on humanism and environmental crisis

Posts tagged ‘origin of language’

Stories about the invention of language

The stories that help us understand “The invention of language as an ultimate culprit for the environmental and social crisis.”

I liked this essay, but my friends think it could be better. Some conclusions and assumptions were too hastily made. The text was too dry and not personal. My persona, apparently, was too pushy and annoying, as I would act as “the strident scientist who knows all.”

  The language was invented by humans very late, as a simple communication social tool. With the recent dominance of the left hemisphere, it crazily determines our reality.

   Danka was an incredible woman. The times must have been ready for a big, almost magical transformation in the living beings on Earth.

She lived about 50,000 years ago in the hunter-gatherer group somewhere in Eastern Turkey. During her single long life, she witnessed and participated in the invention of a new communication method.  As a toddler, she was saved from a tiger attack by possibly the last surviving Neanderthal, Adam. Later, Adam, recovering after the fight with the tiger, observed little Danka learning to communicate, pointing at objects trying to repeat the sounds. Adam was unusually motivated, loved The Beautiful, Danka’s big sister, and wanted to understand and belong.

The life of these people was simple and routine; it was about executing inborn instincts prompted by a changing environment. Sun was rising, and the men went hunting gazelles, which were plentiful there. The women did the rest- gather nuts, wild grain, and fruit.  Everybody helped with caring for the children, grooming, and making stone tools.

 The desires were simple: safety, warmth, belonging, food, mating, and social position. Algorithms and neurotransmitters determined the actions and planning, felt subjectively what we would call “wants, fears, and pleasures.”

  When I go for a morning walk with my dog, Tex, it is pretty much the same. The clouds moved away, and the sun is shining in Tennessee. I am breathing, walking, and enjoying the park around me. The dog is happy; he feels pretty much the same.

  No words. He sees me happy; I see him happy. We think about the breakfast we will have on return. I will cook eggs; Tex will have his pellets. I feel alive, slightly cold, though, and getting hungry. We both think about breakfast, and we both know what to do and what will happen: some vague images coming to mind: “inside the fridge’, “cutting tomatoes,” “Remember the toasts!” and such. You can imagine that these images and thoughts are the pieces of larger instinctual and learned sequences of instructions in my brain. The events in Tex’s mind are pretty much the same: happy on the walk, chilled, hungry, expecting to be fed on return, all parts of instinctual algorithms and learned routines.

   Deep in my “breakfast reverie’ I am startled by the sudden: “Hello, Tom!”. I bumped into Sam, an old friend of mine, with his dog.

“Hello, Sam, “I exclaimed, “what are you doing here?”.

Normal? Well, it looked normal, but it was a neural tsunami.

Until now, both I and my dog utilized our basal ganglia- like the amygdala, and brain stem, maybe some hippocampal memories.

Suddenly (without a second of hesitation), I started to use language. I jumped into a completely separated reality full of people, things, and ideas- all generated in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas while the previous animal system was still active. I was merging both of my realities seamlessly and effortlessly.

Tex was left utterly alone, now playing with Sam’s dog using still the same parts of the brain as before the meeting. (Animal communication uses completely different parts of the brain- chimps with damaged Broca’s area, unlike humans, communicate just fine.)

But neither I nor Sam nor the dogs were aware of the abyss dividing us. The humans couldn’t imagine how such friendly beings as dogs could be so different so suddenly. As we can not imagine it, our brain “explains’ it attaching anthropomorphic features to the dog’s behavior. ”Happy dog, playing with the friend’- we are denying the divide.

Explanations occur in our language-made reality, left hemisphere-dominated world. It is somehow analogous to nature’s “horror vacui”- the fear of void. It is how the famous “a rabbit or a duck’ picture is always explained- one way or another, but not “I don’t know” or “both.”

When we think about Danka’s people, living 50,000 years ago, we create, all of us; anthropologists included, accepted illusions describing humans (and animals) without language.

It is a strange thing; they had brains almost identical in every aspect to our brains, and yet their world before the invention of language was so, so different!

  Max Bennett, in his book “A Brief History of Intelligence,” describes this beautifully, step by step. And yet, he is so wrong. Talking about early vertebrates living on the young Earth half a billion years ago, he says, “brain decodes the pattern of activated neurons to recognize a specific thing” (the italics are mine). Things have specific semiotic (of meaning) boundaries delineated by human symbolic language. These animals recognized not things but choices of behavior, the only thing that could be conserved by the evolutionary pressure.

