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Everything posted by cladking
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quote]You haven't yet presented any evidence that this "ancient language" existed. It would be considered OT here. I’ll start another thread at some point. If you’ll notice I did sneak in one earlier that implied the ancients were aware that some land had come out of the ocean. The oldest written records are about 1,000 years older than that. And entirely comprehensible.From wikipedia: Wiki is an immensely valuable tool but it’s always wrong. They’re closer here than usual; “administrative accounts; long lists of various objects, foodstuffs and animals that were probably distributed among the population from a centralized authority.”. Again, it’s not the words which are the problem. When the language changed the vocabulary did not change. The only change was the way words were put together to express meaning. This is why things like account, lists, and labels survived. They were understood quite clearly. Writing such as “I believe there are many gods which protect me” or “add natron to the solution to produce a very powerful soap” simply do not exist at all. Everything that survives makes no sense. Indeed, only a single sentence from before 2500 BC might survive, “Nefermaat is he who makes his gods in words that can not be erased”. My own opinion is that this is a mistranslation of a title rather than a sentence. In any case it has no meaning without interpretation. If you’re aware of any such writing I’d truly love to see it. No. This is what is projected to the public by Egyptology but it’s simply not true. If you’ll look more closely they never say this. We can make extremely good inferences about things like geneolgy from written information but no sentence regarding geneology exists. It’s names and titles extracted from tombs and not books. Everything is “religious” such as “the dead king inundates the earth after it came out of the ocean”. I simply do not believe that this sentence or any other that was actually left involves religion or magic. It is misinterpreted and it needs retranslation to reflect intended meaning rather than our estimation of what these people must have believed. Purina Dog Chow? A great deal of behavior can be instinctive if you lack the learning to supercede it. It might be possible for a human to raise a dog from a puppy without knowing anything about digestion but then why would such an individual believe he and his dog eats and eliminates waste at all? Surely even an animal knows there's a link between food and waste. Eventually we almost all have even visceral knowledge of this process. If that's a pun then please forgive me. It's very difficult to remove oneself from his place and time to see how others might see things. This is why the ancient writing is mistaken for incantation and magic. I believe things like dam building in beavers and fungus farming in termites is far too complicated behaviors to be the result of natural selection. Nature can't select for those who build rockets until someone builds a rocket. Nor can she select for dam building until someone builds a dam. I believe the simplest explanation is we are looking at the problem wrong. People tend to believe that humans alone are intelligent and that humans got here from highly superstitious ancestors who thought they could talk to gods and animals. Logic suggests we are mistaken. Observation suggests it's not intelligence that sets man apart but language. I think it took a long time to domesticate animals and grow crops because it is extremely complicated. It couldn't begin until there was enough theory to support it which means man had to understand some genetics and the myriad other subjects necessary. Obviously they didn't understand DNA and the like but they had to observe how offspring were like and dislike their parents. They had to know how to care for the animals at less expense than their ultimate value as farm produce or meat. They had to know the hydration requirements or risk expending more effort than the value of the animals. A huge amount of knowledge was necessary. They also would require some sort of security or human marauders would make off with their handiwork. A great deal of sophistication was absolutely required abnd this sophistication is reflected in the evidence. It is merely opinion that the ancients were superstitious and this opinion is founded almost solely on what, I believe, is obvious misinterpretation of the written material that survives. The interpretation is simply illogical and not even consistent with the written material. In each case what is said is interpreted to mean something else. I'm sure you're right that the knowledge was transmitted orally but it appears that the language used was distinct from our own and more like prairie dog language or computer code. Until some effort is made to recover the language, its syntax, and grammar it is very difficult to make many statements about it. In the meantime the general concensus remains that humans used to be superstitious but we're all better now. The concensus is that it was easier to live with predators and a lack of most basic tools and weapons so long as you are superstitious. It was easier to drag stones up ramps if you were building a tomb for a god. There was no need for logic or common sense if you were sufficiently primitive. There's no logic to our beliefs about ancient times and this is why the evidennce doesn't fit the beliefs and why there is a void before 2000 BC instead of a record of numerous oral traditions and scientific works. This is why we have myth instead of history.
