Tuesday, January 24, 2012

where did religion come from?

SSRC | I start with Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion in his “Religion as a Cultural System,” which I should give in my abbreviated version to clarify what I mean and don’t mean by religion: “Religion is a system of symbols which, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations that make sense in terms of an idea of a general order of existence.” I should point out that neither Cliff nor I use the terms gods or God. What Geertz meant by a cultural system is very dependent on his reading of Alfred Schutz, particularly his paper on multiple realities or multiple worlds, terms which Schutz took from William James. Besides what Schutz called the paramount reality, the world of daily life, what Weber called “the everyday,” Schutz distinguished the world of science, the world of religion, and the world of art.

After describing what kind of multiple reality religion is, I wanted to look at the major forms of religious representation, the ways in which people engage in religious action and religious thought. Here I turned to the field of child development, not to look at the ways in which children become religious, though some have worked on that, but to look at the way infants and then children acquire the various capacities to relate to the world. Here was another big field to master, but one in which I have long been interested—especially the work of Jerome Bruner, one of my teachers in graduate school, who is the most important cultural psychologist still living and whose categories for the cognitive development of the child turned out to be remarkably relevant for my purposes. Bruner, himself adapting ideas from Piaget, sees the child as moving from enactive to symbolic to conceptual representations. I prefaced these with the idea of unitive events rooted in the original unity of mother and child but emerging later as religious experiences, usefully described by Alison Gopnik of UC Berkeley’s psychology department in her recent book The Philosophical Baby. So Piaget, Bruner, and Gopnik were my anchors but I looked at a lot of other things as well, particularly the work that links cognitive development in human children with comparable development in the great apes and other mammals.

The major stages of ontogeny turn out to parallel the major stages of phylogeny as described by Merlin Donald in Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Donald prefaces his three stages by referring to episodic culture which we share with other higher mammals and that I see as analogous to unitive events in ontogeny.

I should note that in both Bruner and Donald stages are never left behind, but are reconfigured in new contexts when subsequent stages emerge, leading to my general rule that “nothing is ever lost,” by which I don’t mean cultural content which is all too easily lost (most of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, for example) but the cultural capacities themselves, which never lose their essential and indispensible nature. Donald’s three stages are mimetic, mythic, and theoretic, paralleling Bruner’s enactive, symbolic, and conceptual.

I want to describe what Merlin Donald means by mimetic culture because it makes intelligible what happened during a long period of human evolution, most likely the period between the appearance of Homo erectus, 1.8 million years ago, and the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens, during the last two or three hundred thousand years. Mimetic culture involves a kind of bodily communication more elaborate than anything comparable among the other great apes, lacking language but probably involving spoken or sung communication, what some evolutionary musicologists call musilanguage. Mimetic communication almost certainly led to ritual, though as yet without myth, which requires language capacities that were lacking.

In modeling the society itself as well as its constituent roles, mimetic culture provided the necessary resources for moving beyond the rather anarchic chimpanzee band to a larger group capable of controlling in-group aggression such that pair bonding and same-sex solidarity in various contexts could result. In-group solidarity did not mean these mimetic-culture based societies were peaceful. There is every reason to believe that they were not, that there was endemic conflict between groups and probably in-group aggression was only relatively successfully controlled.

The limitations of mimetic culture are evident. Donald writes:

Mimesis is thus a much more limited form of representation than symbolic language; it is slow moving, ambiguous, and very restricted in its subject matter. Episodic event registration continues to serve as the raw material of higher cognition in mimetic culture, but rather than serving as the peak of the cognitive hierarchy, it performs a subsidiary role. The highest level of processing in the mimetically skilled brain is no longer the analysis and breakdown of perceptual events; it is the modeling of these events in self-initiated motor acts. The consequence, on a larger scale, was a culture that could model its episodic predecessors.

