I’ll need some evidence for that conclusion. You can suppress behaviour sure, but over time the motives and belief will often fall into line as the norm.
And yet "the norm" and "the culture" are not the same thing. Deviant ideas and their various permutations circulate through cultural threads over a number of years and take a long time to gain or loose popularity. What sets any two cultures apart is the set of fundamental ideas that they do not share, NOT the proportion of people who accept one idea or another. This is why, say, fundamentalist Christians and atheists can be said to be two elements within the same culture, because despite what either of them like to claim they share most of the same FUNDAMENTAL psychological memes. Fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims, considerably less so, as the only thing they have in common is an extreme religious zealotry but in two completely different directions and different schools of thought with completely different starting points.
We live in the same culture as our grandparents and great grandparents because we share most of the same fundamental memes as they do, despite all the many things our elders don't understand about us and we don't understand about them. In the end, we have VASTLY more in common with those immediate ancestors than we would with most foreigners of the same age group; those commonalities, NOT subtle generational variations, define a culture.
Great, so we agree that if enough "hairs" are removed, the culture can be said to have changed.
No, I'm saying the difference between "bald" and "not-bald" is binary, cultural changes are not. A bald guy who looses half of his hair is still bald; a bald guy who looses ALL of his hair is still bald.
A culture rife with normalized and violently expressed homophobia doesn't become a different culture just because fewer people beat up homosexuals. As a specific example, some cultures hold to the idea that gang-raping lesbians is a really effective way of turning them straight. Cultures where this idea still persists but is behaviorally suppressed can be said to have a major cultural difference from peoples who have never held that idea in the first place. Likewise, again,f or the relatively common African meme that the menstrul blood of virgins is supposed to cure [insert disease here] as well as any modern medicine. It's an incredibly OLD idea, but it's one that has never really caught on in the west.
The sum of these ideas defines a culture; the sum of their differences defines the border between them.
At any given time of course, but the more exposed they are to the technology the more use they may have for it
Which would represent a FUNDAMENTAL cultural change, far more than a simple change in standard of living. That's a technology that fills a need they didn't know they had, or didn't know could be filled, and forces them to reevaluate their cultural values, pick up new ones, rearrange their order on the scheme of things. The Lakotas (whom this example was implicitly based on) did exactly this in the 18th century when they switched from an agrarian society to a nomadic culture with the adoption of horses: they stopped farming and started hunting, and they committed so hard to the new lifestyle that they completely forgot about their former lifestyle altogether. The Choctaw Indians (whom I assume YOUR example is based on) did this as well, transforming from semi-nomadic agrarian to a mainly urbanized society, adapting European technology, lifestyles, political and religious views.
In both cases, their old culture prior to contact with European settlers and technologies is considered a completely different culture from the one that followed. In a way, it's sort of like the difference between modern English and "Old English," for all intents and purposes they're two completely different languages that are related, but separate. English as spoken by a Texan, however, is effectively the same language as English spoken by a London shopkeeper is the same language as English spoken by a Bisbane cab driver.
For the average westerner it is almost their entire world.
Not even close. You call your mother on the phone because you want to talk to your mother, not because you want to use the phone; you play with your kids because you love your family, not because you want to hear "twinkle twinkle little star" coming out of a toy firetruck. You bang your girlfriend because of the usual biological urges and sexual tension, not because condoms feel really good. You drive your car to work because you need to quickly get to work and get paid; you use a computer when you get there because you need to keep verifiable records, and you use the toilet in the men's room because dumping your shit on your boss' desk would make it smelly and hard to use.
Technology is not a REASON for any of those things, only an enabler. Culture adapts to technology that is available when it finds ways to serve the needs of its members. The Choctaw, for example, needed to keep up with new arrivals to the Americas and needed to participate in what they correctly recognized was an inevitably recognized was a growing foreign culture that would either assimilate them or marginalize them, so they chose to adapt to the new culture along with its ideas and its technology.
Interestingly enough, the Choctaw were ultimately marginalized anyway; they'd apparently under-estimated the extent of European antipathy for non-Europeans.
But the "feedback" can obviously be of a more philosophic variety. By which I mean how we reflect on it. How technology makes us feel etc.