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How did they breed animals and keep them alive without knowledge of biology. They not only had to do all they did but they had to do it at a profit or they would have all died. Nature is the ultimate accountant as well as a cruel one, and feeding cows to chickens just might be more a liability than an asset. I'm not sure what you mean here or intended but there is nothing from before 2000 BC other than what we understand to be "religious writings" and incantations but which make no sense. There is no science and no records from before this date according to modern understanding. I have no idea what that sentence means. And it doesn't seem to address the question. This is how easy it is to lose one's audience in the modern language we are using here. Most people can't understand directions for almost anything. The directions are written in computerese that make sense only to those who know the language and think in pure logic with no intuition. When computer language is expressed in everyday English it makes no sense to most people. I have no idea what that sentence means. And it doesn't seem to address the question. I do not believe this is true. There is almost nothing in Egyptian and the only other source to my knowledge is Sumerian but these are all short works and undatable apparently. It appears that the ancient books were unintelligible and discarded after the change in language. Most all of what survives was inscribed in stone or clay. Yes it is. We have written records of oral histories going back thousands of years. Much of it is supported by, for example, archaeological and other evidence. You seem to have little in the way of evidence other than your own beliefs. I'm confident you know of none of this from before 2000 BC. Evidence that this is a destructive force? This is the nature of nature. People act on their beliefs and if there are beliefs are unnatural there will be no benefit to them collectively. Even if some unnatural belief were able to protect them through mere happenstance, eventually conditions would change. Reason and logic are puny tools but superstition and foolishness are very powerful tools against survival. They were not superstitious at all. They were not religious and didn't believe in magic. This is a misunderstanding caused by a misinterpretation of ancient writing. Which also seems to argue against cladking's beliefs: many pre-literate, oral societies have been studied. They are just like us. No ancient pre-literate societies left enough evidence to understand their beliefs and knowledge. Even literate societies before 2000 BC are assumed to be superstitious because all the writing they left appears to be gobblety gook. There are no known cultures before 2000 BC. Later ideas have created our understanding and not the evidence left by those societies. This is just the way it is. It doesn't prove I'm right but it leaves the door open to me being right and the fact that my understanding of the ancient writing makes accurate peredictions indicates very strongly that I am right.
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I see now. I should have expected a reasonable point since your other point and logic all seems to fit. I'm looking at this from a different perspective and much of the difference hinges on the meaning of the word "know". I've been using it colloquially but when applied to individuals the meaning changes. We are each a product of our time and place and this determines most of our perspective. When the term "know" is used from any specific perspective its meaning changes because what's real from "god's" perspective may not be from any individual's. In other words all true knowledge is visceral and usually learned through experience. If you don't know it in your bones then it's not true knowledge but something else. Even visceral knowledge though is dependent on things like current conditions. In aggregate man's visceral knowledge is much less extensive in scope but much more accurate. From my personal perspective it doesn't (no longer) annoys me to be ignorant on a very broad range of subjects (all of them) as I try to understand nature and gain knowledge in those things and in those ways I can. Most other people fill in the gaps with something. So long as reason is at the heart there's every chance the individual will succeed. So long as reason underlies the reporting of knowledge and experience I'm willing to listen. Gees cut off a huge bite with this thread but it's still entertaining.
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This all is probably true enough I needn't quibble with it. I certainly agree strongly with one of the conclusions; that change in language should be continuous throughout human history. Of course the veracity of this conclusion is contingent upon those things which apply to our language also applying to the ancient language. This is where we run into trouble with the current paradigm; in order to understand the ancient language word meanings and beliefs from many centuries after the origin of the writing have been inserted to understand it. There simply is almost nothing available to solve the meaning internally from the actual words so definitions and ideas are imported from later religious works. It's hardly surprising that this has made the earlier work incomprehensible and made it appear to be religious in nature. If we were talking about a single work here or there were in existence writing that could be understood, if the our understanding of the writing were consistent with known facts, if any of this understanding were internally consistent or otherwise comprehensible none of this would be at issue. The fact is almost no writing survives from before 2000 BC and none of it is comprehensible. Experts believe words change meaning by context and none of these meanings are known except as they relate to later definitions. Since we believe almost every word they left was about magic, incantation, and paganism we tend to assume everything they did and thought was magic. This is most probably impossible. There is most probably a very fundamental problem in our understanding. Using observation and logic would be nearly as likely to lead to evolutionary success as language itself. Indeed, if the only thing language is used for is to communicate superstitions language would become a massive liability rather than an asset. So which groups of humans hunting mastadons had a greater likelyhood of surviving the cold wimter? Was it the group which saw, knew, amd planned or the group that prayed the hardest and invented the more gods? Since 2000 BC humans have been riding the coat tails of our ancestors for survival. We have been surviving on the fruits of their effort. It was only the discovery of a new kind of science that could be done in the new language that allowed progress to resume.