It is well to remember that we humans are never very far from basic mammalian episodic consciousness, the awareness of the event we are in. Mimetic culture is an event about an event. Narrative, which is at the heart of linguistic culture is basically an account of a string of events, organized hierarchically into larger event units. But the moment when our predecessors first stepped outside episodic consciousness, looked at it and what was before, around, and would be after it, was a historic moment of the highest possible importance. Other higher mammals, although they are social, are more tightly locked each in their own consciousness. They are, as Donald says, almost solipsists. But humans, once mimetic culture had evolved, could participate in—could share—the contents of other minds. We could learn, be taught, and did not have to discover almost everything for ourselves. Mimetic culture was limited and conservative; it lacked the potential for explosive growth that language would make possible. But it was the indispensable step without which language would never have evolved.

85 comments:

Big Don said...

You can boil down all this fancy language to a simple one-word explanation: **FEAR**...

Dale Asberry said...

Fear is the motivator, the force behind, never the mechanism -- even in the fight/flight reflex.

CNu said...

lol, it is beyond dispute that "fear" is the only explanation accessible to certain levels of consciousness. Moreover, that fear accounts for the overwhelming majority of "vitiating" movements given voice by those self-same consciousnesses...,

Dale Asberry said...

The First Man is handicapped indeed regardless of any great intellect.

CNu said...

What means "First Man"?

As regards this "fear" and "handicap" - there are of course alternative accounts which suggest otherwise http://www.organelle.org/

Dale Asberry said...

The man living within his base nature, the animal machine. No amount of intellectual capability or potential can lift that man. That is the handicap. The intellect is there but inaccessible.

As for the Organelle link, that's exactly my point.

nanakwame said...

Faith more than Fear for consciousnesses folks, this is the most important question of the day - not why we created rituals which have no real meaning or arbitrary meaning: 

I will make one comment about these kinds of arguments which
seems to me to somehow have eluded everyone. When people make these
probabilistic equations, like the Drake Equation, which you're familiar with --
they introduce variables for the frequency of earth-like planets, for the
evolution of life on those planets, and so on. The question remains as to how
often, after life evolves, you'll have intelligent life capable of making
technology. What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the
billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to
the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is
really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much
evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves,
human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we
have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is
striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't
matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were,
evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no
empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on
another planet would lead to technological intelligence. There is just too much
we don't know.http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/what-happened-before-the-big-bang-the-new-philosophy-of-cosmology/251608/A tanka for Big Don who CNu says he and I have a same habit:Unconsciousness/Propagating mother-lodes/Poet’s Cauldron/Consciousness etches -/Bright Moments Bright Moments…

Dale Asberry said...

If you were to stumble upon a truffle in the forest, what percentage of that fruit comprises the makeup of the whole mushroom?

John Kurman said...

I have no problem with Fear. Fear and I are great friends. He often counsels me, and I generally ignore his advice. It works out about 50% of the time, which explains all the scars...

nomad said...

Indeed. 
technological intelligence might not be ultimate goal of evolution, but an unfortunate and destructive by product. Indications are that the planet would be a better place for its other inhabitants if it wasn't for the killer ape.

CNu said...

I'm gonna go out on an oak limb and guess about the same percentage as the glans comprises of the buckle of Isis overall!

nomad said...

Speaking of  technological intelligence,  did it really take a couple hundred thousand years?500,000 - 80,000 BC:  Homo sapiens came on the scene. I'm just going to round that off to a nice round figure. When the margin of error is 400,000 years, I'm bound to be in the ballpark. I'm going to use the conservative milepost of 100,000 years. Homo sapiens evolved 100,000 years ago. Well, 102,000 years ago. 100,000 BC. That means that man had evolved at that time essentially the same intelligence quotient he has today. Prehistoric homo sapiens had the same capacity to learn as modern man. And yet, for at least 50,000 years they showed no sign of intellectual development. Then, suddenly, in anthropological terms, around 30,000 BC homo sapiens around the globe began leaving evidence of art and through that art evidence of having achieved higher levels of thought. The genesis of human civilization, some  60,000 years after the humans themselves. And even at that point civilization was in it's infancy. There would be no advanced technology for another 40,000 years. 
        Foraging Societies: 30,000 to 8,000 BC

        Settled Agricultural Societies:10,000 to 3,500 BC

        Primary Urban Societies: From 3500 BC

        River Valley Empires From 3200 BC to AD 200In fact, most of man's technological progress has taken place in the second half of the very last thousand years.What could have been the hold up?

