Tom, I am not advocating a return to a natural state, golden age, Arcadia, etc. I did not mean to imply that. I have to go back to the cloud metaphor. Some recent archeology in Central America indicates that some of the civilizations were so successful that they depleted their resources. I think that is culture and not a result of our survival instincts.

Thank you for the welcome. It seems culture and religion are tow sides of the coin. I am reminded of what Carl Sagan said about religion, i.e., we should be careful of how we condemn it because of the enrichment and enjoyment it has added to life. I'm not advocating a search for aboriginal religion.

It only matters in relation to human existence. In an absurd universe, nothing we do ultimately matters, but if our survival abilities are clouded, we will never be able to adapt, and that is what I think has happened.

China is a cradle civilization and Confucius came out of the culture that sprang from Emperor Yao and Emperor Shun, both legendary and from the third millennium b.c.e.

Yes, that is what I am positing. I am currently thinking of culture a a cloud. That is not an exhaustive metaphor, but it serves the purpose of explaining why we can't see other cultures, or even our own nature. As Confucius said, born alike, but by practice far apart. It is an obvious generalization since even within cultures, many of us are different with differing capacities, and abilities, but I think autochthonous humans spent several hundred thousand years before the culture cloud developed, so there was evolutionary value in what we were. I'm not saying culture is bad, it gives us enjoyment, enrichment, etc., but our evolutionary instincts suffer from the cloud. There is no logical reason why we can't solve many problems.

I would say that knowledge comes under several headings (scientific, cultural, literary knowledge, social knowledge, etc.) but water freezing at 32 degrees (caveats for saline content, etc.) would be scientific knowledge and could never be considered a social or linguistic framework. I think we have a mediated knowledge of reality, but what I'm really trying to explore is the human condition without the culture that seems to make us all different. I've been working on Arendt's book The Human Condition for awhile and it is strictly about the human condition from the perspective of western philosophy. It is thorough and quite prescient even into the 21st century (written in 1958), but I'm also cognizant of Confucian humanism which had thousands of years culture behind it at the same time that the basis for western culture was in its infancy.