I can tell this is going to be an adventure lol By pre-Enlightenment worldviews, I mean such as geomancy, astrology and theosophy. I have no inclination to get into the details of those perspectives either. By post-Enlightenment views, I mean the ideals of equal access to institutions of education, representative government, justice, some cultural expression, the social foundation that makes a progressing scientific worldview with a species consciousness, general humaneness, even conceivably universalizable. I think post-Enlightenment thinking is largely what makes it possible for millions of people with vision to care about the experience of someone who is blind in general, based on the idea that the impaired deserve assistance, their constraints dignified by legally affirmed equality of need and rudimentary commitment to reciprocate, the social contract. Prior to the Enlightenment, most citizens probably cared about the blind only if relatives, family friends, or a relationship formed incidental to relatively uncommon local conditions. Based on concepts of humanity, many people would find it generally admirable to describe a visual experience to an acquaintance who is blind, not a waste of time at all!

So I'll be Socrates: if describing sight to the blind is viewed as a waste of time by some with normal vision, it must be for a reason besides untranslatability, because every normal visual experience would be similarly untranslatable to someone who is blind, but not every individual with normal vision regards describing visual experience to the blind as an unconditional waste of time.

If you have had those kinds of experiences and insights then you may indeed have reason to place your faith in them, but if you haven't, then someone trying to convince you of their veracity will be speaking a different language, analogous to trying to describe colour to a blind person; a waste of everyone's time, in other words.

Many people have described visual experience to blind relatives and friends, the analogy is superficial, come up with a better example! lol Preferably not based on pre-Enlightenment worldviews.

Does the elected government technically even run the country? Politics is just a façade of tabloid material, there's not a single honest fact in the mix! lol We should vote Hugh Hefner president, that'd be a good scandal!

Different paradigms consist in attenuated ideas, theories and beliefs, non-trivials, which indeed may not be translatable into each other's terms

You can come to a new mutual understanding without sacrificing the traditional terms though, especially in cases of intermediately non-trivial translation, like between Buddhist and Freudian folk psychologies for instance. Preservation of original terms is probably preferable if possible, as stable points of reference around which all kinds of formative communicating can align, so you can bring the uninitiated multitudes on board. Preserving terminology particularly assists as a locus of conversation, but can be confusing in writing because immediate, personalized clarification is not available. Authors have to massively elaborate while presciently anticipating the mindsets of their audience, and the resolution of objections is a lengthy process, though capable of reaching deeper, more reflective levels. This is probably an obscure way of describing common practice, but it might be good at this stage of the discussion to explicitly diffuse catastrophic relativism. Currently untranslatable non-trivial conceptual schemes exist, but this untranslatability may be alterable somehow.

The properties of neuron synapsing are certainly key to an understanding of mental processes. Thousands of different types of neurons have been identified, the von Economo neuronal system linked with self-awareness, mirror neurons involved in perceiving mental states, certainly important for theories of perception. But I don't think biochemistry alone is ever going to be more than correlated with for instance a qualitative mental image, its going to require a comprehension of quantum effects in both cells and the natural environment to model perception directly. I've never learned exactly how mathematical concepts, observational contexts such as experimental designs, and structural models generally converge in quantum theory, but it would be nice if someone could find a way to make that common knowledge. We spend too much effort rhetorically promoting hugely simplified accounts of theories at the expense of explaining the details that enable their innovation and make them valid. I suppose that's what graduate school is for if you've got the money.

is our agreement profound enough to ensure there isn't a conceptual relativism at work?

That's what we're not so good at, culturally engineering optimized discourse and transmission of ideas. Its an ethical and institutional issue, hard to talk about. I think you have to get into the specifics of many different domains, and progress can change all participants. Do we temporarily delay some technological advancements to first get everyone generally educated and competently thinking about the issues involved? An extremely difficult social problem. You've got to somehow motivate citizens to give up the familiar and adopt new habits. Probably a multi-generational process always vulnerable to regression and corruption. Maybe fostering a broad historical perspective is a decent start, generating a "species" demographic.

