Really enjoyed this full essay, I have converted this whole post (minus the footnotes) into a multi voiced AI reading, I spent quite a bit of time pre-prepping and making sure it all converted properly, I am really happy with this full 3-hour output. I'd encourage anyone who wants to read this but reads more effectively with their ears to try it out.
Great as always! I want to suggest some more ways to falsify the hypothesis:
Which other snake myths exist from bronze age, neolythic and paleolythic times? And by "other" I mean some other snake myths that a pictoric or literary reference to them would be false positives in your research.
I can point out to the magnificent YouTube channel Crecganford, who explains the origin of the flood myth. He posits two main sources for it: the original from Africa, and a main branch from Sundaland, which had vast territories flooded at the end of the Ice Age. The first of those stories involve serpents, the second one involve dragons.
Regarding the use of milk in Indian and Greek mysteric rituals, Crecganford explains that PIE domesticated the cow and first acquired lactose digestion capabilities.
will you please explain the evolution of the anti-I movement (ego death). Also, if self-ego led to culture, what would ego death for all sentient beings lead to as is the goal of buddhism?
I find the perspective from footnote 50 particularly compelling. Also, it is insane that there is a footnote 50 🤣
Anyway, the case looks a lot stronger when suddenly it turns out individual pieces of the puzzle have been extensively argued and researched and the original contribution is about putting them together. I would really like to see this level of effort directed to alternatives to the EToC. Do you know of any? One epistemological problem I'm very interested in is in estimating confidence in theories when there is a lack of coherent alternatives to them!
I think the time frame is way off (I think it is a slow grind in the paleolithic with a noticeable pay-off recently, I don’t think it is “I” arising however, more like “other-I” which magics why we should) but I like the story. It's Sunday and have more time, thanks for writing this.
More thoughts/comments/notes as reading, I jump around a bit:
①"native dualism"
my position is that this is an outcome of the Janus dance, when it doubles-down on it's naive power -- even the yinyang symbol does this, (might be an outcome of bilateral symmetry...? or vice versa??) https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/the-janus-ratio
②"The impulse to make art and search for meaning was not always found in our species. …."
religion/art/performance/rites/routine/plays/staging/fashion/bodypaint/painting are an outcome of the (moral) worlding urge, or if recursively doubled-down it becmes a culture’s passion project as a the “world-building”’reality’(aside: we double-down a lot --- in some French philosophies (Deleuze) this is called intensifying or re-intensifying) this turns a routine into rite, the ritual into a doctrine, and a doctrine into dogma -- the medium of intensification is the social/political space created by the success of the routine in the first place) (if we do this internally we get identitarian politics -- from socially created identities -- unless one is autistic like me of course)
—thus your "Rather, it’s a tic of whatever environments humans have been living in over the last 50,000 years." is correct, the social landscape rather than the terrain mostly (In Australian Aboriginal culture (e.g. tjukurrpa) these are not separated out, they are the world,
③"Time gobbles up evidence. " we have to create a taphonomy of our social landscapes and strip back the intensifications (social ontologies, dogma, identities, build worlds) and see how they fossilise themselves: https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/divining-the-gap
(See also/ have you seen?) Ellen Dissanayake's stuff for an excellent frame on all this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Dissanayake More about special nurturing than feminine insight, in a negotiated multi-modal fitness landscape, raising empathically children into specialness and then breaking them with the reality principle without creating a psychopath/narcissists takes some doing... [[[[ much of the moral/worlding urge I go on about is geared to work policing non-empathic narcissists who break the cross-insurance of hunter-gatherer success paterns (Given Trump/Putin/Boris Johnson et al... we are currently not policing them very well) (multi-modal = where other animal species have one or two niches, humans exploit at least two and negotiate who does what, I suspect the crux you are pointing out has more to do with this being done more successfully allowing a quicker response time to change and so expansion into new geographic zones. Even before this doubles down into economies and stratified societies)
⑦ Epistemic status: me? about the same, I like to generate poetic rumination on the theme but...
