From: Patrick van den Berg (cirandar@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Nov 28 2002 - 13:52:00 GMT
Hi Scott, Matt, others,
> As you see, so do I deny it [that "not all awareness for linguistic
> creatures is linguistic"],
(I have nothing to say about mystics and the Absolute at the moment,
where you hinted at)
One argument on awareness beyond language I haven't seen in this thread
(though it could be that I missed it, maybe Jonathan as a biologist or
someone else made the point) is the relative newness of language in
humans compared with the whole of our evolutionary linage.
Maybe language arised 20.000 years ago, or something. Humans have been
around for say 200.000 years. Further down the line, we can go back 100
to 200 millions of years during which mammals evolved. So language has
been around during only the last 0.01 procent of our evolution as
mammals. Assuming for the sake of the argument that evolution is
gradual, the time that our brains have evolved to be able to produce and
understand language is nothing compared to the time mammalian brains
have evolved. Thus, our brains have only changed very little to be able
to produce language...
(Of course, reality is more complex than this: As the late Gould (for
example) argued, evolution sometimes can be quite rapid, and then slow
again. Think of the cambrian explosion, where suddenly numeroues
organisms appeared on stage. Furthermore, language is of course
something which allows Lamarckian evolution of culture: ideas or
(cultural) 'traits' can be transmitted directly without the need of the
much slower process of evolution through genetic mutations. Thus,
language has been able to evolve 'between' our brains very rapidly.
Of course, Pirsig acknowledges the time-line of evolution in Lila
somewhere (see the passage referred to in Focus-round two) but I don't
believe, concerning the newness of the 'intellect' compared to the
'cells' and all, that he concluded that non-linguistic awareness thus
has most of our braincells dedicated to it. Hm, speeking about that, the
language-centers (wernicke and broca) in our brains aren't really that
big, and it's nearly always in the left hemisphere only. So think of
what the whole right hemisphere is doing (holistic, spatial awareness,
for instance))
Greetings, Patrick.
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