealing the Indians land. Freezing to death, high infant mortality, the list goes on. The possibilities for snarky cosmopolitan humor at the expense of those who romanticize the frontier were many. After all, I can't help, life in a Little House was a mere step from the state of nature, nasty, brutish and short.

My impression of this state is built up as much from having read the books as it is from relating Hobbesian stereotypes about life outside the city. But then I ran out of steam. The last part of the entry, the part I'd really been looking forward to writing, just didn't entertain when I finally got around to it. What after all would be wrong with such a life? Sure, its not the most appealing way of life, and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Henry David Thoreau excepted, not the most conducive to either literature or philosophy (and Thoreau's shack wasn't that far from the settled town of Concord and today would be considered a relatively easy commute to Boston).

Of course, prison has traditionally been considered a rather productive environment for writers of all sorts. So, conduciveness to the life of the mind shouldn't be considered sufficient for a worthwhile form of life.

Maybe I've been infected too strongly by the Socratic bug, the unexamine life holds no appeal and a constant struggle for existence leaves little in way of time for examination, of an either philosophical fashion.

Moreover, I don't have any imaginative connection with the people of the frontier, the people who settled this country. I come more from those people who Howard Dean refers to built America. My forebears left Ireland and the thought of shoving the family into another two room shack to risk starvation would have seemed like defeating the whole purpose of emigration. That, and holy days of obligation were probably a serious inconvenience on the open prairy. I romanticize the tribalisma and corrupt politics of those who came before me in the same way that the descendants of the settlers look back fondly on the struggle to displace indigenous Americans.

Post-message: now there's a nice contrast, the people who settled this country (enamored of the frontier, agricultural background, rural, suspicious of large organizations) and those who built it (the teeming masses, industrial background, urban, at least acclimated to large scale organizations such as trade unions, governments or the Catholic church), to describe the red-blue divide. Of course, it's just as facile as any other simple division.

How Things Should Be Revisited

I've been thinking more and more about the conservative student who bemoaned that the problem with the world as it is is that thing as not the way they should be. The more I read about the election and the distribution of red and blue counties, the more I see that he's not alone, not at all.

The family needs to be fundamental unit of society, small government is necessary for the family to perform its appropriate functions. Unions are unnecessary. Large corporations are a necessary evil. (I can't see anyone whose primary focus is hearth and home finding much sympathy with something as impersonal as a multi-national conglomerate.)

The point seems to be that the family, working as a unit, is best able to secure the goods to its members, including a relevant sort of freedom. My rough (ie unsupported) conclusions indicate that this position is most commonly held in rural (ie red) counties. I've also seen it described as the position shared by the people who founded this country, by which I think they mean the settlers of various generations. This is the group that tamed the wilderness, settling wherever they could clear their own bit of land to satsify their needs. Quite literally the family would be the most relevant unit of operation. This group contrasts with later generations of immigrants who left Europe for the more familiar context of the cities.

The rural counties have an obvious sort of appeal for someone who'd like to emulate these values and the descendants of the frontier settlers who haven't rejected these values would most reasonably be found in the red counties.

This particular approach reminds me strongly of the Little House books. Pa didn't need any social security. Retirement was an alien concept anyway. In traditional societies, offspring are security in old-age. Here's one more way that contemporary western cultures break with traditional ways of living.

Regulatory government is the death of the Little House approach to living. Environmental regulation prevents the most effecient forms of farming, large scale projects lower the entry costs to the frontier too much ...

But the more I think about it, the less appealing a Little House life seems. The isolation, the crude ammenities, not to mention the occasional brutality and lack of good coffee make all make me glad that I don't live on the frontier.