While the amount of recorded history, memetic remnants of the phases the culture has gone through and the amount of information available for the individual are all important parts to count to be a part of the complexity of a culture, the amount of members of a culture that form the culture’s mass mind defines the complexity the culture can sustain.
Cultures are able to move forwards through time in the form of representational awareness in the individuals that assimilate the content of it (cultural assimilation) after their birth, hence becoming a part of the mass mind the existence of a complex culture is dependent on. Why? When we consider that the capacity an individual has in her brains determines how much knowledge it can contain and creatively produce in relativity with the units of information she has in the potential of her capacity, we can observe how it increase the more individuals are a part of the mass mind of a culture.
We can also observe that why the complexity of a culture is dependent on the size of a mass mind in that how many of persons of the society can function for example as artists, scientists, philosophers and so forth inside the infrastructure the population inhabits, sustains and develops. A person who lives in a small town will not be able to have an opportunity to live in an as complex culture a city of tens of millions of individuals can sustain, where the personal histories can vary in extreme differences, while a mass mind who lacks the complexity, development oriented research institutes and sophisticated internal organization cannot host a culture that by our definitions could be called as developed.
We could propose as a rule that the more the complexity of a culture increases, the more the potential for individualizing variation increases. Why? Because the possible sources for the development of personal history increases as do the resources in the level of knowledge increase for the shaping of the individual’s representational awareness. And as the sense of reality is representational, the representational reality is what is inherited by the new generation who are born to advance in themselves the threshold of the emerging future forms of reality. And this very complexity makes the future of a culture unpredictable. A mass mind where persons from a variety of even millions of backgrounds are merging when they meet by interacting, being influenced by the causal history of the culture, gathering and sharing experiences, while going forwards through unknown destinations.
Copyright © 2010 Henry M. Piironen