CNu said...

There is of course a liminal current underlying the juxtiposition of today's two posts. That current would be argoetic\goetic\gothic and calls into the question the origins of religion as we know it today as a response born of fear rather than as a highly advanced legacy handed down to and rendered degenerate through the stumblings and fumblings of ordinary consciousness vitiated by quotidian motives over a lengthy period of time http://www.hermes-press.com/PT_disclose.htm

Dale Asberry said...

Bingo!

CNu said...

What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value.

We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true.

rotflmbao...,

Nana, you and Big Don are the two single-most unselfconscious poster children for the fallacy of foregone conclusions I've ever encountered   http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~cristian/i2rcs/i2rcs_docs/logic.htm

Dale Asberry said...

Liminal crosscurrents with the link you provided -> Amazon.com recommended reading -> Aldous Huxley <- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdzepK-LVtU (came across this morning from another riginter)

Dale Asberry said...

I never follow those Amazon recommended reading ads. Huh.

Dale Asberry said...

Wait a sec, that thumbnail is an elephant head

nomad said...

Yeah, I'm trying to come to terms with the timeline. 400,000 years, 200,000 years, 80,000 years. 75,000 years. That's why I chose the conservative estimate. Any way you look at it, it's a long long time. Unless homo sapiens were less capable of learning then than we are now, why did it take 60,000 years for them to differentiate themselves, intellectually from the other hominids? That's a long time to be foraging like apes. So, setting aside the questionable timeline, I'm still asking, how does one account for this immense expanse of time with no intellectual progress? Man only begins technological sophistication after approx 100,000 years after he arrives on the scene. Give or take a few hundred thousand years. Are we to assume that these humans went 400,000 years (or my conservative figure 60,000 years) without discovering fire or how to cook food?

Tom said...

"What could have been the hold up?"

Yeah, I've been stuck on that question for decades.  (And, Was there even a hold up, or have we misunderstood even that?)

nomad said...

We're dumber than chimpanzees. Apparently it took us 60,000 years to learn to use tools.

Dale Asberry said...

This assumes that humans 'evolved' on the plains in Africa. There are other, very likely evolutional possibilities that would lead to lost fossils and artifacts. Think along the lines of other mammals that: can intentionally hold their breath, have signficantly large brains. Also consider how such an environment could lead to exponential (or faster) increases in cognition.

nomad said...

Thx, CNu. Exactly what I'm looking for.
 http://19000years.blogspot.com...

Which is more absurd, 400,000-60,000 years of humans forging like apes or extraterrestrial visitation? No, I'm not necessarily offering the latter as an explanation. Just saying that the latter is more believable.

CNu said...

lol, Mr. Whitley Nomad Strieber - my man...,

Something you may want to consider as a moderating influence is that language use and writing comprise the basis for human knowledge accumulation and transmission and that languages, scripts, and peoples are a whole lot more fragile than than we routinely imagine.

Think merely of today's posts and the utter inscrutability of high Egyptian hieroglyphics. No one knows with anything even remotely approaching certainty the meaning of those scripts. For all intents and purposes that's a dead language and its knowledge and technology is utterly lost to modern decipherment.

Civilizations rise and fall like clockwork to natural and more often man-made disaster, and when they fall, often they fall so hard there's no recovery to be had of whatever high accomplishments they achieved.

CNu said...

No hold up. Rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall - and you can easily see the evidence of that all around, it's just that we don't reckon with the severity and permanence of the falls.

