Direct Acoustics

This blog has nothing to do with loudspeakers. However, it is an important idea, which needs publishing.

I am giving a lot of attention to the idea of cultural streams because the construction of my model of reality doesn’t fit into any existing cultural stream and is thus quite foreign to most people’s experience and comprehension.

In my model all of culture is broken down into :
cultural streams,
concepts
words
alphabet letters
symbols.
Culture consists of symbols which are transmitted in various bundles from one mind to the next.

Parrots, monkeys and ants do not have culture. They do not have the capacity either to receive or transmit such symbols.

The transmission of culture depends on our having large brains, which have the the ability to receive, organize and transmit the symbols and groups of symbols of which culture consists.

Some time ago, there was a rapid spurt of coevolutionary development when the size of the brain rapidly increased to its present size and simultaneously cultural transmission and its evolution began.

The development of cultural streams imposed a limit on usable intelligence and therefore the brain stopped increasing in size.

This is because once cultural streams have evolved, they became very resistant to change and larger brain size or greater intelligence would make their owners less receptive to existing cultural streams and cause them to be ostracized (or worse) from their culture.

It is in the nature of evolution that only stable traansmissions persist, for example, cultural streams survive. Some streams are consistent with each other or inside of others, for example, the English language and Science. Some cultural streams are conflicting, for example Capitalism and Socialism.

Once this period of rapid coevolutionary development ended, humans have become more and more dominated by their culture. Almost all of ouor activity and choices have to do with conversations with other people. Very few of us spend any significant attention on farming or mining and manufacturing things. To the extent that we interact with reality, it is mostly about our bodies and their health and appetites.

One interesting and unnoticed consequence of culture is that biological evolution has stopped almost altogether, except for regional reallocations of the gene pool. Our young are kept alive to reproduce even when genetically less fit. As a consequence the overall average quality of the gene pool is declining.