Context: New analysis of human portraits reveals shift in culture, cognition
We could just as well speak of aspirationally-unified (boundless, seamless, reflexive, interdependent) cultural and cognitive information-processing fields, topologically Ouroboros-like and akin to those conceptually-variegated and mischievously labyrinthine mathematical beasts of physics. A clear problem of determination, definition or observational identification here is in that – notwithstanding that we exist within (and as) part of the form and flow of them – these hyper-inflating referential systems of creative, adaptive historical metamorphosis are so complex and possess so many degrees of freedom that we might find ourselves utterly swept away in swelling tides of combinatorial complexity.
We should certainly aspire to isolate small, bite-sized trajectories, trends, vectors and functional components or artefacts of these psycho-cultural matrices but only where these parts are assembled and oriented in regards to a larger, bootstrapped, unifying whole. We might be pleasantly surprised to find that in seeking the symmetrical bonding in and of recursively self-propagating psycho-cultural gestalts that all of these functional (i.e. representational) microcosms of cultural information-processing systems emerge quite organically from them.