⑧ I seemed to have missed Michael Corballis, will chase he is “certain” I suspect we are all wrong on these guesses, either way.
⑩ “But these arguments are scattered across posts,” LOL
⑪ My how we load (double-down) on some pronouns and not other at times (why are we dicussing the plural you more)
______________________
⑫ What makes us human?
ⓐ stories need no accuracy because their primary power lies in organising, and negotiating that organising, those groups (of I’s or not-I or we-s or us-I) who do not even try to organise themselves are less likely to survive, this is why we have no organ for truth (maybe one for lies but that is another story) we just do stuff and feel we should, because there can be no iteration (routine or learning) with out starting the journey with a single (mist-)step.
ⓑ Terrence Deacon is good on a non-Chomskyan non Steven-Pinker Language Acquisition Device (LAD) (black-box recursion). For what its worth I think this is the Janus dance of consciousness per se, so this power-up focussing on the “I” is great, but the “I” might be just an outcome of that doubling-down recursively (in a good way). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Deacon
Consciousness is a series of WTF moments that dance on the threshold…. — as I mentioned before
I’ve a side project on the seven sisters, excellent exhibition :
Neale, Margo and National Museum of Australia (Canberra). Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters : [Exhibition, Canberra, National Museum of Australia, 15 September 2017 - 25 February 2018 and Travelling, 2017.] ISBN 978-1-921953-29-3
This song line moves across Australia (the entire continent that is ) from West to East. Compare that to your Roman Empire maps at greatest extent. Across not just languages but language groups. Who needs a imperial government to generate a continental wide culture and negotiated world??
See Dissanyake for another frame on this discussion.
I am beginning to repeat myself so I’ll lay off for now on the point by point responses.
_________final thoughts________
It might be, at your inflection point ~59-60K years ago, cultures could maintain and create better ‘I’s because they became better parents, and not that the ‘I’s first appeared fully formed like Athena from her father’s thigh.
I.E. what the primatologists and evolutionary anthropologists put forward (like de Waals). I think they are on the money. With Dissanyake on how it is done.
That we finally should on others, and in this way we can better police the non-empathic narcissists and pscyhopaths, and this lead to greater organisation capabilites, recursively, in organising the world by way of rasing better ‘I’s, a legacy that stratified societies have begun frittering away by raising structures that reward and double-down on promoting narcissism. (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World)
Narcissists in a sense have no I, because they are the world, much more than just the center of it. They emotional toddlers for whom the reality principle (recognising there are other ‘I’s out there) has never been accessible (parental failure or biological impossibility --- e.g. psychopaths).
One can put it the other way too. Narcissists have no world, because they only have their I.
Being able to negotiated that I/world/I and world/I/World healthily is proabably more key than having as I per se.
The rest of us dance our consciousness like Janus on the threshld between inside me and outside me, between you and me, between us and them, between my body and the dirt, in a multi-modal range of movements (hunting/gathering/teching recursively) across a hyper-dimensional socially negotiated/constructed world united by the seven sisters above us. Between the I and the world we shouldily dream into place
I've been reading bits and pieces of your stuff for a while, this was the first piece I read from beginning to end in one sitting (listened to while I painted my shed floor). It was a fantastic piece for that - it made your case much more clear, and helped me better understand what parts were "established" versus your novel conjectures. I've always been bored in art museums - no longer, can't wait to have another try! Thank you!
These discussions get tiresome when lots of words are wasted defining "conscious", and one of the things I appreciate about this piece is that it defines these terms before using them, with the exception of duality. Do you mean mind as distinct from body, conscious thought as distinct from subsconscious?
