[ransackdev]

Hmm, I remember being 4 years old, not knowing anything at all about the brain, the mind, or much else for that matter. I actually was pretty confused about everything around me. But I knew the voice in my head was me thinking, and I know for a fact that not a single thing was taught to me directly or indirectly to influence that. I just knew that those were my thoughts, because I was thinking them. I’m not special so I’d guess most people “just know” that it’s their own mind, without having to know what a mind is a or have any knowledge at all, and that they aren’t hallucinations.

It’s pretty weird to me that many folks view the people in our past as being unable to be intelligent near or on par with today’s levels. These people were not hypnotized by hallucinations, that’s saying they were not smart enough to even have a thought that they could understand it came from themselves. Yet they were smart enough to develop pulleys and create pyramids, or many other wonders of the world. Things we literally do know how they weee able to do at that time in the past. Things that none of our modern structures will outlast. Things that took understanding of complex subjects, capacity planning, raw material refining, site surveying, astronomy, physics, math, weather patterns, etc.

I wonder in 12k years if humans will look at us and say we were incapable of knowing that our thoughts were ours and lived in a hypnotic state viewing our thoughts as hallucinations. They couldn’t possibly know for one. And also, doesn’t that seem like a odd way to view people who accomplished things we still don’t fully understand?

[angiosperm]

By the time you were 4, you had already absorbed much of the structure of your parents' language, including its models of self.

People were not less intelligent in the past, but they knew less, and had a radically smaller fund of inventions, including mental models and practices, to draw upon. Late speculation about "hypnosis" and "hallucinations" have to be understood as analogies. We know with certainty, anyway, that notions of gods and sacrifice were invented at some particular time, and passed along. And, we know it was common in many places to perceive carved figures talking.

In 12ky, if we don't eliminate ourselves, we will certainly have many inventions that we will be unable to understand life without, and be left to try to imagine it.

[dmn322]

I'm not saying I agree with his hypothesis, but I admire its craziness. He's well aware that it's out there, and he makes some pretty compelling points... doing a pretty thorough analysis of the earliest available literature. For instance in the Illiad, there are essentially no direct references to thoughts or even feeling. He lists the many points where people literally say they're talking to god all throughout ancient literature. They say it in a way that doesn't sound like a metaphor at all. The rulers say something like "<insert god's name> told me to gather 1000lbs of barley and feed him 10 lbs and take him for a procession"... so that is their edict.

I don't think he's suggesting they were stupid. I think what he's suggesting is much more a reflection on the power of metaphor and the sort of fragility of the psyche more than anything. And he addresses something that I've never seen anyone else address. If previous civilizations were so similar psychologically, why don't we see more literature before 2000 bc that contains metaphor. Why doesn't the earliest writing contain self-reflection?

In fact if you see all these ancient people worshipping gods, building gigantic monuments to them, sacrificing humans (many of whom happily participated)... then it seems like you must assume they're stupid on some level to believe they were psychologically the same as us but they just lacked the critical thinking to put their labor to better use. And that they were just lying when they said they were talking to gods, depicting it on friezes, etc.

Hellen Keller said she really did not feel conscious until after she learned language. She had no concept of self. I could never make sense of that either. It seemed like it must be a fluke, like she was exaggerating it to play into people's expectations. But her description sounds 100% sincere.

As for you being 4 years old and being able to differentiate yourself and the thoughts in your head. That's years after you learned "I" and "you".. Years after you learned to remember.

Anyway, when I first started reading the book, it was with extreme skepticism... kind of hate-reading. The book was a gift, and I read it because I liked Westworld, the HBO show which heavily references it. But I have to say, as someone who has been staunchly anti-humanist.. who has advocated for the same basic thought you're advocating for... studying history through the lens of an average person who is just like us... believing that the average people didn't really believe the religious stuff and it was just forced on them by the elites.. this book made me question those deeply held assumptions. I'm still not sold, but I think it needs to not be dismissed offhand without a legitimate evidence-based criticism.