People can’t understand my theories because they can’t imagine the world without things.

  Max Bennett is an artificial intelligence guru with incredible knowledge of evolutionary biology. He will show you how we are learning to make machines following the evolutionary development of nervous systems from bacteria to humans. For him, like most of us, ingrained since the cradle, the things are the most certain and “beyond question” features of our reality, more than ideas, spirits, and gods. Despite the author’s intention and understanding, Bennett’s book moving along the evolutionary tree and relating the stages to AI advances can help in making in our mind the picture of little Danka’s community. These people grew up with a firmly established system of daily routines, activities, pleasures, and terrors. They did not know things, did not need them, and they did not have them. They did not want them; things were not “on the list of their desires,” not on their vocabulary, they did not have vocabulary!

We can imagine that the things “lay dormant” embedded inside instinctual instruction codes describing, for example, things to buy online.  Can you imagine the Internet site describing the needs or pleasures that can be satisfied instead of describing what to buy?  Or going to the restaurant and talking to the waiter about your thirst, hunger, and anxiety instead of ordering from the menu? (unless the menu would be called “What’s your problem?”).

  It reminds me of my uncle “teaching” me how to swim. He threw me to the lake from the boat. There were no objects and no things, only survival instinct and trusting my beloved uncle’s good intentions.

Remember my encounter with Sam and language reality mixed with non-language (non-things) reality from before our meeting?

Now, watch with me the mother playing with her happy 6-month-old.

Back and forth, taking turns starts this loving play. The smile, the coo, then pause, the response, the sing-song, the pointing and playing with objects around them. The duo engages and slowly accelerates the sophistication and richness of play. Mom knows that the baby will be like her, a person. She listens to it in the crescendo of exchanges and happiness.

Now, stop. We are going to split this scene in two. We’ll separate it into two generations distance, not “any” generations but the generations when the magic happened.

First, Danka’s older sister plays with her, second, Danka’s daughter Ada plays with her baby. Between them is the mysterious “invention of the language.” Were these two baby plays different?

I wondered if they would be. Which sounds are the words, which just play-sounds, sing sounds, being together, touching toys, maybe naming them, learning about myself together with learning about the outside world, learning about being the mother and the child and the self?

And maybe there was the third person. Early humans were under pressure, maybe on the run, they had a lot of alloparenting (parenting by many different members of the group, rather than exclusively by the mother, like in chimpanzees), and everybody was constantly together, maybe the third person observed the scene and translated that into adult communication? Maybe it was Adam, the Last Neanderthal, desperately trying to belong and to understand the exchange. And the parts of the baby’s babbling become the first Adam’s words uttered in homo sapiens language.

  There would be a crucial difference between the two scenarios (a mere 40 years apart, as the generations were short then). I think that in the first case, before the language, when 2-year-old Danka was playing with her sister, the presence and role of the third person, a motivated observer, is essential. The play of name,  the “namer” and the object, had to be experienced by the person, human, being outside the triangle of agreement.

  The origins of the triangle of agreement (no things yet)

              Agency, or You/I, or Reflecting on the World

                             /.                                          `

        Naming (There is no symbol                  See, feel,

without an agency naming it).                              Hear

                        /                                                          `

Symbol/ Declarative label  < > merge <   >     Perception (a piece  

   Translating                                              of code, program, algorithm)

                           Triangle of agreement

Forgotten side.                                                 Right side, used side

                                 A human (“namer”)

                            /.                             `

             Naming.                            See, feel, hear

              /                                                       `

A name.   >  >        >       same.   >   >   >   A thing

So, the agreement is made. And then? Then, the agreement is used for communication, manipulated, “grammarized”, preserved and conserved like a sacred flame. Where? In things!

The left part of the triangle is forgotten and we use the right side.

The things with their names and shreds of perception, (instruction codes) are the bricks with which our reality was built for every human baby, including  Ada’s daughter.  The objectivity, (like DNA in every living organism), is the way to carry and build upon it.

