A recent article argued that superior visual perception was necessary for the creation of Paleolithic cave paintings because of the level of correct anatomical details and accurate depictions of high-speed leg positions of animals in motion, considering that the works were accomplished far removed from the actual animals and with crude tools. The article uncovered and outlined current evidence for an association between visual thinkers (some diagnosed within the Autism Spectrum Disorder) and a relatively high percentage of archaic genes, of which some are associated with perception and cognition. Moreover, within this group are some savants who can quickly and accurately scan what they see and reproduce it artistically in extraordinary detail. One example is reproducing the correct number and relative size of windows from a brief exposure to a city scene. However, the linguistic abilities of visual thinkers may be impaired, which suggests a negative correlation between visual perception/memory and language.
The argument in the paper is that pre-human primates (a) are sometimes superior to humans in dealing with visual sequences, but (b) have brain areas more directly connected to visual processing than humans. They deal with a flood of visual information – versus humans, which abstract and discard.
The paper goes on to suggest that language emerged relatively recently… and the emergence of language may be associated with the reduced brain size in Homo sapiens that started about 50,000 years ago and more markedly 10,000 years ago.
(I hadn’t realised that there was such an observed brain size reduction occurring so recently. The early known city is only 9,000 years ago! Radical changes in the nature of consciousness in the recent shallows of prehistory – more recent, even, than the source events of the earliest myths.)
We suggest that an effect of this loss in brain size was the reduction of neuronal signaling and/or pathways related to raw perception and vision in particular. Visual perception relies on informational highways that may provide so much information that it can be overwhelming for other brain functions, such as retrieving knowledge appropriate to the situation or imagining something that is not present in the here and now. We hypothesize that the loss in brain volume is mainly linked to reduced perception of detail in space and time. We are no longer able to perceive how many hooves of a running horse touch the ground, as the cave artists of Chauvet may have seen with ease.
After the Upper Palaeolithic (50,000 to 10,000 years ago) we no longer find evidence for elaborate realistic cave paintings (although we find iconic and symbolic cave paintings after this period).
Ref.
Johansson, C., & Folger?, P. O. (2022). Is Reduced Visual Processing the Price of Language? Brain Sciences, 12(6), 771
2.
Guide to Machine Elves and Other DMT Entities.
Self-transforming machines elves: a term coined by the ethnobotanist, philosopher, and writer Terence McKenna to describe some of the entities that are encountered in a DMT trip. They’ve come to be known by many names, including “clockwork elves”, “DMT elves”, “fractal elves”, and “tykes”.
McKenna:
During my own experiences smoking synthesized DMT in Berkeley, I had had the impression of bursting into a space inhabited by merry elfin, self-transforming, machine creatures. Dozens of these friendly fractal entities, looking like self-dribbling Faberge eggs on the rebound, had surrounded me and tried to teach me the lost language of true poetry.
Meetings are common:
Philip Mayer collected and analyzed 340 DMT trip reports in 2005. Mayer found that 66% of them (226) referenced independently-existing entities that interact in an intelligent and intentional manner.
Charles Bonnet syndrome, in which the sufferer experiences characteristic hallucinations of gnomes and fairy lands: The first cluster consisted of hallucinations of extended landscape scenes and small figures in costumes with hats; the second, hallucinations of grotesque, disembodied and distorted faces with prominent eyes and teeth.
(As previously discussed(2004), along with Homo floresiensi, the mythical hobbit human in Indonesia, 18,000 years ago.)
Ref.
Santhouse, A & Howard, R & ffytche, D. (2000). Visual hallucinatory syndromes and the anatomy of the visual brain. Brain: a journal of neurology. 123(10). 2055-64.
3.
Orcs are an ancient memory of Neanderthals?
Newsletter Contemplations on the Tree of Woe unpacks the (fringe science) book Them and Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans (Amazon) by Danny Vendramini.
Neanderthals were apex predators. Analysis of isotopes of bone collage has shown that Neanderthal diet was 97% meat. …
Neanderthals were cannibals. …
They weighed 25% more. They were so heavily muscled that their skeletons had to develop extra thick bones.
Neanderthal teeth were twice as large as human teeth. …
Neanderthal skulls had extremely large eye sockets, suggesting very large eyes. That, in turn, suggests that Neanderthals were nocturnal.
Also: big snouts suggesting scent-hunting, and no language.
Imagine:
Nocturnal carnivorous almost-humans; coexisting with and physically resembling us, but whereas we are slighter and abstractly smarter, they are brutal purpose-built hunters, terrifying us in the night with their superhuman senses and utter inability to speak – and yet artists of the highest calibre, producing (maybe?) delicate and highly detailed visual representations, a capability astoundingly beyond us, as automatically as a beaver makes its dam or a spider weaves its web.
Living with future GPT-3s and DALL-Es, given robot bodies, will be like living with Neanderthals. Entities capable of destroying humanity, these AIs living alongside us, and of inhuman impossible creativity too, with nothing behind the eyes.
4.
The Silurian hypothesis: if there were an industrial civilisation in Earth’s deep history, could we tell?
