Not that it's a load-bearing tenet of your overall argument, but I don't think humans have a monopoly on recognising their own mortality. There's good evidence that elephants know the bones of their own kind, and they'll sometimes throw leaves and dirt and branches over a recently deceased and stand by them for some time.
Totally! And maybe they do understand mortality. But I don't think that's a given. Humans have had burial rituals for way longer than 12,000 years too. But I still hold that humans maybe didn't understand mortality until the mental time travel click.
I know that might sound weird. But it seems to me that it really does take an extra shift to understand ONE'S OWN mortality. I remember as a 5-year-old thinking about how all people die someday, and that I'm a person… and that this had an inevitable logic to it, but that the conclusion seemed just bizarre. I really had to grapple with it to make it make sense.
If elephants don't have a CONCEPT of all elephants dying someday, and they're just living in the eternal unfolding present moment, but they still remember and miss their lost beloveds and think to visit their burial sites… they might not ever recognize that they themselves will die. There's just no means by which they'd ever notice that fact best as I can tell.
But hey, if that's false, that implies some pretty interesting things! Like maybe elephants can do mental time travel too (raising questions about what stops THEM from building civilizations). Or maybe mental time travel isn't needed to understand mortality. Any of that would be pretty important to notice from what I can tell!
I think elephants probably can do mental time travel, in keeping with the proverbial "an elephant never forgets". What keeps them from building civilisations I would think is more form-factor issues, although they can do quite a bit with their trunks, so maybe they just "haven't read enough John Calvin". Also, language is a super big deal, and required for 'project' cooperation between different family groups, being the encoding medium of the mythos that keeps civilisations together. I'm of the understanding that there's a part of our brains given over to language specifically, so perhaps we can say to our larger cetacean and elephant cousins that it's not the size that counts, but what you do with it, yet I shouldn't think that all that mass isn't used somehow - for example, whale songs as a creative outlet.
I guess maybe I'm not seeing it as such a huge leap from other-creatures-like-me-die (which creatures generally witness all the time) to I-too-will-die. Maybe insects have a limited capacity for existential pondering, but I think at least some birds and mammals have a fair shot at picking up on the idea.
For what it's worth, I think it's good that you're calling attention to what could be called the ongoing crisis of deterioration and death. If we could extend the count of our healthful years, that would be a fine thing. Yes of course it would have 'interesting' knock-on effects, like could pension systems still work? For my part I'm just trying to make it across the pit of doom, to where I've lived long enough to get money for being alive, reflecting the situation when I was a child. I really fucking hate work, and work really fucking sucks, and also people don't just say "money is the root of all evil" for the sake of moving their mouthparts. Anyway, if extending the years of our time means also extending the years we must labour, suddenly my joy at the prospect is tempered. Did I mention I hate work?
(I know that there are Needful Things That Must Be Done, I'm just venting in part because I've had a bad relationship with work and employers. I especially resent the powers the latter tend to assert.)
I don't think memory implies mental time travel. Very different. It's super obvious that my parents' cats remember me, and sometimes they demand to see inside the room I stay in there because they wonder where I went. But I don't think they're doing mental time travel. I could be wrong of course, it's hard to know. But my guess is that it's more like, the sense of me arises in their awareness and they look around for me. They remember me in that their sense of me remains able to arise for them.
Of course language is huge too. My thoughts about mental time travel mostly don't address language at all. Andrew Cutler argues that it's generalized recursive reasoning that does all the magic, and that it sort of bottoms out in "I am". So the recursion involved in social reasoning and grammar come to stem from the same thing. And then the point I'm making about how this becomes mental time travel produces a superpower. Without that, language is interesting and lets us tell nuanced stories, but I don't think it gives us the explosion of power we see 12,000 years ago.
Honestly I kind of wonder if language arose BECAUSE OF mental time travel. That might be too recent in evolutionary terms. But it looks like we have surprisingly little idea how old language is (or isn't). There would have been a pretty intense need to get more precise about our temporal plans once we could make them, and people who couldn't be precise enough to coordinate with would tend to get culled from the gene pool.
I'm reminded of how in myths, humans often were speaking a divine language that allowed them to communicate with the spirits and plants and animals, but then there was some kind of severance (e.g. being cast out of the Garden of Eden) where they suddenly couldn't hear these other living things the same way. The Tower of Babel suggests a kind of proliferation of ways of constructing language, which arose well after being cast out of the Garden.
I dunno how much stock to put in myths. But it's striking to me anyway.
I don't know what to tell you about the jump from third-person "death is real" to first-person "death is real FOR ME". it's a super common hurdle I observe everywhere. You don't see it anywhere I guess? I honestly don't know what to say about that. Stephen Jenkinson makes what I think is the same point I'm trying to say when he says (to paraphrase a bit): "Most people don't know they're going to die. They know that EVERYONE ELSE is going to die. Your death begins when you know YOU are going to die."