Ada playing with her daughter doesn’t need any observer. The “outside World” is in objects, food, toys, crib, and Mum. For them, like for us now, each of these objects/names has boundaries worked out by humans and preserved in the language. The system, the game, the agreement, really, the charades with names instead of gestures, once in place, was carried and multiplied endlessly, effortlessly. How simple.

Category:

enviromnental crisis,, Evolutionary Reality, human nature, nature of reality

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“An ultimate culprit for the environmental and social crisis”.

Introduction

  1. There is a crisis. Humanity more mature, wiser, and more reflective wakes up to see a tragic regression and looming disaster. Media lies are mixed with environmental and social problems. Personal anxieties are mixed with the suffering of millions. Conspiracy theories and overwhelming avalanche of facts are racing for attention of our confused and bewildered minds.
  2. I see the invention of language as the ultimate cause of the crisis. That invention saved us from extinction by giving us communication tools and an unbeatable advantage over all living beings.  But the same tool through the invention of things made over millennia the obsession with power possible.

Power involves the ownership of material goods, but also

  the ownership of the people’s freedoms, on the level of the individual, business, national and religious systems. Slowly but surely, lured by this myth of power we developed a thin, filthy layer of fear and greed.

  • This greed is just cultural and psychological and is too recent to be evolutionary or biological. It is not in our nature, which is why my proposed “no greed parenting” systems can shift our worldviews, desires, and habits in one generation.
  • My solution for these problems is based on the evolutionary explanation of some crucial ethological and anthropological facts in our prehistory.

   Human ancestors evolved from apes: huge brains with a prodigious mixture of sensory capacities-smell, sound, vision, touch.

 These already very social animals, great apes, splintered just 8 million years ago again into a new avenue even more brainy, “betting” on continuous growth of memory and communication, “neglecting” the body’s adaptability to changing environment. They were early humans with their empathy, friendship, and social networks, but without language, without syntax, there were no names or selves. They were living in an instinctual world. We can not imagine that like we can’t imagine “how it is to be a bat”.

In 1976, Julian Jaynes wrote a seminal book called “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. (His work was analyzed in Marcel Kuijsten’s book, “Gods, Voices and the Bicameral Mind: The Theories of Julian Jaynes”.) Jaynes tried to imagine these humans as  “listening to the gods”. I would compare their wisdom to insect nest intelligence.

Ethologists and anthropologists understand the “consciousness” of animals and early humans as an instinctual intelligence governed by neural networks interwoven into evolutionarily developed algorithms, a set of “rules” or procedures to be followed in certain critical situations involving choices. Some instincts can be extremely sophisticated (“how to act as the leader of the pack of wolves” or “disgust with eating your own children”) some simple: the eels following electrical potentials.

From the onset, early human intelligence in groups of people such as a family or tribe evolved into a pattern where it was dominantly allocated to an individual: for example, the alpha male or female. All other eusocial species, that is, species showing an advanced level of social organization, evolved into socially complex systems because of group intelligence. For example, bees are a eusocial species; Each bee has limited intelligence, but the bee hive as a whole is incredibly smart.

Reality Models

.Now, with our intellect we, humans, are trying to understand our place in the Universe– so, we are making models. Curiosity and understanding grew into “knowledge about the world’ and from that sprouted “science” with its logic and objectivity principles.

But, alas, we are using “obsolete equipment”, the great ape’s nervous system evolved in the process of working on our niche, making maps of the environment, and creating a “theory of mind.”

Our understanding is made of these animal models, but we described them using our human language: dolphins “playing, singing, chasing the boat” and squirrels “outsmarting us” in the yard. As over the epochs and civilizations our language evolves, so do these models.

I see just three overlapping sets of models of reality.

  1. Ancient, pre-animal ground of being. Like forest intelligence, the spirit of the mountain, Gaia, Sun and Gods. It is a primordial, unexplained, “aha” of existence.

It is also our deepest understanding of physics, mathematics, and cosmology. (For example: in the forest one experiences a myriad of criss-crossing forces creating the forest as we see it. The trees, the fungi, the animals, but also, water and sun exposure, the history of volcanic eruptions, and human exploration, all according to thermodynamics and the laws of entropy.)

Our language can not explain it, (how could it?) but we can feel it. We share this wisdom in our bones, literally, but we know it is beyond us.

AI can’t have this data, and can’t learn it. AI is based on self-learning algorithms, without animals there is no nervous system, and no algorithms to evolve.

