*Words as Gods; Creationism; Language and its Matrix*

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What do you mean?

Most people do recognise some at least of their thoughts. And those that we don't tend to notice, the constant stream of them which we are generally unaware of, are accessible with certain processes of concentration/"noticing" which can learn either with meditation or some kinds of cognitive behavioural therapy, especially mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.


What we now tend to think of as "our thoughts" didn't exist until we had language. They are language.

I suddenly realised that the greek myths seemed like a vivid description of how the birth of language, ( especially, perhaps exclusively, the abstract words ), would/might have felt to people who experienced it as something outside of themselves/out of their control. The way in which children/new gods are born from other gods, without sex, or from thighs, heads, etc, and are swallowed up again, or hidden, until some behaviour of another god frees them, or makes them visible, and how gods allied themselves with others, defended them, or fought them, could have been what the first stages of ( abstract ) language growth felt like, in the brain, as the words set themselves up, built on others, outshoots of others, or taken from parts of others, some to be added back onto their parent word, others causing the death of their parent word, and some supporting, even justifying other words. And how the opening chapters of Genesis might be describing the process of naming the world, of language dividing everything up, of apparently bringing things into existence, and also causing our fall, because putting our experience/lives in chains, the chains of language.

I also thought that the reason so many languages have genders, could be because if ( the most important and/or abstract ) words were experienced as gods once upon a time, they had a sex, male, female, or a-sexed. And everything seen as "belonging" to them would too.

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Am thinking that one group of people may have been particularly likely to find the power of language tempting, ( one theory states that humans could have used language a lot earlier, but resisted it, or weren't interested; there wasn't enough in it for them perhaps, in view of the cost ... ... ), and that is people who had difficulty with the normal physical/gestural etc communication systems, but were gifted at abstract codes. Like computer programming; language.

Aspies? I can imagine it being a very consuming special interest! Finding/creating/cultivating the code to represent all of life. Not just sticking to animals and birds and plants etc, but heading for the really interesting stuff, about what makes people tick, why people do the things they do, good and evil etc.

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The way language is produced and recieved by the brain requires extensive input from both sides of the brain, anything that affects this can lead to people to believe their thoughts arent their own. Makes sense when you consider the brain is technically two minds with a dominant half.


Considering how a schizophrenic can believing his thoughts and speech is not his own, i disagree. I've seen video clips of some severely impaired autistic individuals that would suggest otherwise as well.

Literacy has been around for approximately 10,000 years.
Based on the written “record” of the Bible Bishop Ussher worked through all the begets and arrived at a conclusion about when the earth was created. For good measure he picked 9.00am because that’s when the university year started.

Actually social grooming takes up a lot of time and effort for primates. Speaking is a much more efficient means of achieving this than manually picking lice off each other. Not to mention probably much more comfortable for those of us with sensory issues.


Well he must be wrong because if they were unable to learn they would not have learned this,and would be symptomatic all the time and would never have not been symptomatic (most commonly people are not symptomatic until early adulthood).


All writing including that which you are reading now entails symbols standing in for objects. Indeed all language does this.


Ridiculous.


Only a subset of my thoughts are in linguistic form. Many are not.

sounds like an elaboration of the 'Logos' concept.

I know that, but you said that "not recognising our thoughts as our own was the price we paid for having the ability to perceive language the way we do". ...


In what way does the schizophrenic's inability to perceive their thoughts as their own prove that thoughts, as we know them, existed before language?

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That isn't what I intended, because if I understand that concept correctly it suggests that "the logos" is something fundamental, spiritual, and essentially positive, inherent in the world/universe.

I meant language, "real" language, the verbal kind, words; how it evolved and how this birth might be what various creation myths depict with gods etc, because words perhaps seemed like gods until we learned to treat them as almost invisible, experiencing them as part of ourselves.

I am not sure that there is necessarily anything inherently positive about it. Or at least nothing necessarily positive about believing in it as wholly as most/many people do, so that if a word exists we think that some "thing" corresponding to it exists too.

Although some people may not have lost touch, or not so much, with preverbal/non-verbal reactions to things, others may be living life as if in a virtual-reality-simulator, reacting to "digitally", ( language/word ) produced "images", ( special effects ), as if they were real.