All you've got to do to reconcile conceptual schemes is pool facts and mutually produce a view. No one wants to pool facts because most everything any individual or sub-culture presently believes is shown to be foolishly false in the act of collective justification or will be in the near future. Trying to explicitly translate non-trivial conceptual schemes is usually career suicide lol

The problem here is that Quantum "mechanics" is not mechanical. Quantum Leaps, Entanglement, & Superposition are not mechanical. So applying objective mechanical analogies to subjective metaphysical experience will get you nowhere.

As was somewhat clarified in my next post, I shouldn't say explain subjective experience in its common sense connotation, as if a description can be identical to the phenomenon, but we may be able to model the nature of certain experiences with participation from quantum physics in such a way that perception is theorizable with extreme precision, predictably observable with instrumentation and technologically implementable, and this is very mechanistic, though as you suggested the systematic math is completely disjuncted from conventional particle concepts.

Superposition is mathematically modelled as overlapping wave phases using the Schrodinger equation. The entanglement of photons is detectable as a statistically significant relationship between their phase states predicted by theory. The concept of diffuse electron wavicles pursuing multiple routes simultaneously within biochemical pathways works as a model of electron transport chains in photosynthesis. Experiments have been designed supporting the idea that the extremely rapid reaction rate of enzyme catalysis results from quantum tunneling in active sites. These are some more preliminary instances of quantum mechanisms besides what I described in my original post, the possibilities are largely untapped. Applied quantum theory will certainly be extremely diverse in its constituent forms and probably encompass the entirety of nature. If information isn't the foundation of our known universe already, it will become so, assuming theory, technology, and communal rationality can continue to progress. Very idealistic!

...we have to operationalize such folk psychology notions as "mind" and "qualia," making them into subjects of an empirical study. To this date, we seem to be nowhere near that goal, and it is not even clear that the goal is achievable.

I get what you're saying, it requires substantial research to identify a brain state and a qualitative experience, though we have rather easily correlated various brain regions with primary roles in vision, hearing, etc. Maybe the constraint isn't intrinsic unintelligibility of qualia to modeling, but simply limitations imposed by a paradigm based solely on thermodynamic chemistry, specifically diffusion, heat transfer, and three-dimensional structure. If it is accurate that perception is modulated by a higher-dimensional quantum interfacing of electromagnetic fields and biochemical matter, perhaps one facet of a total revision in our picture of the physical world, qualia will be no less ineffable subjectively because language is a separate module from perception, but we can expect models in which a physical process isn't merely correlated with for instance the sight of a particular color, but actually is the sight of that color. We may then be able to observe perception directly with some advanced fMRI-like device, integrate perception with technologies like electronics, come up with medical applications, and generally improve our concepts of mind, making them less illusory and language a possibly better approximation of reality. But like any theory or social act, we can always scrooge ourselves with it. Is human culture ethical enough for a science of qualia? It seems as if ethical issues will become critical with every future paradigm.

...the dynamics are so complex that, for all practical purposes, the system is a "black box". We can observe the initial conditions and the outcome, but what happens within is beyond our ability to calculate.

Vaguely reminds me of those rate of reaction problems from chemistry class. We can parse up the total reaction into sub-reactions with a rate limiting step, and these models are extremely practical, but I was always curious as to the details of what was submerged within the parameters of applied atomic theory. Similar to your description of meteorological science, we have a working knowledge of some initial states and end results, but the microscopic particularity that supposedly exists in between is fundamentally a postulated concept, not an object. Maybe quantum physics can completely revolutionize our picture of physical structure, to the extent of rendering conventionalized ideas of an atom itself a formerly intuitive illusion, though I don't know the theoretical technicalities. Anyone think a change this dramatic is possible? Seems the main stumbling block might be inability to wrap our minds around this "causality of the observer" effect.