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I really don't understand your point. On one hand we have everything there is to know and on the other we have everything man knows. There is no balance here from any perspective. We not only don't know about the cave light years away but we don't know how to get there or understand the forces which we'd encounter along the way. We have a tendency to think about what we actually know and to be blind to the virtual infinity of what we don't know. Just because we don't know what gravity is or dark matter or how the two might interact doesn't give us the knowledge that all possibilities of other people's observations are explicable in terms we do know. I'm not suggesting we should all start taking reports of ghosts or flying saucers at face value. I'm merely suggesting that we need to take all evidence into account and not automatically dismiss all low grade evidence. Obviously nothing becomes theory until it is confirmed by experiment and observation. Until then it is an unknown.
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No matter how I attack these points it's always going to come down to the fundamental problem which is the lack of evidence and the lack of written records after the invention of writing. This lack is due to the facts that not only does so little exist but it's all incomprehensible gobblety gook that can shed no light on how the ancients thought and believed. I haven't really made any assumptions in my work with one possible exception and that is ancient people were intelligent and sophisticated. So now I've gotten to the point that I believe I understand the ancient writing and that it reflects a highly scientific perspective which comes as little surprise. But it doesn't prove I'm wrong and this exact perspective can be used to help show that maybe the ancient writing really isn't gobblety gook. This aspect is off topic so I don't intend to dwell on it except to answer the specific point and to observe that the underlying meaning in the ancient work is proving to be supported by the physical evidence and capable of making accurate predictions about undiscovered evidence (predicting the news). That computer like languages are less susceptible to corruption seems almost a given. With few words in the language and the meaning of words not being dependent on context there's little reason to have drift. Look at a word like "print" in computer languages. Yes, the word will probably mean something different in the future, and printers have already evolved greatly in the last half a century but the sense of this word will probably remain intact until and unless it is superceded by a more accurate word. We've only very recently been able to understand prairie dog communication but I'd wager it would be quite similar over time. It's not really the words in question in the old writing so much as the meaning and the referents of those words. If the referent for a single word like "sick" changes then this change should be expected to be apparent. Truth to tell it's largely just my opinion that suggests the language was resistant to change but this opinion is based on the fact that if my understanding of the meaning is correct then language was the metaphysics of ancient science founded upon observation and logic. As such language would be very much sacrosanct and the users actually called the language (especially in its written form) "the words of the gods". No matter how these words are inrterpreted it is very much apparent that they cared deeply for past and future generations. It is apparent and logical that theory must precede all advancement. It is unlikely that a beaver accidently created a dam and then passed the knowledge and ability down through the generations. It's far more likely that a beaver observed nature making a dam and realized it could duplicate it through intention. By the same token man didn't inadvertantly domesticate cattle or corn. First they had to frasp the concept that tamer animals and choicer corn could breed true. It required a lot of time and effort to accomplish this and to produce enough surplus to create cities. While beavers aren't obviously progressing it might be simply the lack of complicated language to pass down knowledge and the fact that their primary natural gift is to fell trees and shape them. Human progress by this perspective simply demands the ability to pass theory between generations. Yes, we could maintain stasis or a specific habitat by merely passing knowledge father to son or teacher to student but it requires the ability to pass down actual knowledge, actual theory, to progress. The fact that we accomplished this (progress) is probably indicative of the ability to pass theory unchanged. This doesn't necessarily support the contention that history and other (hopefully) more static ideas could be relayed but it still suggests a mechanism which we haven't understood. The existence of myths and legends seem to support this. The lack of any ancient scientific knowledge simply screams that we are missing something. Obviously, scientific precepts would be among the very most important things they'd record yet all we have is religious hocus pocus and a void of history and science until 2000 BC. We make assumptions about such things based on drawings and single words in the record. It's simply not logical that the evidence would be laid out the way it is if our assumptions were true. It's not logical to assume that ancient people looked at fossils and simply made no record or inferences about them. It's not logical to suppose that the superstitious bumpkins as seen from the modern perspective could invent agriculture and cities or build pyramids. I believe it took 40,000 