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http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/extract/awp040v1
Put simply, this is one idea. Schizophrenia is the price we pay for language.



You're confusing what i'm saying.

I'm saying, that we could have learnt to speak before we learnt the ability to percieve our thoughts as our own. Most animals do not need to identify thoughts as their own, because it's not relevant. It would be illogical to assume we developed the ability to speak AFTER because their would be no evolutionary advantage/pressure to. This ties in with the first part, schizophrenia being an unavoidable side-effect of how language is handled by our brains. I mentioned this, because our ability to recognise our thoughts as our own could have developed 4000 - 6000 years ago.

Evidence indicates that language coevolved with the necessary neurological and anatomic structures; estimates I have seen put the origin of language generally at or before the Upper Paleolithic Revolution (40K-100K years ago). Extensive symbolic behavior at least was observed beginning at the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, and I have scarcely seen a credible anthropologist propose that there have been any massive changes in human cognition since the emergence of behaviorally modern humans at that time.

"In the beginning there was the word..."

I think postperson hit the nail on the head. ounion, this is such a great thread. I never thought of this before and it is way simple. Yes, I do believe that the first language was abstract and that Greek myths are a prime example of this. It makes me wonder if we were better off without language alltogether.

Time to add another piece of the puzzle: Holy Land Syndrome, aka Jerusalem Syndrome.

The Wikipedia article asserts that this syndrome occurs in people of many different backgrounds, but I have read it is far more common in fundamentalist protestant Christians ... which dovetails with this discussion.

My theory is that those who elevate words to the status of God structure their thought process differently ... after a life centered on Holy Land imagery/ideology from afar, actually visiting the area intensely stimulates such circuits so intensely that it overloads normal cognitive processing abilities.

stimulate circuits in the brain? How can visiting a place have such an affect? I mean, if it did then I'd want to study it and not just dismiss it so easily. If you feel the need to dismiss it as delusional then perhaps you should look at yourself and ask why you won't even give it more thought. monty, are you being satirical? LOL

I'd like to hear an anthropologist's (non religious) point of view on this affect after experimenting with it.

Actually, I am taking a anthro/neurological approach. A similar sort of thing is seen in Islamic pilgrims visiting Mecca, or in pilgrims in India visiting various sites. From my perspective, these experience are probably all equally true. Not all cases are delusional, but the 'reality of the experience' is user created, IMO.

When someone spends years with regular prayer and meditation and visual imagery centered on a particular theme, they are laying down neural circuits. Being religious, these are linked into some pretty interesting functions of the brain - awe, love, death, infinity etc. When the pilgrim visits the source of his imagery, it is no surprise that these thoughts/circuits are highly activated. ("Jesus walked along this very path, up the hill, ...) For some people, it is a nice or even profound experience. For others, the stimulus is too much. As with the flickering lights of a certain frequency, it may lead to uncontrolled firing of various circuits. Normal cognition is affected.

The balding guy from Kansas City who visits Jerusalem and starts to think he is Jesus? ... forgive me for thinking he is delusional as I have already invested in belief that the paunchy guy from Sarasota with is Jesus. Not only did I meet him first, he also has a beard.

One of our member's special interest is visiting holy sites in jerusalem, but she lives there. not sure if i should advise her of this alleged syndrome or not.

Logos is a very hard to define thing and i'm not sure i ever got my head around it, it's to do with god and god's relationship to the word, i think, but it's also something that pervades all life, like a universal force or element.

NTs treat words like god, don't they, they elevate them above all things - they define the universe for them? bow down and worship before the word.

words are a toy to me, i find it hard to take them seriously.

Last edited by Postperson on 14 Jun 2009, 1:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

language can be a manipulative tool, but that is another story...

@ monty
I've also had hallucinations where I saw people transform into Jesus. I knew it was a trick of the mind though. However, it makes me wonder why so many people have similar hallucinations. People who take LSD often say that they see friends transform into Jesus or that they themselves feel like him. I think there is something to it. After all, why don't they transform into the pilsbury dough boy? Why not him or Winnie the pooh? I'm sure we can interpret hallucinations with the same respect that we do dreams. There is an art to it and much can be discovered through it. To place taboos on researching it and wanting to medicate it to subdue it speaks volumes of the subjective ideas of the person who disregards it as delusional. That should be studied as well.