This "only potential" sounds like a combination of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's concept of "will" and Aristotle's "final causality", but with a modern, scientific flare. Me, I'm very much a positivist when it comes to epistemology, I agree that the cosmos has a spontaneous impetus transcending our natural intuitions and our consciousness, with the challenge being to incorporate these phenomena into a functionally theoretical framework for technological purposes. We may not get reality, a definition of the walls of our currently supraphysical container, but concepts like space and time will acquire new practical meaning based on innovative fact-gathering contexts and progressing models of causality with heavy dependence on math. I think this is a dual process, first intuition-building, then experimental demonstration, and in quantum biochemistry at least we are amazingly moving into the demonstration phase!

I'm wondering, will it ever be possible to scientifically model chaos, would it look like negligible uncertainty in a particular probability distribution?

Explain these collapse of the wave function shenanigans, seems key to understanding quantum theory...

The book is Life on the Edge, The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology. Its a really simple read and very enlightening. It talks about how quantum ideas are being applied and corroborated in many areas of experimental biochemistry. The foundational concept is that subatomic particles, ions, and even small atoms intrinsically have a quantum form in isolation, a diffuse wavicle that can tunnel across relatively large distances nearly instantaneously, adopt multiple causal "phase states" simultaneously, morph in response to thermodynamically negligible amounts of energy, and more weird phenomena. Thermodynamic chemistry is the epiphenomenon: as millions of atoms collide and jostle for position, this cancels out their delicate quantum properties so that they can be modelled as three-dimensional particles. The main thesis is that cellular chemistry is a combination of thermodynamic substrate in the form of relatively macroscopic cells and tissues with pockets of quantum processes shielded from decoherence as naturally selected functionality. This paradigm suggests explanations for many key facets of biology - photosynthesis, the improbable evolution of replicators, enzyme catalysis, and more - and has so far been supported by every derivative laboratory experiment.

The idea of brain wave/ion channel interactions is an extension of this paradigm, a hypothesis that while thermodynamics is resistant to electromagnetic fields, a huge assortment of evolutionarily selected quantum processes in cells of the nervous system and throughout the body are not. We're talking trillions and trillions of quantum "pockets". This might allow us to fashion a working model of the mind/matter complex, whether it be biochemical "hardware" running EMF "software", or some multifarious variation on this theme. It seems probable that the relevance of quantum physics to chemistry in general will increase as we discover more and more of these loci of quantum behavior in all kinds of everyday material forms, even if we at the same time debunk the new-agey "awareness is the foundation of reality" notion. The really cool possibility is gaining the ability to better model phenomena such as near teleportation of quantum particles and more using higher-dimensional math while we reverse engineer the dynamics of their existence in the natural world, then finding ways to harness this realm with technologies, very sci-fi! If you want a brief synopsis of some additional material from the book, I can supply it.

Plutocracy in the guise of a republic with democratic traditions...

Is one day of a billion good-natured, reasonable, problem-solving conversations all that we require to achieve utopian paradise? Occasionally I think so.

Your post on class privilege was really good, intellectuality that actually got a strong emotional reaction out of me, not always easy to do. Unfortunately emotion doesn't always translate well into conversational writing lol I'm being ironic because that's how I was feeling, its not a discredit to the quality of what you said at all.

It does me so much good, you have no idea!

What if atmospheric circulation suddenly changed, what if a supervolcano erupted, what good would your draconian revolutionary eras be to you then? lol

I could try to think critically about the executive branch of irrationality, but maybe I should save myself the trouble. lol If the majority likes injustice, who am I to argue? These social arrangements no doubt have some grand function.

Futility futility futility. Futility futility futility. lol

Working class, middle class and upper class political leaders have all existed, so what distinguishes these professional policy-makers from the ruling class? Is the demographic distribution of political decision-makers changing in some culturally transformative way so that a new class is coalescing? What level of continuity does the upper class have that would give it a sustained, multi-generational and cohesive agenda? Also, what is the mechanism of real control? It seems like you're suggesting money might be the mode of influence, but what is the relationship between financing and cultural organization?

