cladking

I seriously and very much doubt it. Language is simply learned at a young age and then is used as much of the template for thought. Language exists outside of higher brain functions even though most higher brain functions primarily use language and idiomatic symbolism assiociated with language. Human language is not indicative of any intelligence any more than the simplicity of frog language implies a lack of intelligence. Human language is simply the result of a random mutation that created a supersized speech center. This speech center was primary cause of language and human ability to seem intelligent since we can pass down knowledge from generation to generation. Humans simply are not much smarter (or necessarily any smarter) than other animals. There might be no more clever animal but this isn't the same as intelligence. Humans have a few advantages in thought with language being chief among them.

If you use terminology like this it is exceedingly difficult to make true statement either general or specific about nature and reality. If you want to use these that's fine and it might be closer to the dictionary definition than the way I'm employing the terms. All human activity is governed by "belief" except the tiny bit governed by instinct and the vast amount that is controlled by the autonomic nervous system. This can apply to animals as well though the proportions are different. If I believe there's something good to eat in the refrigerator I might go eat. If I believe eating between meals is unhealthy, I might not. If the phone rings as I'm getting up to eat then I'll answer it instead if I believe it's more important than food. If the house is on fire this will likely take precedence to any other activity and might even generate an instinct to run. All activity is the vector sum total of our beliefs. Sitting and thinking about metaphysics is an activity probavbly generated by the belief something can be learned or intuited. I don't think of "value judgements" so much as beliefs but "applied beliefs". This is a fine distinction but if we believe discrimination is wrong because it diminishes what it means to be human then we will probably disapprove of discrimination in all cases regardless of the facts. However, we all have numerous beliefs and one of mine is that you'll catch more terrorists in turbans foaming at the mouth and screaming "death to the infidel" than you will strip searching grandmothers in airports. In such a case my "applied beliefs" is that they should be stopping the screaming lunatic instead oif the grandmother. Political beliefs are almost more refexive or instinct than even "applied belief". Action is always a vector sum total of all beliefs in sane people. When we vote for our favorite republocrat we are voting all of our beliefs even though we know we won't get what we voted for. But we believe voting otherwise is throwing our vote away. We believe in order to make a difference we have to vote the way we always have. I do believe you're right about humans getting more complex instincts. It seems tool use is becoming pretty instinctive. Even driving seems to get more natural to people with each generation.

I'm apparently failing miserably at what I'm trying to say. Let me try one last time. You can't measure a beaver's intelligence by letting him sharpen a #2 pencil and see how he scores on the SAT. In order to measure the intelligence of any animal you have to have to understand that specie's metaphysics. You have to be fluent in its language just to differentiate instinct from intelligence. You have to determine if isolated populations are representative of that species. We can't do any of this. Most animals can learn more words in English than a human can learn of its language. How can we even guess at its metaphysics without a near total understanding of its diet, "child" rearing, predators, etc, etc, etc. I'd wager one of the reasons we don't understand animal languages is that we don't realize they are natural languages like computer code. I'd wager most individual animals familiar with humans doubt we are intelligent. They know we communicate but they can't see much intelligence otherwise. Humans are in the habit of ascribing all animal behavior to instinct. Perhaps deducing the best place to find early worms in birds is primarily intelligence in a metaphysics we don't comprehend. We can't measure intelligence in people for many of these same reasons; we're all different. No one is more different to other people than your average robin.