For example, our human industrial civilisation will leave a signal.
When we burn fossil fuels, we’re releasing carbon back into the atmosphere that was once part of living tissues. This ancient carbon is depleted in one of that element’s three naturally occurring varieties, or isotopes. The more fossil fuels we burn, the more the balance of these carbon isotopes shifts.
Chemical analysis of ancient rocks, in the far future, will reveal this isotopic shift in the Anthropocene layer – the geological layer associated with human industrial civilisation.
(Temperature increases also create this shift.)
AND SO, looking back:
Fifty-six million years ago, Earth passed through the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, the planet’s average temperature climbed as high as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above what we experience today. It was a world almost without ice, as typical summer temperatures at the poles reached close to a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Looking at the isotopic record from the PETM, scientists see both carbon and oxygen isotope ratios spiking in exactly the way we expect to see in the Anthropocene record. There are also other events like the PETM in Earth’s history that show traces like our hypothetical Anthropocene signal. These include an event a few million years after the PETM dubbed the Eocene Layers of Mysterious Origin, and massive events in the Cretaceous that left the ocean without oxygen for many millennia (or even longer).
What went down, 9 million years after the dinosaurs? Perhaps we’ll find their traces elsewhere, in orbit around Jupiter or something.
Article by Adam Frank, who also authored the original Silurian Hypothesis paper.
Ref.
Schmidt, G. A., & Frank, A. (2019). The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record? International Journal of Astrobiology, 18(2), 142-150.
TANGENTIALLY:
Denise Wilton on the “uncanny valley”, the feeling of finding almost-humans almost unbearable creepy:
Was it because we’ve lived through all this before, and got it wrong once already? We’re just living in a never-ending experiment that we’d write about as sci-fi but is actually just real life and the robots are going to take over? The uncanny valley is just a muscle memory from the last time we failed as a species.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it by email or on social media. Here’s the link. Thanks, —Matt.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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1.
Cave art may be inaccessible to today’s brain.
The argument in the paper is that pre-human primates (a) are sometimes superior to humans in dealing with visual sequences, but (b) have brain areas more directly connected to visual processing than humans. They deal with a flood of visual information – versus humans, which abstract and discard.
The paper goes on to suggest that language emerged relatively recently… and
(I hadn’t realised that there was such an observed brain size reduction occurring so recently. The early known city is only 9,000 years ago! Radical changes in the nature of consciousness in the recent shallows of prehistory – more recent, even, than the source events of the earliest myths.)
After the Upper Palaeolithic (50,000 to 10,000 years ago)
Ref.
Johansson, C., & Folger?, P. O. (2022). Is Reduced Visual Processing the Price of Language? Brain Sciences, 12(6), 771
2.
Guide to Machine Elves and Other DMT Entities.
Self-transforming machines elves:
McKenna:
Meetings are common:
RELATED #1:
My trip to the dentist in which I discovered the secret of the universe (2020). Alas it turns out this a common effect of nitrous.
RELATED #2:
Charles Bonnet syndrome, in which the sufferer experiences characteristic hallucinations of gnomes and fairy lands:
(As previously discussed (2004), along with Homo floresiensi, the mythical hobbit human in Indonesia, 18,000 years ago.)
Ref.
Santhouse, A & Howard, R & ffytche, D. (2000). Visual hallucinatory syndromes and the anatomy of the visual brain. Brain: a journal of neurology. 123(10). 2055-64.
3.
Orcs are an ancient memory of Neanderthals?
Newsletter Contemplations on the Tree of Woe unpacks the (fringe science) book Them and Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans (Amazon) by Danny Vendramini.
Also: big snouts suggesting scent-hunting, and no language.
Imagine:
Nocturnal carnivorous almost-humans; coexisting with and physically resembling us, but whereas we are slighter and abstractly smarter, they are brutal purpose-built hunters, terrifying us in the night with their superhuman senses and utter inability to speak – and yet artists of the highest calibre, producing (maybe?) delicate and highly detailed visual representations, a capability astoundingly beyond us, as automatically as a beaver makes its dam or a spider weaves its web.
Living with future GPT-3s and DALL-Es, given robot bodies, will be like living with Neanderthals. Entities capable of destroying humanity, these AIs living alongside us, and of inhuman impossible creativity too, with nothing behind the eyes.
4.
The Silurian hypothesis: if there were an industrial civilisation in Earth’s deep history, could we tell?
For example, our human industrial civilisation will leave a signal.
Chemical analysis of ancient rocks, in the far future, will reveal this isotopic shift in the – the geological layer associated with human industrial civilisation.
(Temperature increases also create this shift.)
AND SO, looking back:
What went down, 9 million years after the dinosaurs? Perhaps we’ll find their traces elsewhere, in orbit around Jupiter or something.
Article by Adam Frank, who also authored the original Silurian Hypothesis paper.
Ref.
Schmidt, G. A., & Frank, A. (2019). The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record? International Journal of Astrobiology, 18(2), 142-150.
TANGENTIALLY:
Denise Wilton on the “uncanny valley”, the feeling of finding almost-humans almost unbearable creepy:
Well.