I know what you meant. The point, again, is that it's about how
WE reflect on it, how it makes
US feel. Which means ultimately the only factor here is the human element. We might as well be talking about sunsets and rainbows here: a philosopher who makes a breakthrough discovery about the nature of humanity after accidentally breaking his Android phone is no different from the philosopher who makes the same discovery after watching a rock fall off a cliff. It is the PHILOSOPHER who comes up with that idea, not the phone, and not the rock.
How we deal with technology is part of our cultural makeup, but culture is not based on technology. Culture is based on PEOPLE, and people decide how they deal with technology according to their needs. Cultures can--and do--exist that respond to technology by shunning it altogether.
No, the "invention" has obviously taken place, he is just trying to find out how it works.
It's not an invention unless he has a repeatable and consistent way of using the device. Otherwise, it becomes superstition; he assumes that a certain kind of stick will kill a tiger, so he assumes the next time he runs into a tiger he can kill it by recreating the circumstances of the last accident as long as he has a long enough stick on hand (or he may not be aware that the stick was the cause and he might believe that any stick will kill a tiger as long as he pees on it first). Superstition is not invention, but like technology, it IS the result of cultural behaviors.
The fact remains the microwaves weren’t just discovered by your "preconceived plan theory".
Not preconceived plan, PRE-EXISTING NEED. The point of which is that needs create technology, technology does not create needs.
If he is faced with a tiger unexpectedly and grabs a sharp stick at random, such accidents can contribute to the process of developing technology.
But this is what you're not getting: THE IDEA THAT A STICK CAN KILL A TIGER is not at all relevant to someone who doesn't need to kill tigers. Nor does that idea have to originate with the inventor. A man can tell his grandson about the time his dad accidentally killed his neighbor's pet sabertooth with a pointy stick and what a dumbass he was for that, and then one day the little boy--while contemplating the murder of his rival--realizes that a pointy stick could kill a human as well as a tiger and sets out to use it this way.
You have to consider that the invention of penicillin would have been entirely meaningless unless someone had first discovered that diseases were caused by microorganisms. A culture that still widely accepts Miasma theory would not adopt or even understand the concept of antibiotics. Likewise, a culture that believes the world is flat and covered by a large diamond-crusted iron plate (on the other side of which is heaven) would have no reason to invent--or even adopt--space shuttles.
I don’t see why that would be the case. Effecting a view and contributing to the creation of an idea don’t seem that far apart, giant dog turds notwithstanding.
It's as simple as this: the human mind CONSTRUCTS ideas based on what it encounters. It is the only thing in the universe capable of doing so. Therefore, you cannot OBTAIN an idea from any external source other than another mind; if you don't get the idea from someone else, you have to come up with it yourself.
No we don’t, because it didn’t.
Yes it did. Spock lost control, exactly as NuSpock said it would. He also provided the reason WHY, was that young Spock was emotionally compromised by the destruction of Vulcan and was simply really good at not showing it (hell, even OldSpock didn't show it; Kirk's first reaction on breaking the mind meld was "So you DO feel...")
We don’t know how Spock would have behaved in the absence of that action.
Yes we do. He would have run to the Laurentine System and patted himself on the back for suppressing his urge to chase after Nero and hand his balls to him, ignoring the fact that pursuing the Narada would have been the logical decision in the first place.
There aren't alot of unknowns here. We know what Spock wanted to do, we know what Kirk wanted to do. We know that Kirk's decision was the right one and Spock's was the wrong one, and we know that, once he finally accepted his feelings and stopped running from them, Spock was able tor refocus his considerable intellect to make the plan workable.
The trans-warp beaming tech was critical.
No it wasn't. Narada and Enterprise had BOTH dropped out of warp already; there's no "transwarp" in that operation, just a conventional beam.
Scotty didn't know the equation, remember? NuSpock did. Scotty's a good engineer and all, but I wouldn't count on his ability to accurately memorize a mathematical formula from a single glance on a computer screen.
In the film Scotty states that his instructor thought normal beaming is limited to about 100 miles.
In the context of "relativistic physics," or so he says. Hence the whole issue of
transwarp beaming; when Spock confronted Kirk, he wasn't confused about how he got back, he was confused about how he got back WHILE THE SHIP WAS AT WARP.
Transporter ranges under normal circumstances don't really have this problem; in "Tin Man" the Enterprise is able to beam Data and Tam Elbrum onto alien ship from the other side of the solar system.
In any event, to the extent that the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in some way related to my topic of gender role changes, it would seem to support what I was saying. And those changes obviously represent a cultural change. Nice of you to be of assistance.