Tom said...

So the water ape thing?  That might explain the http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2012/01/gut-check-for-many-ailments.html exponential (or faster) increase in blubber too.

Tom said...

I think one problem with constructing the timeline is just what gets preserved.   We have cave paintings that are 30,000 years old (or whatever it is) because caves  are good for preserving that kind of art.   We don't have buildings from that time, but a good enough reason is you can't keep them intact.  (Plus a kind of thought-police thing, if you talk about stone buildings from 30,000 BC you're kooky.)    So we picture tehse people squatting in caves and making these great paintings about their daily lives, which consisted (obviously) of running up naked to bison and wrestling with them.  Maybe we're not quite on the money there,,,

Tom said...

Well, also, we are embroiled in a controversy here about our IQ (and so forth) right now.  "We" make damn good tools right now, just as soon as we're old enough to buy them at Home Depot.  But if they dropped off a half dozen of us in the woods tonight, with just our fingernails, how good would our tools be?  Get us through the winter?

nomad said...

Not following you there. I understand the rise and fall part. We've seen that in this epoch: the last 30,000 years. But where's the evidence of this cycle in the 60,000 plus that preceded it?

There indeed seems to be an enormous hold up. Let's look into the archives of Kang and Kodos shall we?

30.000 years ago Kang and Kodos, from a galaxy far far away, were looking for suitable inhabitable planets to mine. They considered earth but the creatures there were insufficiently developed to be used to do the necessary work. There was this one hominid, however with superior manual dexterity, but, alas, dumb as toasts. The modification of a few chromosomes and -bingo bango- just as man was able to evolve wolf into dog- this homo-sapien,  who had for 60.000 years been foraging just like the rest of the apes, became a cognitive creature.

They would have chosen the dolphins, but alas, they had no hands.

nomad said...

That's another thing that has puzzled me. Lascaux cave paintings. They are dated to about 17,000 BCE (give or take a few centuries). 
The most famous section of the cave is The Great Hall of the Bulls where bulls, equines and stags are depicted. The four black bulls, oraurochs, are the dominant figures among the 36 animals represented here. One of the bulls is 17 feet (5.2 m) long — the largest animal discovered so far in cave art. Additionally, the bulls appear to be in motion.[10]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux
Much of the things learned in school are strange. There are unanswered questions, which never get addressed. Such is the case, for me, with the Lascaux cave art.You see, the thing I have never understood about the Lascaux cave art is not just the breathtaking monumentality of the paintings but the idea that it was apparently done in the dark; or severely limited light, presumably from torches, at best. Chronologically speaking, it is the first great mystery of art history. How does one paint a 17 foot long bull on the wall of a cave in the dark?

Tom said...

And so BD puts teh dumbness on teh Other and has done with it.  But at least he does keep fresh in our minds the Dumbness Problem.

CNu said...

How many people do you know of who could build a computer from scratch starting with nothing more than raw materials?

Dale Asberry said...

There is no controversy. IQ is nonsense. Counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin...

CNu said...

You're still operating from a one-dimensional model of human development. It's clear from the historical epoch that advancement is punctuated by quite a few complex conditions, and that's merely advancement within a group rising to the level of differentiated hunting/gathering. To get to differentiated agriculture is something else altogether again, and then after that, to get to advancing technology etc..., you need substantial cross-cultural pollination whether through trade or conflict.

Now, punctuate all of that with periodic die-offs, and the probability of continuous development is pretty slight. No need for the unsubstatiated make-believe of Kang and Kodos to have anything whatsoever to do with it.

CNu said...

IQ measured as a cluster of purely cultural competencies supposedly rooted in purely genetic properties is a priori ridiculous. In due time, however, there will emerge valid objective measures of biocognitive potentials.

Tom said...