I think what bothers me so much about Manderson's post is that it rubs against my beliefs. I don't want to believe no one cares how the pyramids were really built because my whole philosophy of life is that we are supposed to have as much fun as possible leaving the world a better place than we found it. There's good reason to leave the world a better place if people today and their offspring have no interest in observation and truth. I might as well dive into the deep end of hedonism and see how much pleasure can be had per unit time until I die. This isn't to say he's wrong but that I can't accept it and it's been causing some dissonance. I'll try to address some specific points soon. You're reading much more into these terms than what I'm trying to impart here. By "caveman" I mean all people who preceded the written language. Many of these individuals were actually cavemen but many more were not. I believe as is the point of this very thread that all of these people including the cavemen tended to be both smarter and more knowledgeable than people today. I believe virtually all of them were far less superstitious than people today. When I use the word "caveman" just think of a scientist with a funny way of expressing himself. It would sound primitive to us and a lot like computer code. When I use the word "Egyptian" I am always referring to the great pyramid builders and those who lived after the invention of writing and before the collapse of "proper" language. Egyptians were much more knowledgeable than cavemen because before 2000 BC human progress (called "thot) was linear. Before language was confused every generation of people knew more than the preceding generation. When I use the word "Egyptian" I'm referring to what was, perhaps, the true crown of creation. This isn't to say I hold modern people, modern language, or modern science in low esteem merely that few today understand or can incorporate our vast knowledge into their lives or use it for any practical purposes. Modern people are highly superstitious and this is a very serious problem. I believe every thread on every site highlights the failure of communication. Yes, there are some great threads on many sites but even in the best you can usually spot two posters who are on different topics. Modern communication is almost never perfect. Generally oral communication is much worse. Even if speakers take the time to listen to each other (few do) anything written or spoken can be deconstructed; it means what the listener believes it means. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction This problem is greatly exascerbated by an imperfect understanding of referents and idiosyncratic, improper, or non-standard usage of definitions. The ancient language didn't work this way. You either took the meaning perfectly or you knew you couldn't understand it at all; like computer code. I'll have to dig for an old thread about ancient constructions. You must know that the pyramids differ from each other, they do not have all the same structure. here. here. I can't comprehend the post in the link. When my mind works it's very literal. Actually one of the things I've done is look at what all the pyramids have in common rather than their differences. One of these things is that they are "all" built on water collection devices. They have a "causeway" down to the valley which can transport water. They have boats buried around them. Their builders had titles like "weigher/ reckoner" and "overseer of the boats of neith" and there are no ramps in evidence at a single one of them. Each of them is five steps implying that these steps were necessary to the construction. There's no evidence of extensive human activity to build any of these. Memphis was nearly a mile away from S1 and the tiny little builders village at G1 was more than half a mile across a ravine (wadi). They are surrounded by water retention devices and canals. There are caves, caverns, and passages underneath them. They all exist in a tiny region on the west side of the Nile that is not so much larger than the largest cold water geyser fields. None of them are being seriously studied by the pseudo-scientists in charge. All but the first comes to a point. Simply stated Egyptology has been debunked. Ramps have been debunked. That people don't recognize this is irrelevant. Human knowledge doesn't wait for any of us and isn't decided by vote. Until such tiome as actual science is done all we can say is "they mustta used geysers" because the "theory" (poor hypothesis) that they "mustta used ramps" has been shown to be the nonsense it is. If anyone is interested there's a brand new book out that claims cold water geysers were used to build the pyramids. This is not my work and I have no financial interest whatsoever in it. I don't even agree with all the science in the book. It is "The Great Pyramid Rainmaker" 2013 Christopher Jordan. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/276831 I believe it's closer to the truth than any other book written on the subject.

Sure. Almost everyone will agree that we build giant air conditioned cities and have agriculture because we're geniuses but termites who do the same thing have no real intelligence; just ask them. Man transforms large areas to make more habitat for himself and this is evidence of huge intelligence but when a beaver does it, it's mere instinct. We only see things things that look like human intelligence and we mistake technology and other manifestations of language for that intelligence. I might agree humans were pretty smart to get a complicated language to pass learning down through time but this was probably just a fortuitous mutation. I might agree that having an opposable thumb to make language valuable was pretty smart but this is the way nature plays around with species and language would be of highly limited value to worms. How are we supposed to recognize true intelligence in other species if we don't understand them? I'd wager most individual animals exposed to humans believe we are more like a force of nature than intelligent beings. We exhibit almost no bird intelligence of any sort so they consider us rather stupid (though they may be jealous of our ability to build nests). They probably consider this nest building little more than instinct. Obviously birds don't spend a lot of time "considering" too much of anything because they have more presssing things on their minds (like trying to avoid flying into our nest windows)(they're hard ya' know).

