carel
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Carel Struyken (M)
Avalon, US
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    Stuck in the Neolithic
    Project: Epiphanies

    Thu, Sep 4, 2008  Permanent link

    Sent to project: Epiphanies
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    gamma     Sat, Nov 29, 2008  Permanent link
    Hello. I often wonder about scales and time. You know, like in India where they used to compete in who will say a bigger number. This article is this number: 11000 years.

    "Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple."
    http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html

    Imagine! Those people didn't just see the ice age, they wondered which one - the first the second... I wonder do they know better how humanity is done, performed, or how to be contacted by aliens or develop genetic memory.
    carel     Mon, Dec 1, 2008  Permanent link
    Some beautiful artwork on those megaliths. But I would think they are from people that were already sedentary and farming. The question is: Can we shake ourselves loose from this neolithic mental straight jacket, can we reclaim our paleolithic mindset? Many contributors to SpaceCollective talk of the need for a better language. But maybe we should aim to rid ourselves of language altogether, or at least aim to engage the world in more non-symbolic, non-representative ways.
    Wildcat     Tue, Dec 2, 2008  Permanent link
    Hi carel, I would really like to hear/read your views on how :" we should aim to rid ourselves of language altogether, or at least aim to engage the world in more non-symbolic, non-representative ways"

    I am a strong believer in the surplus of cognition paradigm vs the surplus of production (neolithic) paradigm and its implications in creating a non-symbolic language, however when we speak of a non representative way of engagement do we not negate the very basis of conscious awareness, namely the representation of the world in/by our minds?
    unless you speak of total merging of personalities & identities with matter?
    folkert     Tue, Dec 2, 2008  Permanent link
    "We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future – all these are momentous signatures.

    A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and he silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of ancient hills."

    — Goethe

    Speech — cultivated and evolved over time as a tool for hunting, collaboration, survival — is such a bottle neck for "modern" thinking and communication... I think that we experience high level, complex ideas much more visually at first, language is a cumbersome output/transfer mechanism we employ to (wirelessly) transmit ideas to each other (bit of an oversimplification).

    It feels like a "non representative way of engagement" is sometimes the only way of encountering, engaging and interacting with (yet unencountered) reality — before the point language is used to describe or understand. Coming up with richer forms of idea-exchange seems very important. Thought is like water, it takes the shape of its container. Representations are containers, symbols — it's essential to be able to perceive reality before incoming information is filed away using this mechanism precisely because mind forms, or deforms, reality.

    One example is from mathematics, which, recently with the help of computers, is moving towards a much more visual understanding. Trying to understand what a six or seven-dimensional process might look like is impossible for most people, but if someone shows you an animation of a six or seven-dimensional process things become a lot clearer a lot faster without a word being said. Flows of energy, understanding complex economies, fractal hierarchies of nature — everything is getting a lot more complicated and will require much more sophisticated tools.
    gamma     Mon, Dec 15, 2008  Permanent link
    I studied physics and I believe that the world is one. Even in Neolithic era people perceived the same laws of nature, which they interpreted differently.

    Every individual grows through stages that are ranging from the fish stadium to the enlightened stadium.

    Depending from the social circumstances, aspects of the neolithic are recreated in many corners of the globe. Suddenly I must confess I am referring to that other, confounding expressions of human life in distant areas of the world where lost tribes live, about which I can hardly clarify the emotions. In my shamefully vague memory of the human rights, science and United nations I trust that all humans rest on the same principles that penetrate from within and emerge through body, legends, cave walls, language or our forms of behavior.

    All forms of life must be accepted. There is probably no severe need to become very educated. Therefore the question becomes, what trace pattern is it most compelling or interesting to KNOW?
    carel     Wed, Jan 7, 2009  Permanent link
    While I am still cogitating on an answer to the various comments on language and perception, I would like to draw your attention to a New Scientist interview with Daniel Tammet, an Asperger's savant, who has created his own language:
    "You have created your own language. Why?