CNu -- Well... I'm pretty sure I'm really talking about something, but not so sure just what exactly it is.  My example is bad, obviously, because all we need for Nomad's Paradox*  is the ability to develop pretty damn good tools over say 1,000 years, 50 generations.

*Does it already have another name?  It's a lot like the Fermi Paradox, but limited to our own prehistory.

----Dale -- On nonsensicality of IQ ... I don't take such an extreme position.  I think some people really are smarter.   I think so.  

Dale Asberry said...

Lol, of course I jumped to the conclusion without the reasoning...

As for objective measures of biocognitive potentials... maybe not. Environment -- lifestyle and epigenetic traits -- play such a significant role they may not be able to factor all the possible influences.

CNu said...

lol, some people are clearly smarter than others.

Some people are vastly more conscious than others.

What's in question is whether intellect and awareness are genetically heritable traits - as opposed say - to the fortuitous operation of bookish parents with sky-high performance expectations or some benign fungus conducing to a thick yellowish toenail...,

As for Nomad's Paradox, I don't think you can site a single example of a group that developed good tools on its own over a mere 50 generations. Matter fact, I can think of a dozen groups that have lived in comparative isolation that haven't developed good tools in the course of 500 generations.

Dale Asberry said...

Which means something else is going on for those cognitive leaps...

Big Don said...

OK. The mechanism is  **Wishful_Thinking**

Dale Asberry said...

Lol, of which you are a poster child for!

CNu said...

argoetic = ergotic

How deeply buried in our own culture is that little kernel of truth?

John Kurman said...

Tom, One argument for our brains shrinking since Paleolithic times is that we don't have to make tools from scratch anymore. Being a generalist is good, being able to figure out a workaround is good - up to a point. But I suspect it can only take you so far. As is pointed out, how many people can build a computer from scratch? Wrong question. How many people does it take to support the web of technology allows for the making of computers? A hundred million one-task specialists? A million hundred-task specialists? The Neolithic cultural package has it's advantages too.

Dale Asberry said...

An argument about the brain 'shrinkage' that I think likely is the change of brain structure from smooth to folded. Surface area is far more important than volume.

nomad said...

I dunno. Seems like you're projecting the developments of this epoch onto earlier ages. Again what evidence is there that the  same applied prior to 30,000 BC? What I'm saying is that that period is a complete void as for as our understanding of what took place in human prehistory. No evidence of any cognitive or technological development at all. 

John Kurman said...

The problem there is brain casts of skulls don't show any reduction of convolutions. Obviously we are looking at multiple factors, protein being a big one. Brains looove protein and fat. A diet of mush vs. mammoth? It just don't cut it. But then again, a Paleolithic Macgyver faces more challenges than a Neolithic stoop labor specialist, so...

Nana Kwame Anthony said...

My genome writes that an African came out of North Africa 30k ago, is that misleading?

nanakwame said...

Please take this connection out - it just gave me a hard time to return to my blog page from twitter. this is why the internet sync is just terrible

nanakwame said...

http://neuroself.com/2012/01/24/why-panpsychism-is-not-anti-scientific-a-logical-argument/

CNu said...

You wish to propose a Nana Turing Test we can apply to establish this belief in the absence of any evidence?

nanakwame said...

Please  Doc spare us - he even mention John Kurman's man, who was a racist but quite smart, yes we are going back to the 1800's on a lot of questions, vulgar materialism is quite a leg of vulgar consumption. 

http://neuroself.com/2012/01/21/karl-pearson-1898-the-grammar-of-science/ 

CNu said...

lol, help me out here Nana.

Who is John Kurman's smart, racist man?

More importantly, how in the world does this "mention" recommend anything to me - in what I will otherwise be compelled to catalog as just the latest addition to your serial foregone-conclusion collection.

That foregone-conclusion business, with exhortations to "imagine, feel, and believe", is reaching damn-near epidemic proportions today...,

Cadeveo said...