years to get to the invention of writing was largely low population caused by food scarcity and the irregularity of its availability. There may also have been a relative lack of need of writing if knowledge could be passed down intact. Writing wasn't invented until farmers stumbled on the concept of symbols representing assets and this was extrapolated to representing sounds. The explosion of knowledge made possible by writing simply overburdened a language with so few words and that was already stressed in expressing new concepts. It was a natural language ill equipped to deal with a lot of new knowledge made possible by widespread dissemination of books. By 3200 BC when writing was invented there was thousands of times more human effort available for study of things like paleontology than there had been only 6000 years earlier. Agriculture drove the invention of cities which drove the invention of writing which drove the collapse of the ancient language leaving the massive void before 2000 BC. Let me put it this way; I once designed a computer system that controlled a little processing plant. The objective was to give operators a fine control over every stage of production and mixing. I hadn't done any computer programming since the 1960's so the actual programming was done by a consultant. Upon completion they were asked to write up a little synopsis of what they had done to aid the operators in using the interfaces and controlling the processes. When I first saw this report I thought they had accidently forwarded the wrong thing but there were a few key words that suggested it might apply to the project. I read it over and over because it made no sense at all. Finally after reading it about the tenth time it all made perfect sense. They had simply set the computer code to English!!! They described this in the only terms they knew. I've read and studied all the ancient literature (one massive corpus in particular) hundreds of times and it makes perfect sense. There are two possibilities for this; either archaeologists and scholars have very poor reading comprehension skills or it is written in a distinct language. I can no more believe that scholars are so stupid than I can believe the meaning of the words is coincidental. The problem is apparently translation and interpretation. The ancients must have had the ability and means to pass theory and knowledge between generations and it's nowhere else in evidence. It is most highly illogical to presume that our ancestors were very highly superstitious yet still managed progress from one generation to the next. Superstition is a very destructive force yet they survived and prospered. There must be a very fundamental problem and such a language change would explain not only the problem but how we missed it. Perhaps there are other explanations but it's this explanation that defines the problem. It gets back to the heart of the issue which is the predictive ability of theory. It gets to the heart of the very nature of science. It is not necessarily observation and experiment but can also be observation and logic. It might not even be coincidental that this is the direction we seem to be heading.
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Human language changed. In modern language things are stated directly and words get their meaning from context. It is symbolic as words are expressed to take the place of actions, processes, etc. "He ran to the store" can have a virtually infinite number of meanings dependent on context and the shared referents and word usage of the participants in the conversation. There are also infinite shades of meaning and implications if this is in response to a question like "Where's Joe?". If our words are lifted from context, even in aggregate, they will have no meaning to anyone who isn't privvy to referents and the nature of the language. Modern language requires a great deal of intuition to phrase or comprehend. There are no road signs to tell us when we misconstrue meaning because we automatically assign meaning to each word dependent on context. Since almost any statement can make sense then barring internal inconsistency, it will make sense. Of course there's no reason this sense will be shared by other listeners or the speaker. Ancient language was wholly distinct. Words didn't vary in definition and meaning was in context like computer code or prairie dog language. Words were used to "paint a picture" and if the meaning weren't comprehended then the words would sound like gobblety gook or word soup. It is likely that everyone used this exact same language which required remarkably few words to express meaning. Of course, the exact vocabulary and pronunciations varied but the format was the same so it was very easy to learn a new "language". The strenght of the ancient language was that there was very little misunderstanding. It might require some effort for two disparate people to establish communication but there was no misunderstanding as they worked. To us the ancient language appears to be gobblety gook and magic and no useful information has ever been extracted from it. Because it looked like nonsense ever since 2000 BC there was no real attempt to preserve it. It couldn't be readily translated into modern language so it wasn't preserved in any fashion. The language was metaphysics and contained the theory and knowledge that allowed ancient man to progress; it was the knowledge derived from as well as the logic and observation that underlay mans' progresss. But this language became geometrically more complicated as knowledge increased aritmatically so it collapsed as a tool of communication. Today language must be in flux and meaning far moreso. Even the meaning of something written long ago