For the Reality, he is as the pupil is for the eye through which the act of seeing takes place. Thus he is called insan [meaning both man and pupil], for it is by him that the Reality looks on His creation and bestows the Mercy [of existence] on them.
But is it not obvious that the photograph, if photograph there be, is already taken, already developed in the very heart of things and at all the points of space?
“In Ireland, you go to someone's house, and she asks you if you want a cup of tea. You say no, thank you, you're really just fine. She asks if you're sure. You say of course you're sure, really, you don't need a thing. Except they pronounce it ting. You don't need a ting. Well, she says then, I was going to get myself some anyway, so it would be no trouble. Ah, you say, well, if you were going to get yourself some, I wouldn't mind a spot of tea, at that, so long as it's no trouble and I can give you a hand in the kitchen. Then you go through the whole thing all over again until you both end up in the kitchen drinking tea and chatting.
In America, someone asks you if you want a cup of tea, you say no, and then you don't get any damned tea. I liked the Irish way better.”
Chomsky, in his initial work on formal grammars, suggested that the descriptive apparatus chosen to model language should be just sufficient and not more powerful than is required – in that way, some match to cognition may be achieved. From then on, in the generative tradition there has been a systematic conflation between the language of description and what is attributed to the language learner and user: “the brains of all speakers represent a shared set of grammatical categories” (Berent), and “formal universals in phonology are constituted by the analytic elements that human minds employ in constructing representations of sound structure” (Nevins).
[...] This conflation of the metalanguage with the object of description is a peculiar trick of the generative tradition. By going down this path, it has opened up a huge gap between theory and the behavioral data that would verify it. The complex representational structures look undermotivated, and covert processes proliferate where alternative models deftly avoid them (see the discussion of Subjacency and covert movement in sect. R6.8).
A biologist does not assume that a snail maintains an internalized representation of the mathematical equations that describe the helical growth of its shell. Even for the internal characterization of a mental faculty, the strategy is odd: computer scientists interested in characterizing the properties of programming languages use a more general auxiliary language to describe them, as in Scott-Strachey denotational semantics. Once explanatory theories hook external factors (e.g., psycholinguistic or evolutionary factors) into the account, this conflation of cognition and metalanguage must be dropped.
There is a persistent strand of thought, articulated most forcefully by Fodor (1975), that languages directly encode the categories we think in, and moreover that these constitute an innate, universal “language of thought” or “mentalese.” As Pinker (1994, p. 82) put it, “Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects.” Learning a language, then, is simply a matter of finding out what the local clothing is for universal concepts we already have (Li & Gleitman 2002).
The problem with this view is that languages differ enormously in the concepts that they provide ready-coded in grammar and lexicon. Languages may lack words or constructions corresponding to the logical connectives “if” (Guugu Yimithirr) or “or” (Tzeltal), or “blue” or “green” or “hand” or “leg” (Yelı Dnye). There are languages without tense, without aspect, without numerals, or without third-person pronouns (or even without pronouns at all, in the case of most sign languages). Some languages have thousands of verbs; others only have thirty (Schultze-Berndt 2000). Lack of vocabulary may sometimes merely make expression more cumbersome, but sometimes it effectively limits expressibility, as in the case of languages without numerals (Gordon 2004).
Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Claude Lévi-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.
For the Reality, he is as the pupil is for the eye through which the act of seeing takes place. Thus he is called insan [meaning both man and pupil], for it is by him that the Reality looks on His creation and bestows the Mercy [of existence] on them.
“In Ireland, you go to someone's house, and she asks you if you want a cup of tea. You say no, thank you, you're really just fine. She asks if you're sure. You say of course you're sure, really, you don't need a thing. Except they pronounce it ting. You don't need a ting. Well, she says then, I was going to get myself some anyway, so it would be no trouble. Ah, you say, well, if you were going to get yourself some, I wouldn't mind a spot of tea, at that, so long as it's no trouble and I can give you a hand in the kitchen. Then you go through the whole thing all over again until you both end up in the kitchen drinking tea and chatting.
In America, someone asks you if you want a cup of tea, you say no, and then you don't get any damned tea. I liked the Irish way better.”
That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.
[...] If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism.
To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.
Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.
To the Romans, gender not only depended more on one’s ability to procreate than anything else, but it was subject to change. Greek and Roman medical texts from the time describe gender not as fixed, but fluid depending on humors like heat and moisture in the body. According to them, these factors could determine an infant’s sex during pregnancy, and they could also change one’s gender after birth. While the terminology was not there in the same way it is today, all of this points to the existence and tacit acceptance of a third gender in Ancient Rome, even if they did not have the same citizenship or property rights as their cisgender (and procreating) neighbors.
[...] Castrated or not, Gallai throughout the Roman Empire dressed, worshiped, and lived as women. They were noted for their saffron gowns, long hair, heavy makeup, and extravagant jewelry. They existed in every part of the Greco-Roman world at every level of society and were mentioned by Ovid, Seneca, Persius, Martial, and Statius as a common sight in the first century. Apuleius even described them in The Golden Ass:
“The following day they went out, wearing various colored undergarments with turbans and saffron robes and linen garments thrown over them, and every one hideously made up, their faces crazy with muddy paints and their eyes artfully lined.”
Establishment of shape during embryonic development, and the maintenance of shape against injury or tumorigenesis, requires constant coordination of cell behaviors toward the patterning needs of the host organism. Molecular cell biology and genetics have made great strides in understanding the mechanisms that regulate cell function. However, generalized rational control of shape is still largely beyond our current capabilities. Significant instructive signals function at long range to provide positional information and other cues to regulate organism-wide systems properties like anatomical polarity and size control. Is complex morphogenesis best understood as the emergent property of local cell interactions, or as the outcome of a computational process that is guided by a physically-encoded map or template of the final goal state? Here I review recent data and molecular mechanisms relevant to morphogenetic fields: large-scale systems of physical properties that have been proposed to store patterning information during embryogenesis, regenerative repair, and cancer suppression that ultimately controls anatomy. Placing special emphasis on the role of endogenous bioelectric signals as an important component of the morphogenetic field, I speculate on novel approaches for the computational modeling and control of these fields with applications to synthetic biology, regenerative medicine, and evolutionary developmental biology.
