No venom experiments on apes, sadly. However, my guess is they aren't on the cusp of self-awareness the way humans were. I think we started experimenting with venom *after* having some symbolic thought. The self is a symbol, and likely not the first one we started using. Apes have 0 symbols.
I write about human self-experimentation in these two pieces:
Can you draw up a timeline of when humans gained consciousness and these traits diffused, or have you already done so?
I've read a lot of your posts and they sound compelling, but I get this feeling that you're trying to build a storyline out of evidence that spans tens of thousands of years.
The EToC series does have some dates, but it's hard because at any given point in time there is going to be a lot of cognitive variation across the world (between regions, between genders, and between ages).
Very roughly, the way I've been thinking about things lately is that humans started to evolve stories and symbols in the last 100,000 years, and them only really becoming part of a fitness-enhancing package in the last 50,000 years. The story/symbol "I" was experienced in a very fractured state, if at all, until about the end of the Ice Age when the Snake Cult (and pronouns) spread.
Related, I want to write a piece on how evolutionary stages that last thousands of years could be turned into myths. The variation helps here, as different evolutionary stages could have been living next to one another (different tribes, men and women, the young and old), in addition to living through the stages in your own life (which happened to a greater degree when self-awareness had not been selected for as much).
Has anyone experimented with these types of venoms on apes?
No venom experiments on apes, sadly. However, my guess is they aren't on the cusp of self-awareness the way humans were. I think we started experimenting with venom *after* having some symbolic thought. The self is a symbol, and likely not the first one we started using. Apes have 0 symbols.
I write about human self-experimentation in these two pieces:
https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/the-snake-cult-of-consciousness-two
https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/when-god-was-a-woman
Can you draw up a timeline of when humans gained consciousness and these traits diffused, or have you already done so?
I've read a lot of your posts and they sound compelling, but I get this feeling that you're trying to build a storyline out of evidence that spans tens of thousands of years.
The EToC series does have some dates, but it's hard because at any given point in time there is going to be a lot of cognitive variation across the world (between regions, between genders, and between ages).
Very roughly, the way I've been thinking about things lately is that humans started to evolve stories and symbols in the last 100,000 years, and them only really becoming part of a fitness-enhancing package in the last 50,000 years. The story/symbol "I" was experienced in a very fractured state, if at all, until about the end of the Ice Age when the Snake Cult (and pronouns) spread.
Related, I want to write a piece on how evolutionary stages that last thousands of years could be turned into myths. The variation helps here, as different evolutionary stages could have been living next to one another (different tribes, men and women, the young and old), in addition to living through the stages in your own life (which happened to a greater degree when self-awareness had not been selected for as much).