First and foremost: You mention your problems with where I place language in relation to these phenomena. You mention it (language) as only incidental.
Can we meet halfway with my labeling it (language) only a housekeeper one post ago?
And the only way this general idea of Soul and Spirit could have spread globally and maintainned itself all these years *is* lanuage- language is someting like its housekeeper- Gend
A man builds his home and the bigger it gets, the more emphasis there is on a need to mantain its function properly. So he gets a housekeeper- the housekeeping is incidental to the building. And this building we can name Soul.
Agree?
You know, another strange thing that might be worked in somehow...? Brain surgery. There have been ancient skulls found that have obviously survived brain surgery. There is a hole cut in their skull that has completely healed before death. It was actually a common procedure into relatively recent times. Nah, probably unconnected. Most likely chronic migraine sufferers. It is amazing that primitive man was able to pull it off though.
You'll find Sagan's books crawling with references to this, if I remember correctly.
Its called trepanning- our ancients in Greece (Hippocrates even writes a how-to on this), Africa, Egypt and countless other cultures would bore holes in a man's head to let out demons and spirits. It was done with no anesthetic or septic procedures so its a wonder how men were able to withstand such tortures.
It can even be traced as far back as Cro-Magnon (looked up a date just to see- a 40,000 year old microsurgery. Blows my mind).
Feast your eyes:
"Magical and religious rituals, to bring luck and to offer sacrifice, etc. In many cultures (mainly those which were known as head-worshippers, because they attributed special significance to the head and brain in their religion), trepanning was very common, and the round slab of bone taken out of a skull is used as an amulet. There is the possibility that the large number of trepanned skulls found in military posts were from enemies, who were used as suppliers of these amulets. "
Man is an funny little animal with strange habits. There was also a woman who documented her own trepannation- she bore a hole in her head and went out to dinner the same day with a scarf round her skull, then showed the tape to her friends. I don't remember her name so I can't show you. Later.
And, all joking aside, I do understand how you feel. It is sad that people are so committed to their own persona's that they refuse to realize that they are not exactly themselves. That our brains are far more complicated than they seem from our perspective. And even more so that understanding this doesn't mean that one must give up oneself. In fact, it will most likely strengthen the self by working to incorporate our full essence within it. As I told a poster in another thread, reptiles need love too.
Not as sad as watching millions of humans dying without ever
once showing curiosity as to where he came from, why he is, and where he's going.
He's born a heatlhy wonder filled with life only to waste all his questions away in this thing we call Dogma.
They accept canned answers from canned theisms and instead of waking up to the gorgeous absurdity that is life on earth they end up dying in dead ends we call Zen, Kaballah, Christianity, Catholicism, Protestanism, Buddhism.
I tried telling this to that stupid fuck Spidergoat long ago, who tried preaching his Zen to me once, but only got mystical regurgitations in return. Then he called me a sow. Ooooh. Ahhhh.
Teach me any religions and any philosophy- all of it pales to the intrigues of the human brain. That a man dies without ever being so much as curious about the biology and chemicals inside his body is what's sad and ...odious.
No saint could walk the hallowed grounds of Biology.
And, I'd still like to hear your ideas on the sex of the original charlatan. I find it likely that it would be a woman. Women were most likely to be revered in the early days, as they are the source of life. Until the connection between sex and children could be made, women were the whole source of life that was known. I've even heard some speculation that Stonehenge is a representation of a vagina. And the earth mother statue has been found at the earliest sites. The phallic cults would enter the picture with the serpent, who was supposedly the consort of the mother. And symbolized wisdom and knowledge. The garden of eden transposed this idea. Making the serpent a criminal and deceiver and the woman the scapegoat of man's evil.
A woman? Nope.
Charlattans would require the technical skill of an analyst-one who thinks big.
Coordination, control, discipline. The female is notorious in her lack for this genius.
Her greed stops on itself and never questions- something like pleausure versus pain. Pleasure intoxicates one down to stagnation while pain demands interrogation in order to alleviate it, so we progress. Woman is far to pleasureable for a greed that is powerful- her greed is only vain and goes nowhere.
Sayz Nietszhce:
'Someone took a youth to a sage and said "Look, he is being corrupeted by women."
"It is men", said the sage," that corrupt women; and all the failings of women should be atoned by and improved in men. For it is man who creates for himself the image of woman and woman forms herself according to this image."
"You are far too kindhearted about women", said the youth to the sage.
"
Will is the manner of men;
Willingness that of woman. That is the law of the sexes- truly a hard law for women. All of humanity is innocent of its existence; but women are doubly innocent. Who could have love and kindless enough for them?" '
- la Sciencia
I haven't been able to find a damn thing worth reading on Cotard's Syndrome. Just a bunch of single paragraph descriptions. Any good sites you'd recommend for neurological disorders?
No can do- I read mostly. Internet is...secondary. Its only the forums that take up my online time, mingled with research.
However:
www.cma.ca/staticContent/HTML/N0/l2/jpn/vol-29/issue-2/pdf/pg138.pdf
Bigass pdf file.
Interestingly, the latest issue of Discover magazine has a short article about an elderly man who came into the emergency room claiming to be dead. He claims he could see "evil" crawling all over the walls. Not a mention of Cotard or his syndrome. Just rambled on about senile dementia and depression. They ended up giving him shock treatment. Shittiest article I think I've read in their emergency room type stories. The doctor didn't even follow up on the case at all. His (actually, I think it was a her) only connection to the case was in admitting the patient and discussing possible treatments. It says that she later saw the man down a hall with his son and he looked better. What a load of crap... Why even print that article... Must have been a slow news month in the ER.
Ah- there's a difference there. The old man describes death on the walls, the room, the
outside.
This syndrome is a curious dementia in that its victims (usually schizophrenic or megalomaniacal, like yours truly) are so exeedingly divroced from Self they imagine they are already dead or dying- even to the points of feeling maggots and worms devouring their skin.
Capgras syndrome involves trauma to the amygdala- a small node of cortex in the midbrain specializing in emotions and the art of scanning external stimuli and seperating them by detecting which signals are motivational in significance by comparing with past experiences stored in memory.
These people simply cannot emotionally class people and things- they can only recognize them
as things, but never as part of self. And so they look at their face and recognize it as one, but not theirs.
There is reason to believe Cotard's is an exaggareated form of Capgras but what's fascinating is that Cotard's does not require trauma.
One can just....wake up with it.
Interesting, huh?
Edit: I'm gonna stop by the library after work. All the books you recommended are in except for Phantoms in the Brain. Which is a pity, because I was wanting to read Ramachandran's work. Any other recommendations?
Here's my list so far:
The man who mistook his wife for a hat.
The Naked Neuron.
The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
Goregous.
Here's another one: "Fingerprints of the Gods" Graham Hancock
or
"Civilization and its Discontents", by none other than Freud himself.
(A romance novel Gendanken? j/k...)
Hell motherfucking
no.
Maybe you would have... I think I would have picked up the apple and let the researcher handle his own dildo. Thank you very much...
Eat me.
Come clean, my boy- even if you hadn't picked up the dildo still would you have managed to stick the apple up your colon. Somehow.
Thank you very much.......
The Mind's Past by Michael S. Gazzaniga
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
Gazzinga sounds interesting.
Poor little book- I'm going to demolish it.