2. Pre-linguistic, animal-like, instinctual, emotional, and intuitive.  These models are based on the neural networks in the brains of animals and humans. In the process of strengthening its niche, each species accumulated data in the form of brain algorithms, starting about one-half billion years ago. We observe animals and ourselves, but most of this data we also will never know. It includes our own instincts, pre- linguistic part of unconsciousness, and “collective consciousness”. It’s huge: no sharing of the wisdom, each organism alone, trillions of them.

3. Our tiny human reality, built by each human baby from the ground up, from babbling, grasping, pointing, playing, “bathing” in words, names, and relationships, then, starting in the second year of life, in “things”. It originated in animals acting, and manipulating the material world. The skills are located mostly in the left hemisphere leading to the symbolic, shared language. An Aboriginal Australian man, the famous Captain’s Cook Indians from Tierra del Fuego, you and I, we all share the same one unique reality. It is why we can play charades and chimpanzees or AI can’t.

(Of course, if you attempt to describe the cosmos (#1 model) with human language (#3 model) you’d be literally “lost for words” and justly feel “there is something more”)!

 For every modern human, these models resemble “Babushka” nesting: my own objective reality described by language, consciousness, and reason in the center. (see:#3)

    Outside of that, there is the unconscious instinctual world, a sum of experiences accumulated in neural networks during half a billion years of animal evolution. (see: #2)

     And then we know there is even bigger ground of being, sacred, energy fields, that we know intuitively but also attempt to imagine and meditate about.

When I die, all my ”Babushkas” disappear, when we all die, everything is gone.

Origin of language

This simple, even if startling, concept of reality explains also consciousness, the Holy Grail of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy.

But before that, we have to remember how language was built.

It helps to see the language as a survival communication tool, it is what saved us from extinction, just 50,000 years ago. We built this tool in a similar way a one-year-old baby learns about the world: metaphor over metaphor, over metaphor, each receiving a name and becoming a thing. And the reality was growing as we learned more and more of them. Round things can be eyes, or balls, or apples, or stars… Happy things; Mom, food, toys!

This incredible innovation of communication was similar in its importance to the tool of preserving the structure of the organisms through the nucleotide chains- DNA.

It was based on the concept of eusocial sharing of meaning attached to name (sound)  and perception (things).

Out of these three crucial elements: sharing, sound, and perception, actually only the first- sharing, was really new and very revolutionary. Somehow mother/baby sharing was shifted to the grown-up world. Sharing included the concepts of “you” and “I”. This we later called “self” “reflective” and “consciousness” in different contexts.

Each word is a metaphor, it has similar origins in “social agreement” (context) and contains perceptual, “old” data and a declaration: an agency naming this old data. For example, I say “ocean of your eloquence” or ”apple of your eye”. All words in each metaphor are already simpler, older metaphors.

Sharing metaphors (words) is unique for humans (like DNA for living things), our reality is completely separate from non-symbolic beings. What we see as the mind of animals or AI, with all appearances of intelligence, language, friendship, and happiness are all anthropomorphisms!

No language, no names. No names, no things. No things, no reality. No reality, no consciousness.

See : the “Origins of Language “and ” Triangle of Agreement” diagrams in the next post: “The stories that help us understand ” The invention of language…”

Consciousness

 It is really simple: The reality is everything around you (I mean everything, past, present, and future, down to each of your bloody cells, and each of the distant stars!), the self is you, and the connection and action between the two is the consciousness. These three big concepts are really one.

They are all the gift of language, naturally one can not exist without the others, all just about 50,000 young.

   So, we call this unique feeling, this connection between self and our reality, the state and knowledge related to my active being “consciousness”, but do not fuss about it. You know what I mean, but if you ask me to add some precision, say, into the level of my alertness, it is fine, be my guest. But there is no “consciousness” floating in the universe of information and hominids trying to match it better or worse. Words are just communication tools.

 All animals have some evolutionary wisdom in their nervous system and their group intelligence so they are sentient but not conscious. Some are very, very sentient, they look like us, act like us, maybe feel like us, and we should not harm them.

. Only humans are conscious, by this ancient agreement solely, repeated with every baby, they operate metaphoric, symbolic language, this unique communication system, learned in infancy with names, agents, and things. Most of the time we act instinctually, sharing the sentience wisdom with the rest of our sister beings, sharing the love to nature and to the Earth.