No!!! The elephant you add to an elephant to get three elepants can not be identical. It takes a male elephant and a female elephant to have a shot at making three elephants and the third one is just a little copy of both sets of genes. It's actually possible in some animals to have different fathers of twins. Nature doesn't count or care. Nature has no value system other than what is. You can't exactly model nature and this is what makes numbers a construct. All our models are constructs but our knowledge is correct to the degree the metaphysics and experimentation is correct. At the risk of getting off-topic, real science is observation organized by logic. In the real world it is simply illogical to say that one elephant plus one elephant equals three elephants. You can address this problem in myriad ways but whether you use ancient metaphysics or euclidean geometry you need to keep in mind the definitions and that numbers are constructs or it's easier to go all wrong or to confuse an issue. You might not even get the cat out of the box until it's died. The real world doesn't care about numbers or cats. We need to do the worrying ourselves. Certainly the real world doesn't count cats but if there were more mice and other prey we might need to count cats. If the cats in the neighborhood were sabre-toothed tigers we'd better be counting cats to zero cats. We'd better be studying nature rather than magic. Sure nature can count in a sense such as it "recognizes" when critical mass is achieved or when population dips too low for a species to recover. Nature tells a CO2 saturated lake when to erupt. But this counting isn't like counting stars or seas. We can model these things and gain real knowledge but we might apply such knowledge incorrectly if we don't understand all of the terms. We can't hold knowledge in mind that we don't understand so it can't be applied simultaneously woth other knowledge. I believe it is important to remember that "numbers" aren't absolute. Even the unitless (theoretical) numbers of math still are "saddled" with all the definitions of the operations applied to them. One plus one doesn't always equal two (and "2" might be expressed as "10" like in this very sentence).

Instinct is a nonautonomic response to stimulus that is not based on higher brain functions. It's what a bird does if you walk up to it.

Think of it this way then. Even though the numbers are constructs the fact remains that nature doesn't know that. In order to get a baby elephant you need one elephant plus one elephant. By the same token having only one seed in an apple would be an inefficient means to get apple trees. Nature can't count rivers, tributaries, or water droplettes but water runs downhill and carves river channels. We just come along and want to count things.

A scientist strives to remove human things from consideration. Ancient man did it through metaphysics and modern man does it through experimental parameters and controls. Nature is nature and this is what we're supposed to see and not our own eyes looking at it.

I'll probably have more response later to Manderson's last post. I can't help but believe people do care about how the pyramid was bult and the nature of the people who built it but they are married to the concept that our ancestors were primitive bumpkins who dragged females by the hair back to their caves. People seem to need something solid in their lives and for some it's the concept of a supreme being and for others it's the supremacy of human beings. Perhaps for some people it's just to much to accept no matter how much evidence exists. It's easier to just believe that the ancients stumbled on the ability to build pyramid as they were out being superstitious bumpkins. Certainly progress has been very poor but I have managed to change the terms by which people argue. The fact is there is a very significant probability that the pyramid was built with the use of water pressure and that the builders were scientific and thought in terms of science. If this is true then it will come to be seen that it is we who are the superstious stumblebums rather than they. I believe that it is critical we learn this because the world and what it means to be human are going to be revolutionized in this century and we have a far better chance of success if we understand the nature of humanity. People are closing their eyes to the facts because they choose not to see. None of these concepts are new. There is nothing new under the sun. The only thing really new is that there really was a change in the language and even most bible thumpers find this difficult to accept. Thanks Michel123456 for the info. It's quite interesting. Many people don't realize that "Atum" was the first god who created himself yet the god Nun (phenomenon of water) already existed at this time. Egyptologists simply dismiss all these inconsistencies as irrelevant. Neither Aristotle nor Socrates is believed to have traveled to Egypt. Sir Isaac Newton studied the pyramid seeking knowledge about gravity but didn't know it when he found it. "8) It ascends from ye earth to ye heaven again it desends to ye earth and receives ye force of things superior inferior.". How's that for irony? He simply didn't know what "it" is. Two modern languages and he got so close. He just needed an apple to fall on his head. http://www.the-book-of-thoth.com/content-157.html the best translation of the concept of using water to build pyramids ins the 12th century Latin; 8) With great capacity it ascends from earth to heaven. Again it descends to earth, and takes back the power of the above and the below. Though I love the rainbow in the Chinese version; 8) It ascends from the earth to the heavens (and orders the lights above), then descends again to the earth; and in it is the power of the highest and the lowest Modern languages fail at communication. The ancient ones did not.