Maybe they are wondering where you went, but maybe they just want to be around your scent?
We have, I think, excessively "othered" ourselves from all else that is. It's the job of socialisation to retard us, to prevent independent truth-seeking, to think only in terms of the framework expounded by the priestly class. All those plants and animals will, never and rarely respectively, speak English back to us, but I think the disconnecting from the whole as part of the infernal You Must Get With the Program thing is the bigger problem. Like those awful medieval Christians who closed all the public baths, their condemnation of the body as a haven for "sin" was highly dysgenic, and we're still recovering from this. I hate the ecclesiastical mentality (the truth has already been revealed, and we have a monopoly!) even more than I hate work for the sake of work.
And religious socialisation has also served to "help" us not have to think about death, by establishing the literally god-awful idea that this whole reality is actually just a precursor for heavenly eternity (if you're pious, anyway).
I suppose my personal attitude was once like Commander Riker's at the end of Generations: "Speak for yourself, sir, I plan to live forever." I've dialed this back to maybe-if-anti-aging-technology-gets-way-better-i-might-get-some-bonus-years. One time, during a psychedelic experience, when I felt that I was in a sort of spotlight, I've proclaimed my fundamental mortality even when it might have better suited my aspirations to become Emperor of Man to claim I was some sort of living god. (A boy's got to have dreams! And people require good orientation!) But then I'd be doing the same thing that those ecclesiasts I hate do. The most important thing is the truth. We're all going to die, and it's a shitty truth to deal with, but it's the truth. And the only magic I possess is that of being a bright boy (though definitely naïve by times) in a land of social retardation, being willing to tell things as I see them.
I took a class in grad school where we had to write our obituaries. I managed to commit a version of your sin #2 above by having myself disappear (presumed dead) during a meditation retreat. So, this hits.
To add to your list of notes on the Fall, JM Greer wrote about the myth of Lemuria in this context. One interesting twist in his version of the tale is that the Fall was caused by humanity establishing contact with a parasitic species of nonphysical intelligence (commonly, demons). To the extent that there is something profiting off the status quo, that only makes the solution more complex, but will leave it here for pondering.
Not that it's a load-bearing tenet of your overall argument, but I don't think humans have a monopoly on recognising their own mortality. There's good evidence that elephants know the bones of their own kind, and they'll sometimes throw leaves and dirt and branches over a recently deceased and stand by them for some time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition#Death_ritual
Totally! And maybe they do understand mortality. But I don't think that's a given. Humans have had burial rituals for way longer than 12,000 years too. But I still hold that humans maybe didn't understand mortality until the mental time travel click.
I know that might sound weird. But it seems to me that it really does take an extra shift to understand ONE'S OWN mortality. I remember as a 5-year-old thinking about how all people die someday, and that I'm a person… and that this had an inevitable logic to it, but that the conclusion seemed just bizarre. I really had to grapple with it to make it make sense.
If elephants don't have a CONCEPT of all elephants dying someday, and they're just living in the eternal unfolding present moment, but they still remember and miss their lost beloveds and think to visit their burial sites… they might not ever recognize that they themselves will die. There's just no means by which they'd ever notice that fact best as I can tell.
But hey, if that's false, that implies some pretty interesting things! Like maybe elephants can do mental time travel too (raising questions about what stops THEM from building civilizations). Or maybe mental time travel isn't needed to understand mortality. Any of that would be pretty important to notice from what I can tell!
I think elephants probably can do mental time travel, in keeping with the proverbial "an elephant never forgets". What keeps them from building civilisations I would think is more form-factor issues, although they can do quite a bit with their trunks, so maybe they just "haven't read enough John Calvin". Also, language is a super big deal, and required for 'project' cooperation between different family groups, being the encoding medium of the mythos that keeps civilisations together. I'm of the understanding that there's a part of our brains given over to language specifically, so perhaps we can say to our larger cetacean and elephant cousins that it's not the size that counts, but what you do with it, yet I shouldn't think that all that mass isn't used somehow - for example, whale songs as a creative outlet.
I guess maybe I'm not seeing it as such a huge leap from other-creatures-like-me-die (which creatures generally witness all the time) to I-too-will-die. Maybe insects have a limited capacity for existential pondering, but I think at least some birds and mammals have a fair shot at picking up on the idea.
