YouTube link. Sadly, still no kitties.
Part 2 of 2. This week, we get into some serious, heavy, nuanced discussion about the nature of symbolic interaction. But don’t worry, there’s a ton of dumb stuff before then. Enjoy!
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Heh, haven’t gotten to the question yet, but wanted to respond to a couple of things before I forget.
Very interesting initial conversation about premarital sex in different historical periods. One thing that I know from having read Thomas Laquer’s book “Making Sex” (which is about how different time periods conceptualize sexual differences) is that all the European people living at the time of the Puritans would have had that idea about conception tied to female orgasm. Laquer’s terminology for the change in concept from that time period to the more modern one is the “one-sex model” vs. the “two-sex model.” In the one-sex model, people understood that the most perfect human was male; females were the result of something problematic during pregnancy. So everyone was first male, and then if the womb did not receive enough heat, the fetus developed as female. This explained why certain “girls” became “boys.” The idea was that if girls became too heated by exertion, they could sometimes become boys. If you think about some of Shakespeare’s plays in which boy actors play girls playing boys who pretend to be girls, you can see that this earlier time period had a lot less fixed idea about sexual identity than the modern period (generally, though shifting now, it seems like).
Female reproductive organs were seen as inverse versions of male reproductive organs. And so just as males had to ejaculate for conception, it was believed that females did as well. And thus, in rape cases, if a woman had become pregnant, this was given as evidence that she had actually not been raped. (I know there are myriad problems with this conclusion.)
The development of the two-sex model was largely influenced by the shift from ideas about government being divinely ordained in some way, the divine right of kings, to the idea that all people had inherent rights as human beings. So to deny rights one had to come up with justifications as to why various groups did not count as fully human or fully capable as white, upper-class men. And so the idea of “opposite sexes” in which women are not one degree of perfection removed from men in the Great Chain of Being, but absolutely the opposite of men. Men are rational, women are emotional (and so can’t make reasoned decisions). Men are assertive and sexual, women are passive and asexual (lie on your back and think of England!). And thus women’s responsibility to keep men’s sexual behavior in check, and any straying on a husband’s part was a sign of something wrong with his wife. And so on, and so on…
Bullying and public confession:
I was thinking about how a kind of loose description of Empire is bullying because I was also thinking about how Foucault says that as we’ve shifted from Empires governed by a sovereign to more large scale Empires, we’ve shifted from a top-down disciplinary system to one that is based on self-policing and the two main mechanisms of that are surveillance and confession.
And actually that connects up in an interesting way to that idea above that in earlier time periods like the Renaissance, people had much looser ideas of sexual identity. Another important aspect of surveillance and confession is categorization/labelling. Judging as deviant depends on strong boundary lines which define the norm vs. the deviant, but if you start suggesting that those boundary lines are really blurry then the authority of the norm gets deflated (so to speak).
Which is one reason authoritarians don’t like suggestions that sex or race are social constructs.
Vaguely reminding me (and getting back to what Tony was saying about imagining different flavors in earlier time periods) that Augustus, when establishing his power as the first Roman Emperor, tried to institute “family values” and censor any “perverse” behavior or representation. And that’s how Ovid got banished…
I think I’ve read some accounts of various acts we might think of as modern being depicted in Ancient art works. Also, this Spring I think there was some account of an archaelogical dig uncovering Roman sex toys. But of course it’s often difficult to tell with some certainty what a thing is from a dig–like is this phallus just a decoration, or did it have practical purposes?
Frankenstein:
There’s a somewhat famous performance piece that later became an academic article by Susan Stryker called: “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,
Performing Transgender Rage.” It references both the book and the Whale film.
https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Stryker-My-Words-to-VF.pdf
Station 11 – I’ll probably need to go back and reread the plots before discussing as I don’t remember in a lot of detail. I did look up the episode descriptions and it was after Episode 4 that I stopped watching. Part of my reaction to the whole show was having heard it described in various places as this wonderfully hopeful take on the pandemic or life at the moment, sort of “art saves us.” This was so much the opposite of what I was watching that it really made me angry before I even got to the 4th episode, but that’s the one where I said, OK, I’m out…
AI discussion:
Yes, I, too, did not quite understand the way that Hinton was using the word “symbolic” as a contrast to “analogic.” But maybe this example helps. Hinton said that you can ask ChatGPT to do something like write something that is in the style of the Declaration of Independence, but written from the pov of a sock, and ChatGPT will respond “All socks are endowed with inalienable rights by their manufacturer.” So what the newer, analogic AI can do, that the older symbolic AI could not do, is realize that the analogy to God for socks is “manufacturer.” The older, symbolic AI might understand that human beings are to be replaced with socks in the writing example (socks will now symbolize what what humans do originally), but can’t go on to make the analogy of “what would be the equivalent of ‘creator’ for socks”?
But I think what William described about needing to create a neural structure that then interacted was a much more interesting point.
It seems to me that a crucial part of a neural structure would be mirror neurons and I wonder if that is even possible to create. I would also think you’d need the equivalent of various sensory-motor skills.
And in closing, I’ll strongly second Tony’s recommendation of RRR. Really enjoyed it and found it so different than anything I’ve ever seen.