Common sense tells us that you have to protect the vulnerable or everyone is vulnerable. But when protecting the vulnerable would significantly increase your own vulnerability, we get not merely leadership but a class set apart from the interests of the majority. I agree that universal need transcends class distinctions, and if the upper class isn't going to undermine its position by attempting to satisfy these universal needs, it can be a positive influence, as can anyone.

I'll get in touch with my inner Socrates. What is an upper class, how can we define it? An upper class isn't simply people with lots of power...

When citizens receive aid from an institution, whether it be a hospital, clinic, government agency, or whatever it might be, the first action taken is to interrogate you: have you been married, do you have a family, what is your medical history, are you employed, how old are you, are you a citizen? This is not primarily to get to know you and help you better, this is to profile your functional niche, determining at what level you qualify for ethical behaviors. The economy does not treat citizens as human beings with intrinsic value, it treats humans as functional units in quantitatively defined demographics labelled and processed in accordance with utility, but usually with grace periods of suspended judgment and such.

The typical economy does not operate for ethical purposes, it generates and caters to superficial interests, what citizens like and what they can most easily be conditioned to like. Human behavior in many societies revolves around what citizens can be induced to spend money on, with no regard for what they should or shouldn't like or do, a minimal stimulation to integrity. Likes and dislikes are channeled and parsed in a system that is based on "whatever works". If system-builders can't figure out a way to economically pressure citizens into morality or don't care to, we won't be. Humans are growing ever more dependent on extrinsic incentives and less dependent on community cultures with self-supportive, mutualizing norms within which you value someone because you should rather than merely because your interests coincide.

That's one possible perspective, it can certainly be argued against.

When corporations spend years and billions of dollars of someone else's money trying to force one guy into vomiting eight times every second meal, anger, fear and anxiety get involved with ethics real quick.

That's the way it is: if you hit the socioeconomic jackpot great, if you get the shaft, sucks to be you. Ethics aren't tied to any particular standard besides whatever works, and we contradict ourselves as much as ever-changing local conditions seem to require of us, with no regard for humanity as composed of human individuals with an intrinsic value that transcends their functional niche. And this highlights one of our many contradictions, because we are commonly empathetic despite our rejection of humanity as in general worthy of empathy. Why I say we may be living in a post-ethics world, all cheesy punning aside. Whatever morality humans may have been marginally capable of is transforming into "what I like" and "what works".

No legal or community resource exists for dealing with it, no options that I know of. The more you try to advocate for yourself, the more some sectors of society rally around threatening you. What's sad is that some people have had it much worse, maybe not for as long and as all-consuming of their lives, but this country's institutions aren't working for many. A lot of citizens are in a similar situation. The wisest approach is probably to stay low profile, but that was made impossible for me and I basically got crucified psychologically. This society isn't friendly to diversity unless its turned into some kind of bizarrely amoral comedy act, and even then it can all fall apart at any moment. That's somewhat vague, not sure exactly what to say, but maybe you have some insights.

I don't think we're in very good shape as a society, but it really depends on your background. Some people are doing well, I'm in a torture chamber. Whether you get tortured or not depends on your willingness or inclination to conform, not whether you abide by the social contract, not infringing on anyone's freedoms. The modicum of freedom humans ever had is being revoked in very deliberate ways, but a delusional veneer inhibits most citizens from acknowledging it. Citizens seem to be satisfied saying, whether they actually believe it or not, "I'm not doing anything unusual, I'm simply living a life like everyone else, so why would I get in any sort of trouble?" That's the pernicious sort of innocence you were talking about, not the respecting freedom sort of innocence. We have to determine whether current freedoms are being curtailed for the sake of future increases in freedom, or whether freedom is under attack, and the truth is manifestly evident because we don't have enough freedom to even talk about the issue without getting tortured, I can personally vouch for that. As far as I can tell, freedom is illegal or at least becoming so.

