[PLUG-TALK] TV

[glen e. p. ropella]

Denis Heidtmann wrote circa 11-10-05 06:45 PM:
> If we go far enough back, cultures had much more free time than we do.  What
> percent of the time do chimps spend gathering food?  What percent grooming?

That's _very_ interesting to me.  Are you asserting that we have
evidence that chimps had/have more or less free time than, say, you're
average middle class American?  Or that chimp's 100k years ago had more
free time than a 20th century Asian?  Could you point me to some of that
evidence?  Thanks.

I'll admit that my assertion that convenience technologies (like chicken
slaughtering, deboning, and packaging robots) have given us more free
time does hinge on a biased definition of "free time", I suppose.  But I
find it hard to map that, tools-based, definition of "free time" to,
say, a pride of lions digesting a kill (rolling around in the grass
cleaning blood off their paws 8^).  I suppose it's reasonable to map
"free time" to the concept of teamwork and specialization.  Chimps share
burdens (e.g. grooming each other), lions share burdens by hunting
together, and humans share burdens (blacksmith vs. baker).  And from
there, we could say that the specialist creates more user-friendly tools
for the non-specialist in the kind of "hyper-burden-sharing" society we
have now.  So, if your point involves admitting that burden sharing is a
spectrum, we're on that spectrum with chimps, and the development and
evolution of tools is just a small part of our place in that burden
sharing spectrum, then I'd have to agree.

But the difference between a chimp's "free time" and a human's "free
time" still seems categorical to me.  So, I'd like to see the framework
in which the evidence you cite was couched.  How do we calculate a
chimp's "free time" vs. the chimp's "job"?

-- 
glen