Perhaps instincts are something like the "beliefs of species" but I suspect most instincts are far simpler and merely involve the way the brain is wired more than the way it's constructed or what's in it at birth. I don't know and there's every chance it's far more complicated and might be an expression of DNA or the like. I say wired because most instinctive reactions seem to be very basic and primal and don't usually involkve very complex behavior. Even where the behavior may seem complex it can be seen as simple from another perspective. Belief though is usally extremely complex and always involves volition. No matter what you believe you believe it because you want to. I often warn children to be careful what they believe because this will define who they are and will determine their fate. Certainly a specific belief can be simple but it will normally be applied to a set of beliefs that already make it possible. Most individuals are taught their beliefs at a young age and never change the basic patterns. Even when you aren't taught them or reject them you still end up a product of your time and place largely because of language. The brain, with its beliefs, is organized by the logic of language which becomes a "civilizing" influence. Almost all individuals in a culture tend to share a core of similar beliefs and those who don't still express themselves in similar terms. Very few people are like someone who was raised by wolves and no ancient Egyptian has ever been born in Kansas and never will be. Beliefs might be thought of as a filter for straining out extraneous information to prevent obverloading thought processes. They shouldn't be or shouldn't exist but this is one of their functions. Beliefs assure you'll see things that support them and that you won't see what contradicts them. Beliefs preclude, prevent, or lower the chances of making good scientific observation. Instinct is like a frog's "knowledge" that when its tongue goes out a fly comes back with it. It's belief is that if it hangs around dead meat the tongue will be more active and its belly more full. This belief might impede it's ability to survive when conditions change. Of course we have instincts. Every animal on earth (and likely every plant) has instincts. Why would humans be different? People lose touch with their instincts partly because they believe they are harmful or ineffective. Pay attention to your instincts and you'll find them.

Definitions. Logic is a property of nature. It's no matter if that's a human construct or not since humans are part of nature. If A follows B then B precedes A by the definitions of terms whether man invents the terms or not. Man is a natural part of the natural enviroment even whan he is also its observer.

Yes! And it's one of the reasons I don't like euclidean geometry. Math is very simple using our definitions but it might not be best at modeling the real world.

So long as the basis of a math are logically consistent, sufficiently defined, and properly applied there should be no problems. Some systems are too simple to be useful (like counting one, two, more than two), and some could be so complex they cause computers to overheat but there are countless possibilities.

Let me just add this; Hawking is supposedly a world class scientist but he came out recently and announced he has disproven the possibility that God exists. I have done better at casting doubt on the belief but in the process my estimation of the possibility has actually increased substantially. Where does one turn for real science as an outsider?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not an insider and am not privvy to everything going on. Obviously there are many good things going as well as high quality and cutting edge science. Information sharing is, obviously, more common and rapid now days. These aren't the things I'm talking about though. I'm talking about the bad science that is common and the inability of real scienbtists to get the ear of the media so people know what is actually going on. In the 70's you could read Scientific American and stay reasonably well informed but now days they print tripe about parallel worlds and global warming. I couldn't even tell you any of the leading scientists in the world today because scientific reporting has gone the same fate as news reporting; it's strictly political nonsense. It's all axes being ground and agendas that are wholly unrelated to science. even most of the science that is still occuring is often more math and thought experiments than it is experimental. Of course the world is really composed of individuals and it is they who make new discovery and have new ideas. Even Egyptologists aren't all pseudo-scientific nincompoops. Indeed, perhaps none or few of them are except in aggregate. Now most scientific research is aimed toward military applications and basic research has taken a back seat. Much of the research being done has to be politically correct to even get funding. Of course much of the problem over the longer term is that in 1900 an individual could work alone with affordable instruments and this is becoming nearly impossible. Costs of living and research are both far higher and a far larger fraction of a living wage. I see much more a ratcheting down in the quality, scope, and methodology of cutting edge research beginning about 1900. Of course there are hundreds of thousands of reputable scientists to whom this doesn't really apply but a system is composed of many people and it's the system that seems badly "misdirected".

OK, science has taken a turn for the worse and I can even agree on its approximate swoon. It seems closer to 1925 to me though precursors existed earlier. But I can't see why you believe it has anything to do with religion. It's not as though science has been becoming more beneficial or less detrimental to religions over the decades. I've slain numerous windmills myself even though most were very diminuative, I am working on the grandaddy of all windmills right now which will have far ranging consequences once it's under my belt. Where is evidence that it's religious? Most signs point to the military but political correctness has the military more often on the side of foreign religions than those customarily associated with the US. Would any sect or religion use the benefits of scientific research into arms and then use the military itself to support "outsiders"? I might even agree that the military industrial complex has a religious bent but this didn't come into power until the late-'50's. It seems more like a massive confusion and superstition at play than religion (not entirely mutually exclusive but largely so).