will change over time. Look at the vast difference between modern interpretation of something like the Declaration of Independence and the author's intent!!! Science largely overcomes this by having set definitions and axioms that can be expressed in math. Experimental results are generally more easily translated than a simple description. But it took us about three and a half millinea to recover from the loss of the old language. Now "recorded" history dates only back to 2000 BC because earlier writing is misinterpreted as being religiuous mumbo jumbo. When it finally becomes properly stuidied a whole new world is going to open up to us. It's not just our history lying in wait but the knowledge we gained in our first 40,000 years of language. Unfortunately much of this is lost but it matters little because much of what's lost should be deducible and there will be information in what survives to uncover much of the rest. Only what was written on paper as been discarded in utter frustration. I have no proof at this time. I believe that something passed down in a language like computer code is relatively impervious to being changed since each generation will perform something equivalent to a "spell check" on it. Somehow "recorded history" doesn't begin until 2000 BC or 1200 years after the invention of writing. Additionally, we know nothing about ancient people, how they lived, and what they "believed". We don't know such basic things as how they invented cereal grains or passed knowledge across generations. Logically if there was much degradation of this passing of knowledge there would not have been progress. We are missing something fundamental. We are missing all the knowldege that existed before 2000 BC. Are you exploring for "new age" beliefs? I have none at all. However I've stumbled onto a vast store of lost knowledge that applies to everything and could even apply to the concept of "Atlantis". Any such connection is somewhat speculative though. Until even the most basic science gets done I'm avoiding speculation to the degree possible. ...now if you want to talk about alchemy or "fossilized" auric sulfate then I'm your man. ...but we'll need a new thread.
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Not exactly. All we really know for fact is that in the last 4000 years we have been making mistakes. I believe that this was when the language changed and all the writing and the oral tradition that preceded it was lost. It might not be permanently or entirely lost.
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The problem here is the paucity of any writing that exists from before 2000 BC. It's recently come to my attention that there could be significant amounts of Sumerian writing but anything I find on the net isn't dated so I haven't even tried to study it in detail yet. http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/ It will be a major project if I ever do. I have read everything that I know is pre-2000 BC but this is almost insignificant. Basically this leaves only the Egyptian writing and, according to the experts, it is all religious in nature and reflects a highly superstitious people who even vary the meaning of words in context: Words have only "shades of meaning" rather than definitions. These writings are not extensive and one is said to be just incantation to get the king to heaven and the other is an agglomeration of spells and magic that was written on coffins between about 2400 BC and 1800 BC. This leaves us with no information whatsoever about the people and their beliefs other than interpretation of job titles and bottle labels based on their "religion". In other words if the Egyptologists are wrong about these words being superstitious gobblety gook than nothing is known from before 2000 BC when numerous other works begin appearing. I believe that there is a coherent meaning to these words and this meaning is expressed such that it is not as susceptible to deterioration as modern language. The meaning appears to be expressesd in context like computer code or animal languages; http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/researcher-decodes-praire-dog-language-discovers-theyve-been-calling-people-fat.html If a person's only job were to remember as much of a subject as he were capable a great deal of information could be retained over generations. When writing was invented it would have been the first thing recorded. None of this seems to survive. No books (from Egypt) survive from before 2000 BC except the hocus pocus (per Egyptology) inscribed in pyramids. We know that papyrus can last for millinea because we actually have some of the first papyrus paper made which is a blank scroll from 3300 BC. This leaves the question of what happened to our history and all those books. I'm betting that there was an actual change in the language and the books looked like hocus pocus to people so no care was taken to preserve them. Now the ancient beliefs, science, and history are all primarily lost except for snippets and fragments in the Bible, hermetic writings, Koran, as well as legend and myth. Ancient people are greatly misapprehended. I don't know how much they knew about paleontology but there's little doubt it was studied. And since they did study such things and exhibited a deep and abiding concern for both future and past generations, it stands to reason they also passed history down from generation to generation as well as all the sciences. They didn't lack writing because they weren't smart enough, they lacked it because no one had thought of it yet. We don't understand the formatting of the ancient language so it's as incomprehensible as most animal languages. We're only now starting to comprehend some of the animal languages.
