Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Storytelling and the Nature Egregore

The world of man is the world of lies mainly because language lies. Words, paragraphs, and entire books of words at best make a toy model world, or rather are illuminated by the toy model world in our brains.

Prior to the city and agriculture the inner toy model world WAS THE WORLD. The shared experience was the experience of nature and the world. Cro magnon man had a bigger brain than modern man.

The city expanded the world of man in terms of symbolic language and institutions and finally formal languages like mathematics, money, and computer languages allowed man to attempt to make a better toy model of the natural world, but it's still extremely low fidelity. Hierarchy and violence, especially institutional violence like Inquisitions or even the civil laws of the enlightenment world, are a mockery of natural law and the forces of nature like gravity or sunshine.

You can't get to that cro magnon understanding of the world via formal language models of reality, but that understanding is actually still in our minds. Is it possible to base language and culture on that type of understanding and have it expand in a similar vein as scientific knowledge? Alternatively, is it possible to remodulate scientific inquiry and the body of knowledge that method has accumulated into a mode of understanding that's based on nature rather than a symbolic version of nature?

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