Only humans can at will move one’s attention froma reflection on the meaning of this essay to laughter or crying to the basic certainty of existence. We are the metaphor experts, jumping domains and shifting the reality models in our minds.

. Only we, humans, have a planetary vision, responsibility, and capacity to save us… from ourselves.

Category:

climate change, enviromnental crisis,, Evolutionary Reality, Explicit and implicit worldview, human nature, materialism, nature of reality, origin of self

Tagged with:

Danka’s Self

    This new essay is similar to the “Last Neanderthal” – it has a narrative, a story, and an explanation of the allegory. That is a philosophical and extremely controversial part. It is actually a continuation of the thought experiment, as it assumes that events from the previous essay- the story- actually had happened, and -again- assumes that my interpretation of them is correct.

 Let me remind you and summarize the story. 

The time is about 50, 000 years ago, somewhere in Europe. Neanderthals are on the brink of extinction, and we follow the fate of one of them. The cold and hunger killed the last two members of Adam’s family, his wife, and his son. They did not have modern language or the ability to start a fire, but otherwise, they were very smart and strong.

  Adam is rescued by Old Woman from the Homo Sapiens tribe and nursed to health by Eve the Beautiful. Adam saves the little girl from the lethal attack of a saber-tooth tiger. This little girl, Eve’s 5-year-old sister, Adam and Eve are creating a shared communication system that (my hypothesis) is growing into Language, Self, and Reality. ( “You called it apple”- it was the first hypothetical sentence understood by these 3 people, it contained: “you called” – the agent, the person, “it”- the thing-perception, sensory firing, a  piece of the old behavioral code, with its name:  “apple”.)

   To continue this thought experiment, we moved a generation forward. The three people who started to use agents and simple objects in communication were bonded by a prototype of a social unit: the shared magic of childhood, love, and of desperate will to communicate. In about 15 years this group grew and their shared vocabulary rapidly expanded. Summers were warmer and there were a lot of fish in the river and berries in the forest and babies in the tribe. Adam and Eve had 3 children Mel 8, Fiona 6 and Sophie 4. The” little girl” is now 16 years old and has the name.

                                           ***

‘My name is Danka, but people call me Dancer. I love to dance. I play the flute, the horn, and drums. I made my instruments with my Uncle Adam’s help and I taught myself to play. 

I go fishing and pick fruit with others, but I am busier and busier with my music.  When I sing and dance the world around me changes. 

My family and others from the tribe come to listen to my stories and to dance with me. Mel, my 8-year-old nephew can play the drums well, but only I can play flute and horn well.

 The stories come to me, I do not know where from, they just come.

Sometimes they come from my dreams and memories of winter and fighting with tigers, and sometimes from flowers and jumping fish. I am teaching kids how to sing and dance and about flowers and animals and seasons.

   Lake Cave Summer Feast is coming up. 

Each year before the midsummer Full Moon young people go to the cave. It is a difficult trip, it takes three days of hiking through treacherous mountains and into the cave. You need to be brave and curious and strong to get there. Last year was my first year, but this year I will lead my people. 

Eve tells me:

“Danka, to make a strong drink we need special berries from the Western  Forest. Take my kids to help you, but be careful, other people live in the West.”

I run like a wind, light and happy and strong.”

 “Who needs the berries

   We need the berries

We find the berries 

    In jungle!

We pick the berries

Magical berries

The sweetest berries 

That dangle!.”

***

Eve’s three kids follow bellowed Auntie, trying to catch up with her, laughing and tumbling. Mel, Fiona, and little Sophia who is just 4 years old.

Danka runs and sings her song “who need the berries”. On the “jungle” and “dangle” she jumps very high, landing on both feet into a deep squat.

Other kids are tripping, trying to mimic her.

Then she skips, then she twirls, still running, three kids after her in the narrow path among giant acacias and prickly raspberry bushes.

Mel is the drummer. He beats the rhythm with his left hand hitting his leather bag. This is not easy because, on his right shoulder, he carries his weapon, a 5 feet long spear. He is also an expert thrower, ready to protect the girls against any danger.

“ But,” he laughs,” all the animals will run away scared from Danka’s singing and jumping”

As soon as he finished his thought he noticed a movement of a shadow among the trees.