One of the many places where @vgr is a wizard is in his curated and crafted vocabulary. He takes a common word with a muddled common usage, defines it quickly in a precise way, and then builds wonderful cathedrals out of these precise meanings. I think your writing would be easier to understand if it had a more precise set of terms which were consistent from piece to piece. Your interviews would be a good place to workshop this skill - they are currently hampered I think by competitive-dictionary-making.
Very interesting post. As you know, I think the insistence on hallucinogens being foundational to human consciousness is post-60s hippy claptrap (with a dark backstory that is not hippiesh at all). Nevertheless, the ambition of thinking at a grand scale about shared human symbolism is refreshing (and completely out of fashion in contemporary anthropology).
Snakes are obvious symbols of life-renewal (they shed their old wrinkly skins and are shiny and new underneath). Rescursive thought, whenever/ however it emerges, poses a questions animals don't think about: what happens to me when I die? What happens to the people I love when they die?
the special intelligence, sociability, and playfulness of humans is most closely analogized in aquatic sea mammals, the smartest of which live in matriarchal pods. they didn't need snake venom to develop this lifestyle :)
I responded to your (book sent by) email asking if substack or my email software is distributing your book for free. I think we had to be aware of an “I” before we could process “I want.”
Is there anything in there about a hominid species similar to our own conducting burial rights? That’s been earning most of my focus lately.
potentially circular trap here given the narrative surrounds, but I take your meaning, (even if 'narrative' beings the moment life lifts itself off a substrate and in that movement composes the body and the landscape it 'stories' over from the substrate of the terrain/medium, that a flow or gradient of protons allows when eddied into a membrane, or membrane into an eddy)
complexification is not a first appearance, just the most famous
No, it continues as a worlding, in this case as a series of responsibilities in inter-relations, in which a life may end but the rest continues. More recently most translate these tripartite worlding concepts such as tjurrkpa (country/land-people-law/lore) as dreaming (traditions of which go extinct but it does not end, being immanent rather than transcendental). Social ontologies on country have more to do with responsibilities rather than belonging and exclusion--(not identity-based). Perhaps it could argued that dreaming's 'sovereignty' ends with the British invasion and settler, but not from within the dreaming POV. Responsibilities descend regardless. Admittedly this is an attempt at emic explanations to a non-Australian audience. (not yet arguing with the main thesis of post).
Sapient paradox? Maybe 10-15 kya we just began abusing our mitochondria with enough blood glucose from ingestion of increasingly available grains that our brains became hyperactive. If so, maybe the 'sapience' we so freely exhibit and blandish about ever since may be nothing much but a symptom of our species' dietarily-induced chronic manic state. Note that under this hypothesis, women would have had relatively greater access to dietary carbs (and consequently induced greater'creativity') before men due to pre-agricultural gender-defined economic specialization. The psychiatrist Christopher Palmer discusses variation in human mental behavior under, among other things, the influence of a carb-enriched diet in his recent book for the layman, https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Energy-Revolutionary-Understanding-Health/dp/1637741588/ref=sr_1_1.
Please keep these going man. They’re always a great read
Really enjoyed this full essay, I have converted this whole post (minus the footnotes) into a multi voiced AI reading, I spent quite a bit of time pre-prepping and making sure it all converted properly, I am really happy with this full 3-hour output. I'd encourage anyone who wants to read this but reads more effectively with their ears to try it out.
https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/p/eve-theory-of-consciousness-v30-by
Great as always! I want to suggest some more ways to falsify the hypothesis:
Which other snake myths exist from bronze age, neolythic and paleolythic times? And by "other" I mean some other snake myths that a pictoric or literary reference to them would be false positives in your research.
I can point out to the magnificent YouTube channel Crecganford, who explains the origin of the flood myth. He posits two main sources for it: the original from Africa, and a main branch from Sundaland, which had vast territories flooded at the end of the Ice Age. The first of those stories involve serpents, the second one involve dragons.
