9-2b3c We are more different than we are alike

2-1a Information is in the difference. No difference, no information. 情報とは差異. 区別のないところに情報は生まれない.
9-2b3b1 Contingency = Meaning (or, contingency implies meaning)

1-1a2a1 Human nature is variable (Cultures ⇒ Flexible human brains ⇒ Variable dark matters ⇒ Variable ‘human natures’ ⇒ Cultures …)

• Human cognition and behavior are not law-like (1-1a2 Our mind is flexible)

  • We are not doing physics
  • We do not expect exceptionless laws
  • Understanding is often list-like and descriptive
    • Rather than abstract and general
      • 3-1c2e 情報は関係性の中にある - Meaning is often in relation to other things

• 9-2b3c1 Everett on Joseph Campbell’s ‘Monomyth’ (innate content) - A tendency to think in generic terms of people and races is undoubtedly the profoundest flaw in mythological thinking. You could shape any myths into a monomyth if you so wished.

• 9-2b3c2 Everett on Chomsky - UG (that humans are born with a tacit knowledge of many intricate details of grammar) and the idea that the linguistics capacity were identical and innate in all humans are ‘monogrammar’ similar to ‘monomyth’

• 9-2b3d Everett on George Berkeley’s critique of the very notions of abstraction and generalization - There is no mind of any kind, only bodies and the world in which they move

• 9-2b3e Everett on John Locke - His tabula rasa didn’t mean there were no innate abilities, but that there were no innate specific concepts (innate capacities ≠ innate knowledge)

• 9-2b3f Everett on Hume - Ideas only make sense or exist through experience

• 9-2b3g Edward Sapir - ‘The particular and the variable, rather than the universal or invariable, are where the intellectual gold is to be mined.‘

  • 9-2b3h Edward Sapir - ‘One is always unconsciously finding what one is in unconscious subjection to’
    • Everett - If he used “psychic unity,” it was in terms of universal capacities, not universal believes or knowledge