Then there is a strange, terrible roar. He has never heard anything like that before.

“WWRAOOOW”

He is ready to kill it.

“ As soon as I see his chest- the beast is dead- whatever it is”- Mel killed a bear and hyena before.

He sees the huge hairy head in the bushes.

“It is mine”, his right arm takes back, and the hips and torso recoil like an enormous spring.

“Wait, wait”- whispers Danka-and he stops at the last moment.

The “beast” jumps out, under the big head there are blond curls and a boy’s laughing face with the funniest brown dots all over it, but most on the nose. 

“What’s your name?!” Danka yells.

But he runs away and he is fast, waving with his “beast” head.

Danka laughs “ Mel, make sure you do not kill silly boys, it was a close call”

She likes this boy. A trickster. She remembers him from the last year, in the cave, he was really small and skinny then. But she remembers the laughter, the freckles, and the funny shadows he made with his hands across the fire in the cave.

 “I hope to see him again next week- if he is not killed by somebody by mistake”- she sighs and smiles.

Next week she will lead her tribe’s youth to Cave Lake. They will eat mushrooms and drink magic foods and potions and then they will dance.

She will dance with them, but her dance is different.

Eve worries about her little sister. 

“ Danka, you’re too much, you just don’t care, you just sing and dance, how can I protect you? Elders are not happy.  Big Man’s older son wants you to be his woman. It is an honor to our family”.

Danka doesn’t care for Big Heavy Max.

Eve sighs and hugs her sister. “Be careful, but when you find the boy you like, go for him”

Danka laughs “ I will, sis”, she twirls with her, then runs away singing and skipping: “I will, Oo-oh, I will, Oo-oh , how I reeeeally will!”

Old women and Eve send them off. About two dozen of young people, boys and girls run away from the village. They run towards the Western Forest and The Mountain. They carry food and drink and wood for fire and they run. They run for hours and hours, then they sleep for a few hours and they run again. Exhausted, and excited thy see The Mountain. And they find the small mountain lake and the cave on the shore. Danka leads her people into the sacred chamber. There are other young people from other villages. 

They are exhausted after a long run but they start a fire and then the drums call them to dance. Their dance is powerful, it sounds like a jungle, like a waterfall and thunder. It sounds like a buffalo stampede or the lion’s kill.

The drinks and food are served by girls, and boys do more dancing and showing off their skills, jumping over fire, and wrestling.

 Soon nobody remembers that they are tired and the dance, shouting and competition becomes more fierce.

 Then Danka jumps out, climbs the elevated flat stone, and blows her horn.

She sees the boy with freckles. And the boy sees her.

She wails and she sings. They understand some but not all words. 

But it is so different, so beautiful. They never heard anything like this: she sings the story.  She shows it, and dances and sings it. They know it, they see it. It is about the buffalo hunt. But also about one hunter- it’s a boy, or is it a buffalo? And he is pierced by the spear, and he falls. He is killed. 

The woman, yes, they see the woman who loved him, she runs and embraces the dead man. 

They scream and then stop and there is silence. The woman, The Dancer, shows how “she lifts the dead body”, and the bloody head mask stays on the ground.

They hold their breath, stunned.

She plays the flute: how beautiful the boy is now and how she loves him.

And then she carries his bloody body and begs and cries.

Wow, she is talking to Sun and Moon, she begs Them- “bring him back for me”.

And they see; that death is final and the only way to be together with her love is..

Is to die. She falls. There is silence. And then… she wakes up, she rubs her eyes- was all this but a dream??

The boy with freckles  runs to her and shakes her,  he wants to tell her: ”I understood, it was me, and it was not!”

Will she understand? He knows what to do.

Andy, ( he has a name now) takes her to his secret place in the cave.

He makes fire- he shows the same story with his hands and shadows on the cave’s wall. He takes her hands in his hands and makes her hands show the boy with a big beast head.

She understands! He says “AAN- DY” She repeats, laughs, and points to him “Andy”. Then he makes shadows of young women.  “She dances”. He looks at her and she says: “DAN-KA”, he repeats: “Danka”.

Their hands do not part, they stay together. They slowly quit wrestling and showing shadows, but start showing young bodies what they want. 

 After they made love, hands still together, they fall asleep, and the campfire’s red ashes glow slowly dying away.