Regarding the use of milk in Indian and Greek mysteric rituals, Crecganford explains that PIE domesticated the cow and first acquired lactose digestion capabilities.
will you please explain the evolution of the anti-I movement (ego death). Also, if self-ego led to culture, what would ego death for all sentient beings lead to as is the goal of buddhism?
Thanks for this. It was worth the wait.
I find the perspective from footnote 50 particularly compelling. Also, it is insane that there is a footnote 50 🤣
Anyway, the case looks a lot stronger when suddenly it turns out individual pieces of the puzzle have been extensively argued and researched and the original contribution is about putting them together. I would really like to see this level of effort directed to alternatives to the EToC. Do you know of any? One epistemological problem I'm very interested in is in estimating confidence in theories when there is a lack of coherent alternatives to them!
A Gday Andrew, from Tasmania
I think the time frame is way off (I think it is a slow grind in the paleolithic with a noticeable pay-off recently, I don’t think it is “I” arising however, more like “other-I” which magics why we should) but I like the story. It's Sunday and have more time, thanks for writing this.
My passion project on this theme started at https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
years later I started the blog here abouts at https://whyweshould.substack.com/
ⓐ also read thismorning c.f. https://www.razibkhan.com/p/the-longer-i-live-the-wronger-i-get
More thoughts/comments/notes as reading, I jump around a bit:
①"native dualism"
my position is that this is an outcome of the Janus dance, when it doubles-down on it's naive power -- even the yinyang symbol does this, (might be an outcome of bilateral symmetry...? or vice versa??) https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/the-janus-ratio
②"The impulse to make art and search for meaning was not always found in our species. …."
religion/art/performance/rites/routine/plays/staging/fashion/bodypaint/painting are an outcome of the (moral) worlding urge, or if recursively doubled-down it becmes a culture’s passion project as a the “world-building”’reality’(aside: we double-down a lot --- in some French philosophies (Deleuze) this is called intensifying or re-intensifying) this turns a routine into rite, the ritual into a doctrine, and a doctrine into dogma -- the medium of intensification is the social/political space created by the success of the routine in the first place) (if we do this internally we get identitarian politics -- from socially created identities -- unless one is autistic like me of course)
—thus your "Rather, it’s a tic of whatever environments humans have been living in over the last 50,000 years." is correct, the social landscape rather than the terrain mostly (In Australian Aboriginal culture (e.g. tjukurrpa) these are not separated out, they are the world,
③"Time gobbles up evidence. " we have to create a taphonomy of our social landscapes and strip back the intensifications (social ontologies, dogma, identities, build worlds) and see how they fossilise themselves: https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/divining-the-gap
④ "soul" https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/reading-the-relativistic-brain-how
⑤ oral history, millennia http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_9966-1
⑥ "My thesis is that women discovered “I” first"
(See also/ have you seen?) Ellen Dissanayake's stuff for an excellent frame on all this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Dissanayake More about special nurturing than feminine insight, in a negotiated multi-modal fitness landscape, raising empathically children into specialness and then breaking them with the reality principle without creating a psychopath/narcissists takes some doing... [[[[ much of the moral/worlding urge I go on about is geared to work policing non-empathic narcissists who break the cross-insurance of hunter-gatherer success paterns (Given Trump/Putin/Boris Johnson et al... we are currently not policing them very well) (multi-modal = where other animal species have one or two niches, humans exploit at least two and negotiate who does what, I suspect the crux you are pointing out has more to do with this being done more successfully allowing a quicker response time to change and so expansion into new geographic zones. Even before this doubles down into economies and stratified societies)
⑦ Epistemic status: me? about the same, I like to generate poetic rumination on the theme but...
⑧ I seemed to have missed Michael Corballis, will chase he is “certain” I suspect we are all wrong on these guesses, either way.
⑨ I’ve begun interrogating the I/we assumptions in ‘teh’ west at https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/games-in-the-hide-of-our-names (I’ll add here that ‘We’ is not prior to ‘I’).