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This is an assumption. It is a very commonly made assumption and very logical since it is supported by evidence. But it is still an assumption and all the evidence applies only to times since 2000 BC. I actually don't believe the concept of deterioration of information over time applies to the time before 2000 BC and especially not to times before the invention of writing. Admittedly there wouldn't be any evidence it did apply even if such deterioration existed. Modern thought is based on a lot of assumptions and this is one that is likely wrong. The simple fact is that it is ludicrous to believe that the invention of cities was possible without theory; theory had to be maintained through oral tradition. Since man did progress in an apparently straight line fashion before 2000 BC the logical conclusion is that their theory (science) could be passed generation to generation intact. I believe that this ability to pass information was due to the nature of their language and the reason all history and science before 2000 BC is lost is that there was an invisible change in the language. I've never been much of a Darwinian myself. He had keen insights but "survival of the fittest" is not by any means the best fit logically nor with the evidence. Any sentient being looking at a strange fossil or an out of place fossil is going to see change and great lenghts of time.
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Yes. This is one of the biggest problems even during recorded history. Not only does the story evolve but the details get muddied because all the place names change and word meanings change. But this shouldn't be a prime problem since the invention of writing as original narratives should exist. They don't exist (at least dated and in context) from before 2000 BC because such sources aren't comprehensible. It's little better since 2000 BC since few sources exist and they tend to be religious in nature. Not until the 7th century BC Greeks is there anything approaching a continuous history and many of the details are hazy at best. I doubt our oral history was so broken and confused. They would have taken great pains to assure it was passed down correctly. When writing was invented this oral history would be among the very first things recorded yet it appears to be lost nearly its entirety save bits and fragments which might exist in legend. Certainly they lacked the vast data that we have but they would be aware that these fossils must be extremely old since marine animal fossils would be found high on dry land. A great deal can be pieced together from observation and logic alone. 388a. It is N. (the dead king) who inundated the land after it had come out of the ocean; This specific sentence might be so ancient that it even pre-dates writing itself, yet the concept that land might have once been part of the ocean seems quite clear. They also would probably see fossils for which no animal was known to exist including some dinosaur bones. But we seem to have no memory of ever writing such words. They knew that animals came and went and likely changed. They would have guessed at the mechanisms just as we do though they would not have large amounts of supporting evidence. There seems to be a disconnect between ancient and modern times caused by much more than just our habit of downplaying ancient knowledge and capabilities. http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/pyt/index.htm
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The Bible says that "Adam named the animals" which could certainly reflect the development of language as the result of a genetic mutation such as Chomsky suggests. Obviously man couldn't remember millinea of evolution if we can't even remember the most basic and important events of human history but there is certainly no reason to suppose that our ancestors couldn't look at a fossil and put two and two together. What happened to our memory?
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There are at least a couple Egyptian myths about the origin of man. The better known probably dates to later times and has the god Khnum make man from clay on his potter's wheel. The other is older or at least has elements that are older and has man springing from tear drop of Re', the sun "god".
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Actually I think the assessment that we know virtually nothing is highly accurate. The value of science, the very reason that we or our ancestors pursued science at all is for the sake of making predictions. We can very accurately predict the behavior of our machines but we can't predict much of anything else. If we could make even the most basic predictions about nature then the stock and financial markets would run like well oiled machines rather than gambling halls. The weatherman would at least get current conditions right every time. We believe we have great knowledge because our machines have made us comfortable at a very great cost and enormous waste. We believe we know a lot because we see what we know and everything else is invisible to us.
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I don't believe humans are really very special at all. We're more dextrous than most animals and a little more clever, no doubt, but what really sets us apart is simply language. We are capable of passing down learning across generations and this led to numerous advances in language use such as writing, the printing press, telecommunications, and the internet. It is language which allows each generation to progress and not that humans are somehow "special". Thanksa for the post. "This also comes from the many Egyptian Gods, like Anubis and Horus." This is completely untrue. There is no such basis for these so called gods within 1000 years from when they arose.
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The simple answer is that humans used to be part of nature and they studied nature through observation and logic. We simply have forgotten that nature was divided into its various aspects for study and these were given human characteristics to help in remembering their relationships. We in modern times misinterpret these various aspects of nature as "gods". This exact same misinterpretation underlay the the legends, myths, religions, etc, etc, etc for four millinea.