For what it's worth, I think it's good that you're calling attention to what could be called the ongoing crisis of deterioration and death. If we could extend the count of our healthful years, that would be a fine thing. Yes of course it would have 'interesting' knock-on effects, like could pension systems still work? For my part I'm just trying to make it across the pit of doom, to where I've lived long enough to get money for being alive, reflecting the situation when I was a child. I really fucking hate work, and work really fucking sucks, and also people don't just say "money is the root of all evil" for the sake of moving their mouthparts. Anyway, if extending the years of our time means also extending the years we must labour, suddenly my joy at the prospect is tempered. Did I mention I hate work?
(I know that there are Needful Things That Must Be Done, I'm just venting in part because I've had a bad relationship with work and employers. I especially resent the powers the latter tend to assert.)
I don't think memory implies mental time travel. Very different. It's super obvious that my parents' cats remember me, and sometimes they demand to see inside the room I stay in there because they wonder where I went. But I don't think they're doing mental time travel. I could be wrong of course, it's hard to know. But my guess is that it's more like, the sense of me arises in their awareness and they look around for me. They remember me in that their sense of me remains able to arise for them.
Of course language is huge too. My thoughts about mental time travel mostly don't address language at all. Andrew Cutler argues that it's generalized recursive reasoning that does all the magic, and that it sort of bottoms out in "I am". So the recursion involved in social reasoning and grammar come to stem from the same thing. And then the point I'm making about how this becomes mental time travel produces a superpower. Without that, language is interesting and lets us tell nuanced stories, but I don't think it gives us the explosion of power we see 12,000 years ago.
Honestly I kind of wonder if language arose BECAUSE OF mental time travel. That might be too recent in evolutionary terms. But it looks like we have surprisingly little idea how old language is (or isn't). There would have been a pretty intense need to get more precise about our temporal plans once we could make them, and people who couldn't be precise enough to coordinate with would tend to get culled from the gene pool.
I'm reminded of how in myths, humans often were speaking a divine language that allowed them to communicate with the spirits and plants and animals, but then there was some kind of severance (e.g. being cast out of the Garden of Eden) where they suddenly couldn't hear these other living things the same way. The Tower of Babel suggests a kind of proliferation of ways of constructing language, which arose well after being cast out of the Garden.
I dunno how much stock to put in myths. But it's striking to me anyway.
I don't know what to tell you about the jump from third-person "death is real" to first-person "death is real FOR ME". it's a super common hurdle I observe everywhere. You don't see it anywhere I guess? I honestly don't know what to say about that. Stephen Jenkinson makes what I think is the same point I'm trying to say when he says (to paraphrase a bit): "Most people don't know they're going to die. They know that EVERYONE ELSE is going to die. Your death begins when you know YOU are going to die."
Maybe they are wondering where you went, but maybe they just want to be around your scent?
We have, I think, excessively "othered" ourselves from all else that is. It's the job of socialisation to retard us, to prevent independent truth-seeking, to think only in terms of the framework expounded by the priestly class. All those plants and animals will, never and rarely respectively, speak English back to us, but I think the disconnecting from the whole as part of the infernal You Must Get With the Program thing is the bigger problem. Like those awful medieval Christians who closed all the public baths, their condemnation of the body as a haven for "sin" was highly dysgenic, and we're still recovering from this. I hate the ecclesiastical mentality (the truth has already been revealed, and we have a monopoly!) even more than I hate work for the sake of work.
And religious socialisation has also served to "help" us not have to think about death, by establishing the literally god-awful idea that this whole reality is actually just a precursor for heavenly eternity (if you're pious, anyway).
I suppose my personal attitude was once like Commander Riker's at the end of Generations: "Speak for yourself, sir, I plan to live forever." I've dialed this back to maybe-if-anti-aging-technology-gets-way-better-i-might-get-some-bonus-years. One time, during a psychedelic experience, when I felt that I was in a sort of spotlight, I've proclaimed my fundamental mortality even when it might have better suited my aspirations to become Emperor of Man to claim I was some sort of living god. (A boy's got to have dreams! And people require good orientation!) But then I'd be doing the same thing that those ecclesiasts I hate do. The most important thing is the truth. We're all going to die, and it's a shitty truth to deal with, but it's the truth. And the only magic I possess is that of being a bright boy (though definitely naïve by times) in a land of social retardation, being willing to tell things as I see them.
I took a class in grad school where we had to write our obituaries. I managed to commit a version of your sin #2 above by having myself disappear (presumed dead) during a meditation retreat. So, this hits.
To add to your list of notes on the Fall, JM Greer wrote about the myth of Lemuria in this context. One interesting twist in his version of the tale is that the Fall was caused by humanity establishing contact with a parasitic species of nonphysical intelligence (commonly, demons). To the extent that there is something profiting off the status quo, that only makes the solution more complex, but will leave it here for pondering.
https://www.ecosophia.net/notes-on-the-lemurian-deviation/