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I love it, as a fan of Julian Jaynes, I’m definitely adding it in.
He places also the appearance of self-awareness and fully human behavior 12000 years ago, but self-awareness exists in other animals and many human behaviors date from long before (tools: 2.5 Myr, fire: 400-1000 kyr, art: 30kyr)
I also read the article about the snake cult of consciousness that read more like an elaborated numerology than a scientific hypothesis
The Eve Theory of Consciousness proposed that consciousness is recent, women were self-aware first, and agriculture was the result. Any biologists or anthropologists care to chime in on whether that's obviously wrong or not? The author's self-described background is engineering so I find some of his more outlandish claims about human development suspect.
1. Are there primitive societies of hunter-gatherer that are not self aware, as in they don't pass neurological test that measure this?
2. From a evolutionary perspective what is the advantage of this sexual dimorphism and given that this advantage exists why did this advantage disappear afterwards and become present in both sexes. Are there any other traits where woman are shown to have larger divergence. I thought men where the "weak" sex in this regard.
3. If consciousness is recent then how do you explain conscious trails and self awareness in lower primates, is this also a case of convergent evolution?
I'm a little skeptical of any theory that makes pronouns super important for the simple reason that there are many languages like where pronouns are not super important. In agglutinative languages like Turkish and Finnish, person is shown via conjugation, making pronouns redundant. In topic marker languages like Japanese and Korean, person can be derived from context and pronouns are often replaced by titles.
Could you give some examples in context of how this works? I’m interested in understanding the concept!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you give some examples in context of how this works? I’m interested in understanding the concept!
In Finnish, the smaller words get suffixed into the larger one. Take "talo", nominative for "house". In English you say "in (the) house", in Finnish the "-ssa" suffix means the same thing, so you say "talossa". "from (the) house" would be "talosta". There's like over 20 such modifications to the root word, and they compose. "from my house" would be "talostani", where the "-ni" suffix means "my".
It gets even a larger swath when considering polysynthetic and fusional languages.
I find self-contradictory the idea that the pronouns have a single origin that at the same time appeared very late and propagated everywhere even in place that have been isolated before the appearance of the pronouns. He places also the appearance of self-awareness and fully human behavior 12000 years ago, but self-awareness exists in other animals and many human behaviors date from long before (tools: 2.5 Myr, fire:…
But the similarity of pronouns across the world is still a very interesting subject to research. Johanna Nichols has done a lot of work in that area.
The Eve Theory of Consciousness proposed that consciousness is recent, women were self-aware first, and agriculture was the result. Any biologists or anthropologists care to chime in on whether that's obviously wrong or not? The author's self-described background is engineering so I find some of his more outlandish claims about human development suspect.
Unless it includes the word “quantum”, in which case take it with a truckload of salt, preferably intravenously.