I'll keep this brief since the sofware is failing me here. The Hebrew word for babel is "division". There are many ways in which loss of the ancient language caused division. Before the change there would have been numerous relatively isolated "societies" but they all shared the same language. When they did encounter outsiders the first thing they'd do is update each others language. Normally such updates would be insignificant unless the isolation had been very prolonged. After the change not only were most outsiders no longer understood at all but the new language fostered superstitions. There are probably no people alive today who hold onto more than small fragments of the ancient language and even less the way it was used. Certainly individual words survive (many are onomatopoeia) but vocabulary is nearly irrelevant to communication. I'm told there are some aspects of "computer code" that may survive in Hawaiian so, parhaps, this language evolved naturally away from the original natural language. I don't believe that primitive societies today usually have much commonality with societies in the distant past. Obviously even the most primitive societies today have attributes and some advantages to the distant past and even to "western civilization". But they may be mostly irrelevant to trying to understand cavemen or the ancient Egyptians who were the "crown of creation" relative other peoples who spoke natural language.

Yes. Exactly. But it is still on both persons' shoulders to know the referent and to know the nature of "two". The former could be computers (Apples) and the latter is a human (/crow) construct that isn't normally confused. Math works fine in theory and in all known cases works in the concrete world so long as its nature is understood and terms are properly applied. Of course this isn't necessarily the case as evidenced by government finances. Logic works fine only so long as it is properly applied and defined. These definitions rest now on things like euclidean geometry rather than the real world and this too makes them a construct.

I once worked in a plant that mixed various ingredients to make a consumer product. It was all automated and the computer system was quite antiquated. When it was updated I had an opprtunity to make interfaces so operators could see and control each process. I designed the entire interface system and the software department installed everything. When it was complete they wrote up a brief synopsis for the operators so they would know specifically what changes were made and how to affect the operation. When I read this synopsis I didn't even know what I was reading. There were numerous key words that seemed to imply it was this subject but the words were all a jumbled mess with no coherent meaning. I read this thing over and over and then suddenly about the tenth time it all fell into place and made perfect sense. They had simply described in English what changes they had made in the computer code. The synopsis was equivalent to computer code translated to English. This is what the Pyramid Texts appears to be. A sort of computer code or natural language translated to English by people who don't know that the language provides meaning in a different way. I believe I understand vast stretches of this work nearly as well as the author. I often say that it means exactly what it says and this isn't far off but what it says isn't expressed quite like the way we express things. I suppose it's possible that this is largely caused by translation errors but generally the translationsd appear sound judging by the meaning. It seems that since no one else can understand it even with my explanations I'm running into a brick wall. Perhaps I've deluded myself but then how would I have all this information that no one else has? Perhaps everyone is even stupider than I am, but in my experience this is improbable since I tend to be pretty thick. Perhaps everyone is playing games but then I'm right back to being deluded. This pretty much leaves only the possibility that the language changed and other people can't understand it. If it's true the language changed and there exists a story that the entire language of the world changed then a workable theory exists. On investigation of this theory I've found several pieces of evidence that fit and support it and no inconsistencies. I don't know. I do know that if you plug the concept of "cool effervescent water that tosses" into pyramid building then all human history fits a logical pattern and there is a significant probability that someone from babel built a tower for scientific purposes that fell from natural causes and led directly or indirectly to a change in language from something like computer code to the deconstructable nonsense that we all know and love. I'm not married to the concept but it's easier on me to consider it as the most viable explanation at the current time. Hence we have priests whoi were actually scientists and cavemen who were while not highly educated could outthink most people alive today on any scientific subject. At least the "world curves the width of a river each day's walk" is much more sensible than most things I hear people say.

No. All animals including man have instincts however in almost all humans almost all instinct is subsumed by knowledge and belief. Most humans operate almost strictly on belief and most animals usually operate mostly on instinct. Animals do operate on knowledge and belief but this tends to mostly occurs when they are comfortable with a full belly and no pressing needs other than avoiding predation. On the relatively unusual occasion that humans act on instinct it's usually in the face of danger. Many individuals have very poor or repressed abilities to operate on instinct because it is buried under many layers of conditioned behavior and thought. Animals are in relatively little need of beliefs (thought?) and people are in relatively little need of instinct. Like everything though if you merely pay attention to it you can usually find a means to affect it in yourself.

