I believe that all people should be given the opportunity to see things the way they are. - Stanley Kubrick
I believe that all people should be given the opportunity to see things the way they are.
danielholter:afghanistanbananastand:
A small group of hunter/gatherers living in the Amazon rain forest is overturning some fundamental assumptions about the mind. Although linguists have long believed that counting and having words for numbers are basic, if not innate, to human cognition, the Pirahã people in Brazil have no words to express numerical concepts such as “one,” “two,” or “many.” “They don’t count and they have no number words,” says MIT cognitive scientist Edward Gibson, who headed a study published in the journal Cognition [pdf].
The researchers spent eight days in a Pirahã rain forest village conducting counting tests on adult members of the tribe. Sometimes the experimenter placed varying numbers of spools of thread on a table and asked the participant to perform a simple one-to-one task, such as laying down the same quantity of uninflated balloons. Other tasks required remembering how many spools had been placed inside a can.
On a related note : I just finished reading Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, about an evangelist who goes to live with the Pirahã people (to ostensibly save them/convert them), and it was quite fascinating, eyeopening, and remarkable. The author ends up appreciating their way of life, renouncing his faith and losing friends and family in the process.
This document was written for TV by Alan moore, as such it forms a good introductory passage.
Reality, at first glance, is a simple thing: the television speaking to you now is real. Your body sunk into that chair in the approach to midnight, a clock ticking at the threshold of awareness. All the endless detail of a solid and material world surrounding you. These things exist. They can be measured with a yardstick, a voltammeter, a weighing scale. These things are real. Then there’s the mind, half-focused on the TV, the settee, the clock. This ghostly knot of memory, idea and feeling that we call ourself also exists, though not within the measurable world our science may describe.
Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know. The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas.
Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored. Before the Age of Reason was announced, humanity had polished strategies for interacting with the world of the imaginary and invisible: complicated magic-systems; sprawling pantheons of gods and spirits, images and names with which we labelled powerful inner forces so that we might better understand them. Intellect, Emotion and Unconscious Thought were made divinities or demons so that we, like Faust, might better know them; deal with them; become them.
Ancient cultures did not worship idols. Their god-statues represented ideal states which, when meditated constantly upon, one might aspire to. Science proves there never was a mermaid, blue-skinned Krishna or a virgin birth in physical reality. Yet thought is real, and the domain of thought is the one place where gods inarguably ezdst, wielding tremendous power. If Aphrodite were a myth and Love only a concept, then would that negate the crimes and kindnesses and songs done in Love’s name? If Christ were only ever fiction, a divine Idea, would this invalidate the social change inspired by that idea, make holy wars less terrible, or human betterment less real, less sacred?
The world of ideas is in certain senses deeper, truer than reality; this solid television less significant than the Idea of television. Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map.
Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.
Code-switching is a term in linguistics referring to using more than one language or variety in conversation. Bilinguals, who can speak at least two languages, have the ability to use elements of both languages when conversing with another bilingual. Code-switching is the syntactically and phonologically appropriate use of multiple varieties.
