BIG01.EXPRESSION

BIG01.EXPRESSION

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” – Charles Dickens

What makes culture tick?

BIG outline: The organic world of nature emerged from the physical world, and with it ‘life’. At one point in the history of the universe there was no life, but it came about when the dimension of nature came about. Keep that in mind, because I’m going to tell you now that ‘time’ only came about when the dimension of culture emerged from the natural world. Humans make stuff. Actually, they can’t stop not making and creating stuff. This stuff is all around us as the artificial (not natural/human-made) and it feeds back on us all the time. Actually, it feeds back on us AS time. All artefacts are ‘conversational mediums’. That’s easier to understand with books, art and Kickstarter Projects like this, but more tricky will other artefacts. However, just like a conversation goes back and forward so does our engagement with the billions, even trillions of artefacts all around. We express ourselves (create) into the stuff all around us, and it sticks around (continues) through expressed interest. To understand the laws of motion and notion of culture we need to understand this constant circulation between, (a) the stuff we have created around us, (which I call placetime) and (b) the effect it has on the here and now, (which we call meantime). We refer to ‘information’ but by this we really mean these two times ‘in formation’. We record our experience into placetime, and this loads back onto us constantly as/in meantime. This is tricky, using words to describe something so dynamic, so I’ve worked on a system of diagrams displaying how this all works. 

Evolution doesn’t manage this process, it is one of Expression. 

1. We express ourselves into the artificial world around us we create. 

2. This creation is continued by our expressed interest (adoption, not adaptation), and 

3. This is an express process. This revolution upon revolution gets quicker and quicker and we’re now in a position to understand it like never before. Stephen Jay Gould called culture ‘the Lamarckian juggernaut’ and it’s really important to realise this is not cultural evolution, but cultural expression. It is a process that we, a single species are responsible for. We don’t live in ecological niches, we live in ‘times’, the constant action and interaction of placetime and meantime. In a BIG sense, we need to take responsibility for our time(s).

BIG outcome: Culture comes from human creative expression as the artificial world we see around us of trillions and trillions of artefacts. Unlike DNA, this is the source code of culture. In buildings, books, clothing, technology, laws, media, etc we design a world that in turn plays a telling part in defining us. It’s not possible at this time to be certain of all the outcomes, but again, think about how Newton-level, and Darwin-level bodies of work have changed the world, and we’re looking at something like that. Newton’s Principia was published in 1687. 172 years later we had Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. If we can get these 11 x TED-style lectures out for next year that’ll be 159 years after Darwin. Newtonising the social sciences (arts and humanities) is a wonderful coming of age in the same sense that physics and the biological sciences came of age with Newton and Darwin. We’re talking about providing an intellectual spine for all work, all expression, all disciplines along the social epistemological spectrum (I’ll try and keep the fancy words to a minimum). The other 10 BIGs that I’m going to outline are stand alone BIGs, but together they represent a body of work that isn’t just bigger than anything that has come before, we’re talking BIG. Full stop