I can't thank you enough for the encouragement. I've gotten very very little. I have no means to establish these facts on my own for reasons I'd rather not discuss. I have no options but to pursue this the way I have. I might have gone to the media but do not desire the attention. My primary interest is now, and has been to know how the pyramids were built. I've been distracted from determining the specific details for over a year now because there needs to be testing done and it isn't happening. This makes it more tactically important to interest other people in the subject. I believe locks were used limitedly. I don't know much about quarrying but experts believe channels were pounded by shatteriung stones into rectangular shapes and then holes were drill horizontally under them and wooden wedges inserted into these holes. The wedges were soaked with water and their swelling broke the stone free. I have no particular problem with this and some evidence exists. However there is a great deal not known ant the PT refers to a force (set) which operates the "Great Saw Palace". There's apparently more that isn't known. I believe masonry is derived from pyramid building and there is at least limited knowledge of this among masons. I get a great number of google hits for masons. There are too many to be coincidental. I've managed to google up most of the 33rd degree stuff and their rituals and some can be interpreted to relate to pyramid building. I don't know. I'm here specifically to expose this to real scientists. Egyptologists are are very knowledgeable and intelligent but do not follow proper scientific procedures nor do scientific testing. Their results are correct to the degree the assummptions are correct but these assumptions are apparently all in error. They are no help to outsiders and do better counting angels that can dance on the head of a pin than gathering knowledge or discussing findings. They are hamstrung by assumption and tend to get angry when challenged. Interesting questions. I can't be entirely forthcoming. I might be the last educated caveman or a reincarnation of a pyramid builder. No, not literally of course but I grew up naturally inclined to question everythinmg and was encouraged in this direction. Everything had to be checked. This is a poor way to learn specialties and I lacked the funding anyway so I became self taught. I invented a new field of study I call generalism but is known by a few as nexialism. My passion is partly because I believe man is on the wrong path even before I found that we might be on a 4000 year detour. It's partly because I find sorts of "soul mates" among the Egyptians. They have been horribly maligned for many centuries. They have been ridiculed, laughed at, and had their graves desicrated since time immemorial. The major source of my passion is simple curiousity about how they built these. I know viscerally that ramps are an impossibility and that they quite probably had a motive force. That the ancients are defined for political, religious, and racial reasons also sticks in my craw. They deserve to be understood for who and what they were and if I'm right then we can't even understand ourselves or the nature of humanity without understanding the Egyptians and by extension, cavemen. I have to be much more circumspect on this last point but suffice to say that there are implications of this that will impact directly on me and many others alive today and time is of the essense. I'm not sure it's this apparent that they are wrong. I am sure they actually believe these people were as primitive as they claim. They point to the lack of artefacts in the museums as proof that there was no complicated technology. But right inside the Cairo Museum is what I believe we know as the "fire-pan"; a signalling device to alert builders to report to work; This device sat in the nurse canal on the mehet weret cow and stayed burning so long as the water was violently rocked by the falling water. Its ability to float was maintained by the renennutet which channed CO2 from the eye of horus to beneath it. It was probably known as the "mks-sceptre" and with the nbht-sceptre which waved the "variegated feathers of the mehet weret cow" were the only two automatic signalling devices in operation. This device was probably the highest technology they possessed but it paled in importance and beauty to some of their simpler technology. I believe Egyptology just took a wrong road 150 years ago based partly on racism but primarily on inertia and building on older beliefs. I think at this point it's mostly a matter of them talking themselves into it. Just this past summer they commissioned another study to determine the feasibility of ramps. They always just assume the exiostence of ramps and compute the effort but don't consider the ramps must have only a single shape. Their descriptions of ramps always comes up Escher-like because there is no systemthat would work and the evidence says there were no ramps. Truth to tell, I've always believed human intelligence is grossly over rated. It barely exists at all. Everything we do is primarily a manifestation of habit founded on beliefs developed by the learning made possible by language. Yes, there are flashes of true intelligence in people but there is in animals as well. We simply are creatures of habit. This was probably just as true before the languagfes wwere confused. The real difference, I believe, is ancient people knew they were ignorant and not intelligent but this knowledge was lost at the tower of babel. It's not hidden. It's right out in the open everywhere we look. It's in the PT, Bible, Koran, and various ancient writings. We simply misinterpret it. This knowledge and the ability to get back to where we once were will have to wait until the science is done. There are some questions here I've never been asked. Thanks.

