Reddit reviews The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

I'll add my two cents since this is something I've put some thought into, and will point to some other works you can check out.

I'll go a step beyond McCarthy here by saying I'm a fan of Zapffe's idea that self-awareness might be a mistake, a evolutionary trap:

>Such a ‘feeling of cosmic panic’ is pivotal to every human mind. Indeed, the race appears destined to perish in so far as any effective preservation and continuation of life is ruled out when all of the individual’s attention and energy goes to endure, or relay, the catastrophic high tension within.

>The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by overevolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.

>In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.

I am very interested in the historical cases of feral children, and the reports of the attempts to re-integrate them after years away from other people. It seems there is a age past which the mind loses a certain plasticity of infancy and learning speech is no longer possible. Though of course the cases are rare and the reports often hobbled by the perceptions of their time, it is also of great interest to me that these children appear to stay at about the same general level of intelligence as the animals that raised them for the rest of their lives (if they were rescued after a certain developmental period). I wonder about the relationship between language and self-awareness and to what degree they depend upon each other. You could learn so much with just a handful of EXTREMELY UNETHICAL experiments.

Other fun notes:

Peter Watt's Blindsight is a recent sci-fi novel with aliens who work entirely "subconsciously" (without self-awareness) and are able to be much more efficient as a result.

People who speak languages with more colors are able to distingush more colors

There is a ton of interesting work out there that has been done about the ways that limited language can lead to limited thought, if you're interested.

I also recommend The Spell Of The Sensuous if this is interesting to you. One of my favorite books. Hopefully we can get to it in the book club some day.

No, but funnily enough you're the second person to ask that.

It's from here.

edit: Just realised you're both people.

Haha you are echoing my own thoughts and worldview that began with reading the PEAR, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research
experiments, onto Ayahuasca experiences, animism and shamanism and realising archetypes are an actual thing, then hefty doses of Jung, and the books of David Abram (Spell of the Sensous especially).

https://www.amazon.com/Spell-Sensuous-Perception-Language-More-Than-Human/dp/0679776397


Then on to the occult driven by this pondering over the role of language in shaping reality and the seeming power of words, symbols, sounds to alter... your perception of reality? Except sometimes they alter objective reality, and the psychological model of Spirits was shattered conclusively for me one night suddenly throwing a whole ecosystem of beings into the mix.

And now I am back where I started, pondering the role of the world of symbols, archetypes and spirits and hidden forces and the implications for, as the guys at Princeton named it, anomolous engineering.

This is the missing key. What humanity and science lacks in order to bring forth, as you say, the Golden Age, is what we today call the occult. It's like mainstream civilization is missing half the picture.

That means we need to apply science to the occult, and the occult to science. We already know that a experiment is affected by the experimenters expectations. We know that the cat is in limbo till the box is opened. We know the placebo effect is better then pretty much every drug at healing. We know that random number generators are affected by crowds. And statistics tell us weather is not behaving like normal on holidays. The mountain of evidence is tall enough and has been for decades.

Now we need theorists, both scientists and occultists to come up with the why, and a new class of engineers to figure out the how and the applications thereof.

As to the spirits, and their nature? Some might be natural universal forces, spontaneously birthed by every complex system you could think of, from stars to planets to animals to plants, to that bend in the brook with a rock that creates a bit of turbulence.

Some might be man made or indeed, once men and women. Some might be current or long dead terrestrials and extraterrestrials, some might be AI's the size of planets built by long gone aliens, some might be interdimensional visitors from each category above. There be multitudes.

As far as I am concerned the first non human contact happened tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago and is ongoing every day all around the world. The norm throughout human history was probably much more contact then we have today. That might be a problem.

https://www.amazon.com/Spell-Sensuous-Perception-Language-More-Than-Human/dp/0679776397

favorite non-fiction book, warped my perception of the world for weeks after reading it

You would probably really enjoy reading this book - http://www.amazon.com/The-Spell-Sensuous-Perception-More-Than-Human/dp/0679776397

The Spell of the Sensuous?

Alan Watts was an extraordinary human. Definitely one of the most insightful people in the English-speaking world. I can't recommend him highly enough.

I also strongly suggest David Abram. His major work is The Spell of the Sensuous. Watts points out that we've mistaken our map for the territory. Abram begins to teach us how to put the map down.