⑩ “But these arguments are scattered across posts,” LOL
⑪ My how we load (double-down) on some pronouns and not other at times (why are we dicussing the plural you more)
______________________
⑫ What makes us human?
ⓐ stories need no accuracy because their primary power lies in organising, and negotiating that organising, those groups (of I’s or not-I or we-s or us-I) who do not even try to organise themselves are less likely to survive, this is why we have no organ for truth (maybe one for lies but that is another story) we just do stuff and feel we should, because there can be no iteration (routine or learning) with out starting the journey with a single (mist-)step.
Perhaps the I is a mistep.
⑬ Recursion is useful
yes
ⓐ “But Humans aren’t computers” again see https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/reading-the-relativistic-brain-how at least as a re-framer [ power of the first (mis-)step??] (I mention “I am in a strange loop” in introducing their book)
ⓑ Terrence Deacon is good on a non-Chomskyan non Steven-Pinker Language Acquisition Device (LAD) (black-box recursion). For what its worth I think this is the Janus dance of consciousness per se, so this power-up focussing on the “I” is great, but the “I” might be just an outcome of that doubling-down recursively (in a good way). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Deacon
© I had a blog for a while riffing on the monomyth, using the Hans Christian Anderson story of Thumbelina as a contra-myth. The monomyth is just a hunter’s story, (there and back again, successfully connecting three vectors of movmeent, and retuning into balance) leaving out the other side of the paleolithic negotiating side, the gathering movement, which we see in Thumbelina as one damn WTF moment and circumstance after another.
Consciousness is a series of WTF moments that dance on the threshold…. — as I mentioned before
I’ve a side project on the seven sisters, excellent exhibition :
Neale, Margo and National Museum of Australia (Canberra). Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters : [Exhibition, Canberra, National Museum of Australia, 15 September 2017 - 25 February 2018 and Travelling, 2017.] ISBN 978-1-921953-29-3
This song line moves across Australia (the entire continent that is ) from West to East. Compare that to your Roman Empire maps at greatest extent. Across not just languages but language groups. Who needs a imperial government to generate a continental wide culture and negotiated world??
A nice coin too https://www.ramint.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020/Media_Release/2020-1-coloured-fine-silver-star-dreaming_the-seven-sisters-uncirculated-coin_rev.jpg
Weak EToC
See Dissanyake for another frame on this discussion.
I am beginning to repeat myself so I’ll lay off for now on the point by point responses.
_________final thoughts________
It might be, at your inflection point ~59-60K years ago, cultures could maintain and create better ‘I’s because they became better parents, and not that the ‘I’s first appeared fully formed like Athena from her father’s thigh.
I.E. what the primatologists and evolutionary anthropologists put forward (like de Waals). I think they are on the money. With Dissanyake on how it is done.
That we finally should on others, and in this way we can better police the non-empathic narcissists and pscyhopaths, and this lead to greater organisation capabilites, recursively, in organising the world by way of rasing better ‘I’s, a legacy that stratified societies have begun frittering away by raising structures that reward and double-down on promoting narcissism. (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World)
Narcissists in a sense have no I, because they are the world, much more than just the center of it. They emotional toddlers for whom the reality principle (recognising there are other ‘I’s out there) has never been accessible (parental failure or biological impossibility --- e.g. psychopaths).
One can put it the other way too. Narcissists have no world, because they only have their I.
Being able to negotiated that I/world/I and world/I/World healthily is proabably more key than having as I per se.
The rest of us dance our consciousness like Janus on the threshld between inside me and outside me, between you and me, between us and them, between my body and the dirt, in a multi-modal range of movements (hunting/gathering/teching recursively) across a hyper-dimensional socially negotiated/constructed world united by the seven sisters above us. Between the I and the world we shouldily dream into place
ok, I seem to have become a blog fly, I still haven't read it all, but this is a virtual backlink (as I think about what I have read here) (contexts for my other comments) https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/games-in-the-hide-of-our-names
Oh we are so back
I've been reading bits and pieces of your stuff for a while, this was the first piece I read from beginning to end in one sitting (listened to while I painted my shed floor). It was a fantastic piece for that - it made your case much more clear, and helped me better understand what parts were "established" versus your novel conjectures. I've always been bored in art museums - no longer, can't wait to have another try! Thank you!