I didn't mean to suggest that we can't become sufficiently productive to continue to finance mountains of waste, debt, and stupidity in the short term. I merely mean that eventually a system based on waste, irresponsibility, and incompetence must fail

Yes. This is essentially my problem with the concept of the "sub-conscious". Of course you're right that people can excuse themselves of anything at all and will find a way to intellectualize it, blame God, fate, or anything but their own misguided behavior or their own weaknesses, perversions, or carelessness. But I don't see this as the problem of the 20th century where tens of millions were simply murdered, often horribly, and many millions more died in senseless wars. I believe the problem is that too many people believe we aren't responsible for our results or our actions. Most of these people don't believe we are responsible because of some imagined sub-conscious or overwhelming urge. This allows schools that don't teach and institutions that don't react. Families are breaking down as increasing government interference affects all aspects of society. People can't be trusted to do what's right so government is appointed to not hold anyone responsible (at great cost). No one is responsibnle for what they do or how they do it but increasingly people are held responsible for what they think or how they say it. Rather than getting better results this leads to more and more political correctness. Everyone talks a good game and then passes laws and institutes programs that discriminate because of characteristics over which no one has control. Every year human life is held in lower esteem and individual rights give way to civil rights. The same processes are going on nearly world wide. Until people are held responsible schools will turn out illiterates whose atrocities are excused in advance by a media that pretends their victims were "caught in the crossfire" rather than murdered to force relatives to join gangs. School boards are more interested in political activism than concerned with a 70% failure rate for the boys they are supposed to be teaching. Meanwhile families continue to breakdown because fathers whose income is dependent on drugs sales tend to be exceedingly undependable. Mothers who get paid to have children are not always the best care givers. Of course you can't get too specific because that might indicate a lack of political correctness which is the only standard to which anyone is held. The status quo always remains unaffected because no one is responsible. There is no investigation into why the media is not honest about the facts and no one cares how badly the government does anything or polices the activities of business. So even ketchup doesn't work anymore which is just as well since you probably can't get it open anyway. Everyone sits back and knows no one is to blame. We buy shoddy products from China or leave money in the banks run by those who get billion dollar bonuses but pay no interest. The country runs on inertia and the status quo and will, right up until we crash smack dab into reality.