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The green solution. I believe the most ancient texts are written in a misinterpreted language that is highly scientific. These texts say a great deal about this place and the chemicals and their characteristics. As I interpret the language it very distinctly states that the basalt "mat" under the carbonated water turns green. This is not consistent with the only colored material I know to be in the water; copper sulfate; There's only one "mat" and one "bow" though there could be other "turquoise". Conditions here are most highly variable. After it is "purified" the temperature can be as low as about 58 F. It is below the "cool lakes at 81 feet", but can easily become quite cold under some conditions. It can probably get as hot as about 130 F under some conditions and can even stagnate rarely. I should add that at times there would be large amounts of siderite (iron) as well as various particulate debris and organic waste material from people. The water starts its treck carbonated but by the time it reaches the "mat" should almost always be almost completely decarbonated though it will sometimes pick up other gasses from a lot of handling. It will also contain very small amounts of an aromatic organic (myhrr). I can identify several other things in the water but they are in trace amounts. It's a real "soup" over the course of a season but at any given point in time its condition can be closely estimated. The copper sulfate will primarily appear early in the annual season with the siderite but other conditions are steadier over time though always variable. When the water is "purified" it will be cleaner, colder, and higher in natron and copper sulfate levels low. I greatly appreciate everyone's help. If I don't repeat it later... ...thanks.
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My limited knowledge of chemistry suggests that copper sulfate in solution with salt, baking soda, and sodium decahydrate (natron) will precipitate copper hydroxide which would accumulate on the bottom of a very large container. There would be numerous contaminants in this water and solution levels of the copper sulfate would be probably less than .05% but highly variable. The water would be very slightly acidic and turn over rapidly. I believe there is evidence it would turn basalt green. Does this sound right to anyone?
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I believe this is one of those things that seem true to everyone but is absolutely false. Perhaps at one time there was truth in it but in the modern world ideas are a dime a dozen. You can invent cold water fusion and people will just ignore you until you start producing lots of megawatts and this might not happen since there will be various forces working against you. If an idea has military implications then it will probably get a hearing. "Intelligence" (such as it is) has far less value than ideas. I think we are just going to have to agree to disagree on Freud. Many people for whom I have great respect think Freud was onto something. I couldn't disagree more. I believe everyone believes what he wants to believe and Freud simply charted his own thinking and beliefs. There is no set way people believe or even think. We are engrained with perspectives reflective of our time and place so even people with different beliefs and different ways to think will have great similarities in perspective. There will be far more similarity between an atheist and a priest than between an ancient fig cutter and Christopher Columbus. Communication is based on shared referents and those from different times and places will lack not only the referents but the perspectives. To my mind Freud simply reflected a culmination of 19th century thought which needs to become obsolete. This doesn't mean all his observations and deductions have no basis in reality, merely that his conclusions are far too broadly applied.
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Excellent point s but the pragmatist in me says don't count your chickens until they're hatched so #1 doesn't exist until it's a chicken.
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Modern people have lost sight of all the important things. Human life is a race because we must race to understand our past. We must race to avoid being eaten by the sabre-toothed tiger and we must race to assure the world we leave our progeny is the best possible world. Human nature demands that we understand our enviroment which means we must understand nature. It appears we are falling short almost across the board and the best chance "catch up" is to recognize our ignorance and then reevaluate what we actually know. In learning about the natural order we'll always find that it will appear to be supernatural until it is more properly understood. As I said earlier in the thread, we understand such a tiny percentage of nature that it's only hubris to try to assign anything to the supernatural.
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To me "mind" is largely just what the brain/ body does. It acts on beliefs so there is similarity between the concepts of "mind" and "belief". I suspect the more one subdivides the concept of mind the less that exists at all. Certainly in humans the unconscious is a substantial part of the make-up of "mind" but most of this is quantifiable at least in theory. I doubt that the "subconscious" exists at all or that any part can be quantified. It doesn't even exist unless the individual believes it does. To a large extent you're right that a lot of the difference here is largely semantics and most of the rest is perspective. There are obvious connections between people and things that are not quantifiable or even identifiable. To experimental science this is usually equated with non-existence. It's likely that until terms and parameters are better defined these subjects will not be giving up any facts to modern science. There are myriad ways things affect one another. I have a lot of doubt about your view of the ubiquitousness of consciousness. No doubt it's far more widespread, diverse, and extensive than generally believed but it's difficult for me to grant it to a potato or a stone. Certainly the potato needs some level of some ability to do what is needed and stones always "know" to roll downhill but there must be some level below which "consciousness" has no real world meaning. The mind can make connections between seemingly unrelated processes and events so some of the connections we see in nature may be largely projections of ourselves, our minds, into our observations. We are wired to see what we expect and part of this is the propensity to see what we know. If we see connections between two consciousnesses or between an object and another we're far more likely to see confirmation. I think of myself as the first person to be intelligent enough to know he's an idiot. Of course, intelligence has many parameters and were I more capable in more of them I might never have even made the discovery. In recent times I've learned that everyone before 2000 BC used to know they were stupid so my "discovery" is really just a "rediscovery" anyway. (chuckle, indeed)
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Perhaps I'm being dense here and there would be no advantage other than preventing insects and rodents from attacking the body while it's drying. I suppose there would be no changes caused by such a process would be detectible with modern instruments and knowledge. Perhaps it could be possible to autopsy mites and the like to see if any died of CO2 suffocation.