These discussions get tiresome when lots of words are wasted defining "conscious", and one of the things I appreciate about this piece is that it defines these terms before using them, with the exception of duality. Do you mean mind as distinct from body, conscious thought as distinct from subsconscious?
One of the many places where @vgr is a wizard is in his curated and crafted vocabulary. He takes a common word with a muddled common usage, defines it quickly in a precise way, and then builds wonderful cathedrals out of these precise meanings. I think your writing would be easier to understand if it had a more precise set of terms which were consistent from piece to piece. Your interviews would be a good place to workshop this skill - they are currently hampered I think by competitive-dictionary-making.
Very interesting post. As you know, I think the insistence on hallucinogens being foundational to human consciousness is post-60s hippy claptrap (with a dark backstory that is not hippiesh at all). Nevertheless, the ambition of thinking at a grand scale about shared human symbolism is refreshing (and completely out of fashion in contemporary anthropology).
Snakes are obvious symbols of life-renewal (they shed their old wrinkly skins and are shiny and new underneath). Rescursive thought, whenever/ however it emerges, poses a questions animals don't think about: what happens to me when I die? What happens to the people I love when they die?
the special intelligence, sociability, and playfulness of humans is most closely analogized in aquatic sea mammals, the smartest of which live in matriarchal pods. they didn't need snake venom to develop this lifestyle :)
I responded to your (book sent by) email asking if substack or my email software is distributing your book for free. I think we had to be aware of an “I” before we could process “I want.”
Is there anything in there about a hominid species similar to our own conducting burial rights? That’s been earning most of my focus lately.
(Big post) (not all read but I had to pause at):
"meaningful traits"
potentially circular trap here given the narrative surrounds, but I take your meaning, (even if 'narrative' beings the moment life lifts itself off a substrate and in that movement composes the body and the landscape it 'stories' over from the substrate of the terrain/medium, that a flow or gradient of protons allows when eddied into a membrane, or membrane into an eddy)
complexification is not a first appearance, just the most famous
Incredible read!
Cultural transmission from trans-Siberian travelers?
(big post)(Second pause) "Dreamtime ended."
No, it continues as a worlding, in this case as a series of responsibilities in inter-relations, in which a life may end but the rest continues. More recently most translate these tripartite worlding concepts such as tjurrkpa (country/land-people-law/lore) as dreaming (traditions of which go extinct but it does not end, being immanent rather than transcendental). Social ontologies on country have more to do with responsibilities rather than belonging and exclusion--(not identity-based). Perhaps it could argued that dreaming's 'sovereignty' ends with the British invasion and settler, but not from within the dreaming POV. Responsibilities descend regardless. Admittedly this is an attempt at emic explanations to a non-Australian audience. (not yet arguing with the main thesis of post).
Sapient paradox? Maybe 10-15 kya we just began abusing our mitochondria with enough blood glucose from ingestion of increasingly available grains that our brains became hyperactive. If so, maybe the 'sapience' we so freely exhibit and blandish about ever since may be nothing much but a symptom of our species' dietarily-induced chronic manic state. Note that under this hypothesis, women would have had relatively greater access to dietary carbs (and consequently induced greater'creativity') before men due to pre-agricultural gender-defined economic specialization. The psychiatrist Christopher Palmer discusses variation in human mental behavior under, among other things, the influence of a carb-enriched diet in his recent book for the layman, https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Energy-Revolutionary-Understanding-Health/dp/1637741588/ref=sr_1_1.