I can't disagree that it all depends on context. Its unbelievable how many bizarre scenarios are possible, and that's why the law is so complex. But the whole point of law is to protect the innocent, because the instigator usually has the initial advantage, to an extent that the level of crime would be astronomical without at least minimally enforcing the "innocent is good", common sense tradition. Its either that or unceasing feuds. Without the wussy definition every sober citizen would be in lifelong misery. Comparing this ideal to actual historical and present conditions yields some interesting insights into human nature if one wants to venture that way. I think Nietzsche's concept of resentiment explains a lot, how even legal systems that have been refined for centuries can still get co-opted to cruel, corruptive, unjust ends. Is there really good and evil anymore? Maybe we've transitioned to resentiment and nihilism, with millions of commendable "good and bad" dissentions. Getting all wild and crazy tonight.

A person intending to harm might consider themselves good, but it contradicts the conventional meaning of the word itself excepting maybe in cases of self-defense. That's the way it seems to me, we can refine these ideas of course.

Enrique contra I like sushi :razz:

The post about Nietzsche was addressed to your inflammatory controversy-inducing atrocity lol

Its somewhat confusing, but I don't think Nietzsche's views on morality are prescriptive at all. If they were, they'd be totally irrational. I think he's saying after his speculations about morality's development that most people assert their own personal or sub-cultural "good and bad", and the concept of "evil" tends to be used as a means to coerce conformity, stifling growth of the individual via guilt and shame. Free-thinker Nietzsche of course dislikes this. Whether Nietzsche's assessment of evil applies in modern society is disputable.

Then in what sense did hunter-gatherers believe their myths?

To revive a defunct thread for the noble purpose of relieving an idle moment, what role does concept of self play in ethics? Seems that every ethical decision depends on the nature, status, psychology of affected agents, whether pain is experienced, the long-term benefits of temporary pain or inconvenience, the relative value placed on individuals and possessions, concerns like this. In some contexts humans place a significant premium on sanctity and quality of life as well as the collective future, and in some situations, not so much. Anyone aware of literature on the topic, theories, or arguments that have been made?

I'm still trying to work out a cogent view, which is why I posed the question (for what purpose who knows, but its entertaining me), so these are my initial thoughts based on the not too bad parameterizing of the issue you guys put together.

In ancient Athens, a society with only a few thousand politically active citizens, the individual was viewed by Plato and Aristotle as a microcosm of the state. The individual's obligation was to be virtuous in personal relationships, basically simple manners capable of being explained as a set of guidelines a la Nicomachean Ethics, and to use politics as a means of securing an environment where virtue is possible, by education, enforcement, structural organization, and in the leadership classes, deep reflection upon one's own values, motivations and purposes, like in The Republic. If all individuals were virtuous by training and also by ethical reasoning as a kind of practical problem-solving about the consequences of actions, in essence intellectually deferential to the attitudes and experiences of fellow citizens, then the collective would be virtuous as well, upholding virtue as culture. This is probably very similar to Kant's categorical imperative: if an individual can will an action of ethical import to be a universal law, then it is moral by way of the fact that what works for the whole will work for each individual as well, and we have a duty to conform to these minimum principles, standards adequate in the vast majority of cases. This is all also similar to Christianity's golden rule, love your neighbor as yourself, the idea that everyone is obligated to act in ways of benefit to the whole community.

As far as I understand it, utilitarianism claims that what is best for the majority should be the standard, and "best" means what brings pleasure, not only to oneself but also the collective. The tacit idea I suppose is that human beings are very similar in their basic experience of pleasure as satisfied by material and social needs, and so in many domains a majority is a nearly absolute majority: food, shelter, clothing, health, security, friendship, community, etc. In this case, the individual is a microcosm of the collective to a more limited degree.

