Quote:
Originally Posted by zeek
OK, you didn't hypothesize that exactly. But, you partly inspired it with your idea that the human language was the result of Yahweh breathing the breath of life into a hominid. I'd have to dig for the post. It was on this thread, I think.
My initial thought was the meme would survive and propagate symbiotically with the host species. But, obviously, language has played a role in the dominance of the human species. So, the symbiosis, if that's what it is, has had survival for the hominid that became homo lingua as well.
The connection I made was to this idea:
In a more radical version of biophysicist Francis Crick's hypothesis of directed panspermia, McKenna speculated on the idea that psilocybin mushrooms may be a species of high intelligence,[3] which may have arrived on this planet as spores migrating through space[8][63] and which are attempting to establish a symbiotic relationship with human beings. He postulated that "intelligence, not life, but intelligence may have come here [to Earth] in this spore-bearing life form".
and
At these higher doses, McKenna also argued that psilocybin would be triggering activity in the "language-forming region of the brain", manifesting as music and visions,[3] thus catalyzing the emergence of language in early hominids by expanding "their arboreally evolved repertoire of troop signals."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna |
There is a guy on Ted Talks who was referenced in Pollan's book that talks about how mushrooms can save the world, and he isn't talking about magic mushrooms per se. It is a very impressive talk and was a great way to begin the book as it powerfully demonstrated to me that there was a whole lot here I had never heard about before.
I think quantum physics is very similar to the visions Pollan describes. We know that light can "act" like a particle, and that it can "act" like a wave. What some are hypothesizing is that on the quantum level it is no longer particle or wave, but rather "field". So if you put in a detector to detect particles it will respond, likewise with waves, but in fact it is neither, it is a field. That reminds me of the vision where the individual melts into this one great unifying entity. I would compare this to the Spirit. The Spirit can sometimes act like a wave going through many people, and at other times it can act like a particle (Antipas, against all).