The Tower of Babel

self | 04/21/02 | self

[medved]

FYI

[tictoc]

A very entertaining read.

I don't know if this stuff is totally off the wall or if there is a grain of truth there.

However, a thought just entered my mind [hey! when did I declare an open-door policy to these shiftless vagabonds anyway!], and that is that there may be more to the Islam/West divide than we think.

We in the West are accustomed to a highly individualistic way of living, and thinking. Most of the time, we don't give it too much thought, but actually it is anything but simple and easy. If we look back at childhood and adolescence, there is a great deal of pain and struggle involved, which comes from learning that we have to stand on our own two feet and "make up our own mind", neither daddy or mommy or anyone else can relieve us of this burden.

In most parts of the world, the group is far more important than the individual. Like Linus holding on to his comfort blanket, people in the Islamic world yearn for that which is old and therefore safe. They cherish community, "groupthink" and rote learning, and abhor the loneliness and confusion that comes from having to think for yourself.

I'm not sure how much validity there is to what I just wrote, probably I am guilty of stereotyping. However, it might be risky to assume that "deep down, they are just like us". Your post serves the purpose of challenging notions that we take for granted about how we think and how identity is formed.

Sorry for thread drift and for clumsy expression!

[medved]

One thing you can say about Islam is that it is based upon a belief that there is such a thing as prophecy in our own age, i.e. our own world age, the last 2500 years or so and, as my little study above tends to indicate, such is not the case.

[medved]

FYI

[Physicist]

Recommended reading: Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. In this novel, it is revealed that consciousness is an operating system that runs on top of the brain's machine language, which is ancient Sumerian. It was bootstrapped (at the Babel/Infocalypse) by the Sumerian god Enki, who in reality was a neurolinguistic programmer. This works well until the 21st century, when somebody designs the "Snow Crash" virus, which crashes the operating system and makes the bicameral mind available for nam-shub programming, now deliverable by the mass media...

[Doc On The Bay]

'Tho NOT a "Prophet," I predict that Modern Islam will Implode by trying to duplicate the acheivements of Western Thought while retaining the constraints of Medieval Islamic "thought Structure!!"

Doc

[medved]

To my thinking this is the most interesting result from catastrophism studies. I mean, if ancient literature was all about people sitting around poverty stricken feeling sorry for themselves, then I'd have a hard time getting interested in it no matter how intriquing people like Velikovsky or David Talbott might make any of it sound, but that's not the way it is. Antique literature generally claims that the antediluvians were better off than we are, and that HAS to be interesting; any reasonable person would want to know why.

[gore3000]

This is totally fascinating and has some good points about the electrostatic mind. It certainly is original. So basically you would say that all languages are fairly new say 4-6,000 years old?

[medved]

Possibly more like 3500 years old. Again, my money is on Heinsohn and Sweeney in the questions of chronology.

Spoken languages of the kind we now use are no older than that in my view. Prior to the flood, communication would have been telepathic, although a person using that system could easily have had many of the same kinds of experiences we do.

The human brain is good at rerouting data paths; for instance, blind people "reading" braile with their fingers apparently use many of the same brain areas which sighted people use for vision. A similar rerouting appears to have taken place in going from the antediluvian system to our present system of spoken speech.

[medved]

BTW, I assume you can see what a kicker this one would be for an evolutionist to try to explain?

[cebadams]

Does the theory of evolution apply to language? Is there any information explaning how a language develops or the length of time it takes to even be called a language?

Interesting -- but I don't know that much about language development.

[Pietro]

bump for later

[Psalm 73]

Interesting read.
I guess Edgar Cayce was a true throwback, big time.
I believe that The Bible is the unerring Word of God, but within that framework there is room for a lot of interesting theories.
The Bible also may be more of a true history book than many secularists would like to believe.

[Tribune7]

bump for later

[medved]

I don't know enough about Cayce to have an opinion. David Berkowicz (Son Of Sam) really was a true throwback however. The problem is that the thing no longer works on our planet; no telling what you'd be hearing and we humans no longer have the ability to discern what would be real, what static, what coming to us with bad intentions.... The thing which makes the whole phenomenon dangerous is the basic question of how to ignore or disobey a voice which is inside your head, which you have no way to get away from. If you've ever studied other languages you might have noticed that the words for "hear" and "obey" are close to the same word in many languages, like sluchats/slushatcya/poshlushno etc. in Russian. That's primordial, as are also formulations like "I hear and obey" etc.

[jlogajan]

You pinged me for a medved rant? :-)

I know, I know, I'll be accused of closing my eyes to his great truths -- but ya gotta draw the line somewhere.