    My language - called Mänti - is about my love of words. If you have that relationship with words, you will always want to express yourself but not be able to find the word in your native language. I speak many languages and I still can't always find the right sentence in any language. Mänti is about having that freedom to play with language, to see what would happen if I had a word for this or that.

    What can you say in Mänti that you can't say in any other language?

    I like the word "kellokult", which means "clock debt". It's a way of emphasising that when you are late for something, it incurs a debt, you owe someone that time. There is also "rupuaigu", which means "bread time". It's a period of time, roughly an hour, that is the time it would take for bread to bake in an oven. What I like is that it is the same for everyone in the world. It's a more intuitive way of thinking about an hour."

    Reading this does not shed much more light on our relationship with language, but maybe it sheds some light on autism, asperger's and a "normal" mind. Maybe, from the point of view of a hunter/gatherer, all modern humans could be perceived as autistic. We have become seriously handicapped in our ability to relate to our environment because of our dependence on symbolic representation and thought.

    Carel
    gamma     Fri, Jan 9, 2009  Permanent link
    Happy new year.

    I'm thinking now so firmly and confidently to produce really correct answer. I must think about what is important and lets see... I'm seriously in love with some model from Fashion TV. Completely connected to her (how do you say?) fragility and motion which is without flaw and no harm came to that youth of hers. Oh dear. Can you imagine big brown eyes opening slowly from wide to intellectually wide, attentive. Motion works really well for me and seriousness too.... a little bit like Rachel in Blade Runner kind of serious.
    Man!

    I find that perception swells body with substance that brings dark and light. It is a palm of hand pressed slowly and perfectly as to touch at the same time with the whole surface. Some people would say that effort and will are behind the language and then, language is before the self entity having experience.

    However, correctly describing my perspective would be that things are already happening to me by themselves. Within the happening I object and stop - that is my effort of discipline. Within the event there is feedback echo. If I want to stop or be embarrassed by something is the excitement of situation.

    Storyline is a road for activity of neurons that in my opinion, carries thoughts further away. Instead of running with that flow I find that the flow itself can influence a man instead of man being carried by a single wave. To perceive implies that there is a feedback loop - some knowledge of perception and displaying that content.

    I can copy from many things I heard. Language is used for copying, adding new content and messaging. I heard a question: what is the rate of success of messages left from you to self? I understand as much that its variable is time. (Although I wonder what would be a spatially dependent self-message...) Without answer, content or storyline to this I may only hypothesize that it depends from interest in messages one might have and getting feedback.

    Phew, I forgot to add my comment that it is probably agriculture as most important invention in history. It probably coincides with other events - settling, building...

    Also I remembered something. Its a classical question in maths: would you say that algebra is invention or discovery? If it is discovery then it can be uncovered again in altered states of mind or in the future after history.

    Another example is symbolic math. For us all math is symbolic and you didn't even know it was symbolic. In computer programs its a big difference to numerical methods. Anything can be calculated numerically. Sure, there are problems with repetitive tasks, giant simulations... Processing pure data is not so characteristic for normal people, maybe for savants. Normally there is pattern recognition among usual forms of intelligence. Symbolic math can find transformations between variables which can be graphed, evaluated and felt.
    kurthlab     Mon, Mar 1, 2010  Permanent link
    On the concept of Good and Evil
    Interesting thoughts "Hunter Gatherers" vs "Farmers". I do agree with the possibility of farming being the one of the major factors in the creation ideologies, and concepts such as good and evil, while "Hunter Gatherers" were more Darwinian in nature. The bible itself seems to show traces of ideas which are tied to farming one way or another. Sort of a farm driven type of mindset that validates its existence as well as perpetuates its own construct as a society (necessarily self-serving if you will).

    On the concept of "Hunter Gatherers" vs "Farmers" and their time management
    Jared Diamond proposes in his book "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies," that it was due to the fact that humans invented farming and the ability to produce more food than needed and be ability to store it, that that was the deciding factor in actually freeing up time in order for us to innovate, which in turn played a major role in our survival/evolution. And that the societies that did not adapt to farming and were busy hunting and gathering all the time and in turn did not have time to think and innovate and therefore perished.
     
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