Mental Fossils

Reply to Agent Smith Quoting Agent Smith

our minds and those of other animals are the right places to look for what I call mental fossils. If we explore the mindscape and carry out a dig, I'm 99% certain we'll find dinosaur minds buried under layers of thoughts deposited over aeons of mental evolution.

If you’re looking for living fossils, I’d start with the Republicans.

Reply to Agent Smith

I suppose in the viewpoint that a body contains two parts: its physical self and its mind, the mind is more or less regarded as something ethereal, unconstrained by the practicality of the world, which would seem to point as to how the mind eludes the palaeontologists. My question is, if the mind is ethereal, how can it coexist with the body?

Uh, oh. Sounds like this is Lounge material.

Sounds like the start of modern a sci fi premise. Indiana Jones learns to take psychotropic drugs in order to dig up mental fossils in an immaterial world. Gets chased by the psychedelic dinosaurs he is spying on.

Quoting Daniel Dennett, Julian Jaynes's software archeology

... this is software archeology, and software doesn’t leave much of a fossil record. Software, after all, is just
concepts. It is abstract and yet, of course, once it is embodied it has very real effects. So if you
want to find a record of major “software” changes in archeological history, what are you going to
have to look at? You are going to have to look at the “printouts,” but they are very indirect. You
are going to have to look at texts, and you are going to have to look at the pottery shards and
figurines as Jaynes does, because that is the only [...]
of course, maybe the traces are just gone, maybe
the “fossil record” is simply not good enough.

Jaynes’ idea is that for us to be the way we are now, there has to have been a revolution—
almost certainly not an organic revolution, but a software revolution—in the organization of our
information processing system, and that has to have come after language. That, I think, is an
absolutely wonderful idea, and if Jaynes is completely wrong in the details, that is a darn shame,
but something like what he proposes has to be right; and we can start looking around for better
modules to put in the place of the modules that he has already given us.

Quoting Joshs

If you’re looking for living fossils, I’d start with the Republicans.

But they're not likely to fund your fossil mind project. The Democrats will print up a dumpster full of money for you. :cool:

Quoting Joshs

If you’re looking for living fossils, I’d start with the Republicans.

Conservatives, old school, old fashioned: fossil minds?

Reptilian parts of our brain?

Quoting john27

My question is, if the mind is ethereal, how can it coexist with the body?

I wish I knew.

What I want to know is whether bits of our prehistoric minds can be recovered by exploring the human mental world. We could extract, study, and display them like we do with dinosaur skeletons/fossils.

Quoting Nils Loc

Uh, oh. Sounds like this is Lounge material.

Sounds like the start of modern a sci fi premise. Indiana Jones learns to take psychotropic drugs in order to dig up mental fossils in an immaterial world. Gets chased by the psychedelic dinosaurs he is spying on.

In my humble opinion, it's an idea that has merit. Paleontologists have been trying to piece together dinosaur behavior from fossils - trying to answer questions on how dinosaurs think - but, to repeat myself, they're looking in the wrong place (the physical world). Dinosaur minds should've left its imprints on our minds if not directly, indirectly via our mammalian ancestors who were coevals with dinosaurs (I read somewhere that psychologists found out babies/infants have a natural fear of snakes).

Reply to bongo fury :up:

Quoting Agent Smith

What I want to know is whether bits of our prehistoric minds can be recovered by exploring the human mental world. We could extract, study, and display them like we do with dinosaur skeletons/fossils.

That would be neat. I would probably start with exploring memory; can't get anymore time-travellely than that.

Quoting john27

That would be neat. I would probably start with exploring memory; can't get anymore time-travellely than that.

Yep! It would be fascinating to find out how dinosaurs might've left their mark on our minds; even more marvelous would be if we have a reptilian mind buried underneath all that we call mammalian or human thinking.

So how would mental fossils work if we were to describe the behavior of our living cousins, like orangutans or cats? How do we label which thoughts belong to which narrowing taxonomy of animal?
How could species memory tell me what a species does in absence of any physical knowledge/evidence of said species? The nightmare of matching dubious pseudo memories (dreams/visions) to their class of would be progenitors would be a puzzle of cosmic guesswork.

Dinosaurs probably felt satiated like we feel satiated. Getting a flesh wound probably hurt. Orgasm must've felt good. Are these dinosaur memories or my memories?

Reply to Nils Loc There's a lot of work that needs to be done. The devil is in the details. My intention is simply to open up a new branch of enquiry, a much needed one given how paleonetological efforts in understanding dinosaur minds have been so damned frustrating, working as they are with fossils (skeletal remains) only. It's hard to divine what a person was thinking from his corpse.