Then we've got Nietzsche, who claims that morality is a product of authority, in the form of prehistoric social mores and then a revolving door of oppressively self-serving upper-classes, forging populations by comparable methods of pain-infliction into having similar experiences and behavioral tendencies, with moral standards basically being criteria for submission, which over the course of millennia narrowed the human trait profile in an evolutionary process until some cultures with universal values were possible.

In the first case, the individual is a microcosm of the collective as a consequence of absolute human nature, in the second case, the individual should consent to the collective as a generally practical expedient, and in the third case the individual is coerced by social power into submitting to the collective.

It is interesting to note that this trajectory into relativism parallels the progression of Western civilization towards greater multiculturalism via colonization and conquest. Ancient Athenian citizenship was uniform culturally, John Stuart Mill's England was ethnically homogenous with some class differentiation, and Nietzsche's imperial West was extremely diverse culturally. Ethics become more complex with increases in sub-cultural heterogeneity.

The initial European solution, as was alluded to by someone in an earlier post, was the formulation of universal laws pertaining to ownership, based on the concept that the standardized economic value of material goods is under the protection of the government as personal possessions, the sum of which are an individual's property. This bypassed the thorny, still highly speculative psychological issues, defining ethics solely in terms of universally recognizable inanimate objects, but it also subjected human behavior to a poorly understood dynamic of international commerce.

This property concept, the idea that material objects are a symbolic representation of one's self, seems to be extremely appealing to the psyche. Most human beings love flashy materialism and a culture based on commercial fads. But the process by which economic conditions change is accelerating in thus far unpredictable ways, meaning that massive amounts of new material goods are constantly being innovated and mass-produced, so that human concepts of self are in perpetual upheaval and the property paradigm is growing more difficult to manage. Most financial actors and sub-cultures try to manipulate this disorganization for their exclusive, usually short-term advantage, making technological and institutional development minimally ethical and efficient. Can an attempt to induce even further conformity by force remedy this situation? I doubt it. Educated citizens only conform while they're at war, war sucks though the occupation of soldier has so far probably been the most important job in world history, and an uneducated population has become an economic and thus a political disadvantage.

You guys have any insights about this?

So it seems as though ethics are in a degenerate or inadequate state. Then how can we make it better?

Goes to show that typical modern mentality isn't really much different from prehistory in some ways.

Maybe this hunter-gatherer knowledge was empirical in a sense, but I would doubt it was what we would call scientific. We have theories describing mechanistic laws of nature, while prehistoric humans had mythical narratives, and there is a categorical difference between these views, though apparently a comparable mnemonic role. Its like Enlightenment Deism vs. polytheistic Animism, the further back you go in human history, the more spiritual entities are seen as modifying the essence of natural order. Spirituality has never vanished as the technical progresses because spiritual phenomena are real, but the theory-based design of a doppler radar evinces a completely different perspective and mutational dynamic than orally transmitted myth, even though they are addressed to some of the same events.

Maybe we could compare ancient and modern thinking by saying that in both cases the degree to which belief is oriented towards supernatural or functional explanation depends on context, and though society is still a combination of both outlooks, the arrangement of contexts has changed. Churches can be sacred spaces like the caves of prehistoric France, and the technological mindset has expanded from a relatively narrow array of everyday practices situated in a fundamentally spiritual cosmos to the introduction of a specialized class that spends almost all of its time conceiving nature in exclusively technical ways and educating the population to conceptualize much more mechanistically. Scientific theorizing is not in contradiction with spirituality in general, it is a crucial professional context of practical non-spiritual problem-solving.

