wintler2 wrote:MacCruiskeen wrote:..
This is brilliant, and it opens a big can of worms. You're probably familiar with
John Zerzan, a green anarchist whose rejection of modernity is bracing, to say the least. He identifies the Fall of mankind with the emergence of language itself, which was "a binge of symbolic cognition" that preceded even reading by several hundred millennia.
I prob picked up idea from Zerzan or someone like, but i'm cautious about primitivism, which seems idealised and simplistic. For us here now, going off symbols altogether is not an option, but theres no need for binary choice, one can alternate between them as appropriate. First we need to remember that it is even possible to
not abstract and distance ourselves from the world and ourselves.
The bands that symbols are communicated from one human being to another is typically too underdeveloped to be useful. At best you can get a simple sentence or idea through, the rest slips into the unconscious. Good for creating a large movement of simpletons, bad for technical training.
This is the problem with LSD and psychedelics in general, any metacognition that is performed ends up being done by the subconscious. It's equivalent to looking through a hole in a wall when you need to tear the whole wall down altogether. Even after the transfer of the symbol takes place, the subconscious can disregard data because it has no model to compare it too or mis-categorize it to something it feels is similar.
The problem isn't language or symbols strictly speaking, it's humans lack of perception. Perception itself is a tricky concept...
Edit: If you cut out abstract thinking you will live entirely in the moment. No more past/future oriented thinking. No more mathematics. No ability to understand any form of truth beyond the ones that your senses feed to you right now. Being in the moment does not equal being outside of time, by it's very definition. Do you believe that truth exists outside of time?
Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2012 4:08 pm
Thats what we do, label/fit it in to or out of our worldview, then can pretend we understand, and go back to sleep. A creature less inclined to labels and abstraction is correspondingly more aware of whats going down here and now, imho. It may not seem an advantage if you're locked in a cage, but it does increase ones chance of getting out of the cage. 