Andy wakes up and a tiny ray of sun lits the stone wall where they played with shadows. Was it a dream? No. He sees a beautiful woman happily sleeping next to him. He gently frees himself from her embrace, gets up, and stretches.

Then he brings the paint they used to make hands prints-thousands of handprints, generations after generations- time signatures, nothing more.

In his head, he still has Danka’s story. In his disheveled, half-woken head.  He shakes his blond curls, curses quietly, and starts painting. 

The world disappears and the pictures come alive on the stone wall.

It is hours later when he looks behind his shoulders.

She is awake, sitting, looking at him and at the paintings, smiling.

She starts to sway into slow, dance-like moves. She sings sweetly and quietly. 

“Andy, Danka, Aaaandy,

Playing by the fire, 

We live and love and liiii-ve,

And then we die.

                                   ***

The real language i.e. the communication between people as a sine qua non for the experience. Shared (?”selfed”?) narrative, music, and visual art as the simple beginning of our reality.

What is an Agent or SELF? All words have human origins. It means that at some point in time, there was a social agreement (usually unconscious) between some humans about a word and its meaning. Because of these social and pragmatic origins, over time these agreements shifted and shifted. I expect that about the word and meaning of say “an apple,” there was no need for much shifting, but such concepts like self or consciousness or soul or ego the agreements shift and shift and for every discussion, it is very wise to renew the such agreement. 

How about attaching “participants, selves or agents” ( “self” as the common language equivalent of “I” and “you” and “he/she”,  while using “agent” to denote “action of an observer”) to the concept of experience? 

Self and experience. 

Self experiences an experience. To have experience is to have self. No self, no experience. Simple and elegant. Again, it harks to the origins: we use language for conversations. That’s what makes an experience. Each conversation has agents (selves), content, and context. But context can only be described by additional conversations. How about the events that look like experiences? Pre-linguistic music, images, emotions, dreams, animal behaviors? Remember the last Neanderthal from my story? He was hungry, dying, and grieving the death of his son. But, by the will of the omniscient author, he had no language yet, then no self, no experiences. (of course- the author and readers- did experience that). He was using his sophisticated instinctual system to survive. Later on, with the magic of love, childhood, and translation, he, the Beautiful and Little Girl acquired the socially shared first word- “apple’ with its meaning of red round fruit (the first thing!). So, later on, he could try to explain his past, using his budding language and self to describe past experiences. It is a dramatic fictional illustration of a hypothetical event. But we live with hybrid minds. Your anger is a mixture of primordial, instinctual sensations and all language/self-saturated memories and concepts. Also: Your awe, love, headache, and friendship. Any difference between conversation and experience? Not much: more emphasis on “from you to me” versus “me with me”- both are social and “selfed”- i.e. language-loaded.

This agreement would also help with understanding, among other mysteries of the universe, our hybrid mind. 

The old part makes almost all nervous system, similar to animals, octopuses, and all. Peripheral nerves, autonomic nerves, whole brain with all myriads of codes, and algorithms. This old mind led us to get more and more complicated through the perils and challenges of evolution, it contains all mechanisms to survive, to outwit others, all instincts and gut feelings, altruism and competition, and anger and love.

It creates a sophisticated world, with emotions and feelings but this world belongs only to this organism. It is not shared and it doesn’t have things. It is extremely difficult to imagine such a being. All feelings and drives but nobody to feel and be driven. All fear, trembling but without anybody to fear. 

And then Homo Sapiens invented language. I described possible scenarios. Most likely I am wrong, but it helps with imagining the process. It started with sharing simple sentences like “I called it apple”

Strange, it had an agent, “self”
But no emotions, no value. The “stone” or “buffalo” is not good or bad. Revolutionary, it had things. The incredible advantage of things over the old system ”behaviors” is that they can be easily controlled! They practically “ask” to be controlled. The “self” controlling “a thing”: the consciousness is born.

The new ( maybe 50.000 years old?) system propelled Homo Sapiens to where we are now. The shared material world was controlled. Greed was born and it challenged more and more evolutionary-developed altruism. This is the core and deep origin of our environmental and social disasters. 

It also points toward the only way we can reverse this.

Category:

climate change, enviromnental crisis,, Evolutionary Reality, human nature, nature of reality, origin of self

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