Maybe the reason science and religion are always in such conflict is because they tend to become similarly corrupt or predatory, and are more than willing to acknowledge the hypocrisies of their traditional rival while refusing to recognize their own. Superficial rancor to keep humans fighting as a diversion from making power structures and institutions more sane, ethical and fair I suppose. Ooh, big rebel maybe lol

These are the ways of defining human language that I immediately think of: grammar, vocabulary, phonetics, aesthetics, rationale, meaning, function, and of course they are all classifiable as a mental process, so understanding largely depends on theories of brain structure, cognition and behavior, though I think studying written records of historical memes along with cultural imagination can be revealing also. My basic knowledge leads me to believe that the forms of human grammar are constrained to a relatively narrow set of possibilities. When humans speak, they are riffing within the bounds of some structural parameters, and I think these parameters are more like a facet of thought's intuitive frame of reference than a strictly linguistic construction as sentence diagramming and the study of literature might incline theory towards alleging. I doubt grammar is a completely distinct functional module, a purely symbolical arbitrariness separate from thought, but represents in some measure the essence of how humans conceive the world. Grammatical structure is perhaps one of the conditions for higher level thought.

This could certainly be disproved, but my opinion is that every facet of language and thought besides grammar involves extreme plasticity, to the extent that the whole duration of the universe's existence cannot exhaust the current possibilities for substance/consciousness instantiation, let alone the total possibility. This assumes the concept of totality even refers to a reality, as Aristotle's prime mover might be an artifact of our earthbound intuitions, an illusion.

I agree that the encyclopedic potential of the human mind is astounding. Some people can memorize hundreds or thousands of pages of literature. I think this ability is closely tied to written language though, its more possible to remember hours of writing than hours of speech. This is maybe one of the reasons why myth exists, errors continually entered orally transmitted narratives until these stories did not reference what anyone had ever experienced.

Human development is a fascinating topic that I haven't studied much. I think it would be nice if a more Freudian paradigm came back into the mainstream instead of the force average behavior paradigm. The mind has some extremely unintuitive qualities that radically defy common sense until closely analyzed.

Sushi, I strongly disagree with your use of the word outline, my post is in paragraph form. Your notion of substance is rather vague, I profoundly doubt your ability to articulate exactly what kind of content would satisfy you. I'm disappointed, I expected more precision. lol j/k

Sushi, your exasperation is funny. I should say that the original post is a short excerpt from a single chapter in a more than three hundred page book I'm writing. My post lacks quite a lot of context. The use of terms may make minimal sense to someone who hasn't read what precedes, but I thought it might still get some analysis going.

Let's see if I can roughly clarify the basic idea. At first human language was blurbing until you had satisfied affect and rudimentary functional needs. Then human functioning became more technological and conceptually sophisticated. Though we don't have indisputable proof, this development of technical practice probably coincides with increased application of mathematical intuition in structural proportioning, measuring and counting. For the human mind, reality began transforming from an effect of animate entities and their wills, the prehistoric belief in spiritual essences as evinced by mythical narrative, to a world of disanimate objects, materialistic causality with a degree of inert subordination to human purpose. Humans attempted to express these new materialistic notions with natural language, which altered speech so that it became more precise, detailed description of the complex properties of objects rather than either blurbs, basic manners, crude labeling, statements of extremely simple causality, impressing the girls, or begging Zeus to spare you. Once writing became phonetic, a form of speech, the first literature was epic narrative, symbolic of a culture's values and steeped in ancient myth, Homer's Illiad is a good example. Eventually, meticulous reflections performed by increasingly philosophical authors advanced technicalizing common language into a specialized discourse, the first terminologically innovative and then academic discussions of the essential principles that make material objects and their behaviors predictable. This created a tension with spiritual traditions, and philosophers have perennially tried to harmonize concepts of matter and soul, ever since early antiquity, stretching language while seeking to make it work as an account of total reality, as a synthesis of technological, naturalistic, spiritual and ontological concepts.

If we can say how to do it, we can do it if we really want to, but we are constrained to the instinctual, unconscious, rational, fulfilling and not self-defeating, that's what I mean. We're not so good at the not self-defeating part.

Hopefully that makes more sense.