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Gees; My error. I skimmed the entire thread except page 5 before I even asked. I didn't remember having followed the original link because I hadn't even skimmed very much of it but since your mentioning it was on page 5 it has been entirely skimmed. I do owe this thread several comments and will try to get to them today. Regarding your last post; I have read some Freud when young and found his work fascinating and brilliant. Indeed, until a little later I believed he had actually made a few discoveries that could be universally applied to humans and the way we think. This would be a rather remarkable accomplishment even by my thinking at that time. But since I have come to believe that he is merely describing his own mind and that is one of a 19th century scientist rather than anything that can be applied to anyone else. His world is not a very attractive world at that. It was only later that I came to believe that it was a misunderstanding of Freud's work leading to the disintegration of society and mass murder. Humans are almost infinitely adaptable because of our ability to accept any belief we choose. We can even choose to divide our minds into the ego and id and have dreams that explain ourselves in these terms. Certainly it is we ourselves living in this world of our own superegos so anything we learn from such a process is likely to actually apply to us and our understanding of reality, religion, or thought. It's not my contention that there's anything wrong with seeing reality from such a perspective, merely that the results can't be universally applied. Since all our actions are predicated solely on our beliefs we will actually become a sort of manifestation of those beliefs in time. Individuals are always a product of their time and place because there is always a set of definitions and beliefs associated with a time and place which "all" perspectives share. These beliefs are not necessarily founded in reality and historically have been in a range from insanity to confusion. An entire nation can go mad and tear itself apart trying to root out and murder people it suddenly deems different. For a long time now people have had the notion that humans are somehow different in that they are "intelligent", "conscious", and "distinct" from other life forms. "I think therefore I am" isn't supposed to be applied to a goldfinch. Our hubris doesn't only apply to natural species but to nature itself since most people believe all knowledge is possessed by one individual or another. Yet here we are incapable of even agreeing on such basic concepts as the nature of consciousness or the nature of human consciousness (you and I seem relatively close here but I doubt many are with us). It is simply my opinion that there is virtually no way that our thought and consciousness can't be organized. Indeed, I even believe that a vastly different system was in place before 2000 BC that was similar to other animals. People are brought up and spoon fed the beliefs of their parents and the society at large. "Bonding" at an animal level can certainly be a part of this process and one that is likely to make the individual more attuned with nature and the body and will draw him to others on this basis. While personal opinion may be largely irrelevant it would seem to me anything that removes our concept of ourselves from ivory towers and omniscience is a survival characteristic at the current point in history. Humans have become so divorced from nature that we have become a serious threat; mostly to ourselves but to aspects of nature as well. Freud was a pretty clear thinker and will probably make a very important case study someday but I doubt that day will come before we have a much clearer picture and ability to quantify more aspects of the human brain/ body (mind). For now, in my opinion, he is primarily a window into Freud himself and provides the more asture among us an ability to see (somewhat distorted) images of the way our own minds work. It's not so much I dislike the man as that I consider him dangerous to children and the cause of most of the mass murder of the 20th century. None of this is direct responsibility of course. So long as one is secure in his own beliefs and can keep his own perspective (literally) Freud might make a good source for reading. I doubt there are any ultimate truths in his work though this may be too high a standard.
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Tough question here; First an easy one to get warmed up though... Would there be any benefit to mummification from exposing the body to a CO2 enviroment while it's being dried? I'm confident there would be in theory but how about in the real world where most of rotting is being caused by aneroebic bacteria? If a mummy were produced using such a technique would there be a means to detect it after 4700 years?