That Perennialist/cymatics stuff sounds a whole lot like what G.I. Gurdjieff was talking about in Russia in the 19teens and in France and America in the 30's and 40's.  He didn't use the term "Perrenial art" but "objective art," but the concept is exactly the same.  Mighty interesting stuff there... The constant cycle of rises and epic falls/fails of civilizations is also something that ol' Russo-Armenian wiseacre described over and over in "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson."  Mayhaps the concept of Eternal Recurrence that Ouspenksy, Nietzsche, and Pythagoras them (and some Egyptian cats he cribbed it from before that) is also alluding to the same thing.

nanakwame said...

Exactly - Aye’ ni rere -Life is eternal (Yoruba) ...when we stop seeing life as being centered around the human species (a development of capitalist materialism and its successes)  we  return to the stories begot in ancient times and those who studied at the feet of Masters like Gurdjieff. Matter/Mind (Info) has always been here and one can not exist w/o the other, with the permanence of death/life, no matter the genesis or form. Physicist today are returning to  terms and notions that were used by ancient thinkers, for we haven't produced a new trope yet for what we now "see" or proved in our experiments, yet; it is quite exciting...

http://www.livescience.com/18117-religion-happiness-countries.html 

Dale Asberry said...

Which physicists? What terms and notions?

nanakwame said...

You are the bright one, not keeping up? Why even if I don't agree with everything this man's web page was a sweet serendipity. Good for my aging brain and its been along time since I re-read some good old philosophy of science...http://neuroself.com/ 


Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science
and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

Carl Sagan...Everything existing in the universe is the fruit
of chance and necessity.


Democritus

Dale Asberry said...

On the contrary, I am unaware of any physicist taking up 'ancient notions'. I'm simply asking for clarification so that I can investigate. However, you haven't shown anything to support your notions. If you're going to make vague statements, you should expect me to ask you to clarify what you mean.

nomad said...

Now, concerning these periodic dieoffs. Does the next age of cognitive development have to begin from scratch? You're talking about die-offs but you seem to be suggesting a cumulative intellectual development over that 400,000-100,000 year period.
It obviously takes more than 50 generations for the kind of technological developments like the ones we have today to develop, but come on. 50 generations is a short period of time. Less than 5000 years.  Once cognitive skills have begun we've seen, in our own case, according to conventional scholarship. it can happen within 30,000 years. Do you think in homo-sapiens 400,000 - 80,000 years on this earth that it has only happened once? 

And though my Kang Kodos analogy may be fanciful, there is ample evidence of extraterrestrial presence upon this planet. If and how they have interacted with us is debatable. The scenario I outlined is at least as believable as man remaining in a primitive precognitive  state of existence for 400.000 years .

nanakwame said...

A gem from the site
http://neuroself.com/2012/01/25/the-connectome-hits-the-wsj/ 

CNu said...

 ‘Everything in the universe is material, and for that very reason Ultimate Understanding is more materialist than materialism’? G.I. Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff parle à ses élèves, Paris, Stock/Monde ouvert, 1980, p. 35 http://www.gurdjieff.org/nicolescu3.htm

Dale Asberry said...

That's neuroscience, not physics.

CNu said...

As far as I know, the indigenous peoples of Australia show the only continuous/unpunctuated cognitive and linguistic development over a greatly extended period of time. Ken Hale could've explained for you the most phenomenal cognitive and cultural constructs evident among these peoples, but the one that stands out in my recollection is that in general individuals are fluent in a few dozen languages (not merely dialects) that they play language and mnemonic games found nowhere else in the world among these humans, and, that they never lose their language acquisition faculty (something that seems to dry up after about the age of 7-8 in humans in the "developed" world - with the exception of rare geniuses of which Dr. Hale was an example.

Other than the emergence of fungi out of nowhere 450 million years ago, I'm not aware of a single credible piece of evidence of extraterrestrial presence that cannot more simply be accounted for as the result of risen and fallen human activity over a greatly extended timeframe.

If you've got links you'd like to share, I'd be delighted to see what it is that's convinced you otherwise.