This isn't my argument at all. This is the Egyptological perspective. This is essentially the viewpoint of western civilization as well as most of the world today. My argument is that this perspective is demonstrably wrong and patently illogical. To deny that this is the Egyptological viewpoint is to subscribe to their political correctness which holds scientific achievement in a society equally to superstition and primitiveness. No, it's not my contention that one is inherently wrong or one is inherently right. It is my conrtention that one leads to life and one leads to death. It is superstition that kills and it kills individually and collectively. I don't know if there's something wrong with Egyptians having been superstitious or not and it's irrelevant to any of my arguments. The Egyptians were who they were and nothing an Egyptologist nor I say can possibly have any effect whatsoever. Nor is it my contention that "science" as we know it has led to any "truth" or complete understanding. It is my opinion that science as we usually practice it and understand it today has obscured more issues and more truth than it has disclosed. I believe that "technology" has become mistaken for knowledge and science has more in common with religion in most minds than with truth. This also is irrelevant to any of my arguments. There's simply no question that Egyptology paints these people as backward and superstitious. They hold up the Pyramid Texts which they admit they can't understand and that they translate it improperly anyway and call it prima facie evidence that the great pyramid builders were hamstrung by religion, believed in magic, and were willing to risk their own lives and the lives of their families in order to construct a 6 1/2 million ton tomb for a dead king who never died. Were this not sufficient they also say that they were so backward and primitive the only possible means they could devise to lift stones was to build a ramp! It's irrelevant that the only evidence for any of this comes from thousands of years later because this is still how they define the great pyramid builders; in terms of later people and later evidence. This isn't open to question but is established fact. They even translate lines from the PT to suggest that their gods needed to be told to not walk in the corpse drippings of a dead god who was born a mummy but lived forever!!! How much more primitive and backward can a people actually be to believe or write such nonsensical tripe? 722c. Thy foot shall not pass over, thy step shall not stride through, 722d. thou shalt not tread upon the (corpse)-secretion of Osiris. 723a. Thou shalt tiptoe heaven like Śȝḥ (the toe-star); thy soul shall be pointed like Sothis (the pointed-star). Rather than question the possibility that they are misunderstanding the material, they simply accept that these people were beholden to stinky gods who walked in the secretions of corpses. None were immune to such treatment; 1272a. If Isis comes in this her evil coming; 1272b. do not open to her thine arms; that which is said to her is her name (of) "wide of ḥwȝ-t (evil-smelling)." In other words they say that logic didn't matter to the Egyptians and that they'd endanger the lives of their loved ones to do things for stinky gods who walked in corpse dripping after being born dead but this OK because there's nothing wrong with that. Well, I should break this to them more gently but there really is something wrong with that. No, this isn't necessarily a value judgement since these are unpopular now days but what's wrong with it is that such twisted and convoluted thinking can't lead to a perfect pyramid but only to confusion. They started with the assumption that the people were superstitious and this is the foundation on which Egyptology rests. This assumption is obviously in error because it is inconsistent with the facts, has no predictive capability, and is inconsistent with human nature. All of these things can be learned from observation and then confirmed by further observation. I specifically mentioned one means of confirming the size of the earth by how much things appear to dip below the horizon due to distance. This is hardly rocket science and there's no reason to believe cavemen were stupid. Bees describe to the community the distance and direction to food so why would man with a complicated language not be able to do the same? Obviously they had sort of measures for both long and short distances so they could communicate. To claim otherwise is to suggest that language and human intelligence didn't exist because they were cavemen. Initially these concepts would have been "primitive" such as "a day's walk" to describe long distances and they would observe that in a day's walk a mountain receded the width of a river below the horizon. We might see this as highly primitive and believe it doesn't represent real knowledge but we are wrong. We believe this because we misapprend the nature of knowledge itself. The caveman could use all his knowledge simultaneously because he understood both the metaphysics and the individual facts themselves. He'd know things like a smoke signal or a reflection from a distant base camp would be affected by various condition including the curvature of the earth. People now simply don't and can't think in such terms. As far as tides showing the distance to the moon all they needed was the concept of gravity (tefnut) and its diminuation over distance. The highest tide is always on the side facing the moon and the second highest tide is on the side away from the moon. The difference in height of these two tides gives an estimate to the moon in all locations on earth (though some can be a little confounding to to the movement of the water). The high tide in Egypt was 4" if memory serves. If cavemen had tried to use shamanism and superstition to understand their world we wouldn't be here because they'd have succombed to faster predators, disease, poisons, and the myriad dangers waiting in a world that lacked highways and hospitals. Logically each tribe, band, group, or gang that tried to live by magic would wither and die and the world would naturally be polpulated by those that used observation and common sense to understand and manipulate their world. Logically this is just a form of survival of the fittest which works even better for social animals like humans. It was cavemen and pre-civilized people who invented agriculture and gave rise to the cities. Cities did not rise like termite mounds because mans' needs are so much more complex and diverse. My fields of expertise lie far outside of solar phenomena and the size of Venus. There are other possibilities for ways to discover the speed of light but I think they would all require fast communication which could not have existed until 8000 years ago. As a child Ibelieve I could see Venus' disc when it was aligned with the sun properly. I included it parenthetically just to help direct readers to see that there is a great deal of observation and shortcuts to obtaining knowledge. If Venus behaved as a planet and appeared as a disc it would suggest each of the planets were discs despite the inability to see it. Who was it, Yogi Berra who said that there's a lot you can see if you just look. I would say that there is much more you can see if you observe. I believe in twenty years it will be the common assumption that the ancients must have been scientists. But then, I expect this new assumption to start yielding actualm evidence pretty quickly because this is the nature of proper theor; it makes predictions. This is the nature of being human; it's far easier to see what you're looking for than what you aren't. Let me turn your question around on you; what evidence do you have that the ancients were so ignorant. Does the lack of books and nuclear reactors necessarily mean that the people of the day weren't scientists?