CNu said...

I'm about 99.999% certain you just now hit the "Penrose limit" of what Nana actually knows and can speak to. From here on out, it's going to be a rapidly enlarging cloud of increasingly loose fecal matter.  http://youtu.be/Jhjb4P_jnKk

nomad said...

Got plenty. 
http://nomad-spacebook.blogspot.com/

nomad said...

Oops. Try this one: 
http://nomad-spacebook.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-12-25T13:51:00-06:00&max-results=7

nomad said...

Oops. Try this one: 
http://nomad-spacebook.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-12-25T13:51:00-06:00&max-results=7

CNu said...

Naw dood, stop playing/holding out.

Show me something specific that will absolutely defy my capacity to explain it away.

chemtrails and indiscernable telescopic/photographic artifacts don't quite make the grade.

nomad said...

Nope. That's it. That's as bout as much evidence as there is to support more conventional "knowledge".  Of course all witnesses to UFO phenomena are hoaxers; including astronauts and Russian fighter pilots. I don't see you splaining nothing away. BTW, the chemtrail phenom is a completely different issue. That's why I said "oops".  I meant to direct you to the UFO stuff. That's more about mass mind control than about UFOs. The cigar shaped UFO is the type I saw myself. And I guess seeing it yourself will be the only thing that would convince you that the rubes (astronauts, fighter pilots and the like) ain't lyin'.

nomad said...

Nope. That's it. That's as bout as much evidence as there is to support more conventional "knowledge".  Of course all witnesses to UFO phenomena are hoaxers; including astronauts and Russian fighter pilots. I don't see you splaining nothing away. BTW, the chemtrail phenom is a completely different issue. That's why I said "oops".  I meant to direct you to the UFO stuff. That's more about mass mind control than about UFOs. The cigar shaped UFO is the type I saw myself. And I guess seeing it yourself will be the only thing that would convince you that the rubes (astronauts, fighter pilots and the like) ain't lyin'.

nanakwame said...

That is a 1800 argument on the walls place between academic subjects, the material, empirical science has blow everything out of the water. When these institutions can now say that we can show 9 Dimension to 1 Time, then we entering "metaphysics" conversation for many.
I you and Craig should know by now that I enjoy conservation, I believe it to be human - Back to the "watery void" - "Supersymmety" for singularity is weak really

I can't pronounce words well or remember terms O' /Turing I give thanks to, but; concepts s_t and with Google would you like to dance? Cosmology is the first, the longing to return to the womb. 0 1 3 then 1000.

Dale Asberry said...

And here's the wet, loose fecal material. I tried. :-/

nanakwame said...

"The Hindu cosmology and timeline is the closest to modern scientific timelines and even more which might indicate that the Big Bang is not the beginning of everything but just the start of the present cycle preceded by an infinite number of universes and to be followed by another infinite number of universes. It also includes an infinite number of universes at one given time." wiki Just a fact not a a define reality or self.Did you notice how the Japanese made food out of "fecal".

Dale Asberry said...

Lol, you're gonna dehydrate.

CNu said...

lol,

um..., Brah Nomad,

Does unidentified flying object equal extraterrestrial/exobiological?

If so, please explain how you know that the former equals the latter?

Thanks!

nomad said...

Does unidentified flying object equal extraterrestrial/exobiological entity? 
Either that or our secret government is light years ahead in technology than we are led to believe. I think ET is more likely.
Even if the ET are a branch of humanity from an earlier epoch. Perhaps, having destroyed and fled the planet once, they keep tabs on their descendants in  their former home. In other words, yes. I think they are ET. There is, of course, no way I can know. I just don't deny the evidence. The "vehicles" exist. I think our government knows and uses pejoration to hide this knowledge from the public: http://nomad-spacebook.blogspot.com/2010/11/pejoration-published-august-28-2010.html

CNu said...

You should assume that the government in its compartmentalized black projects is at least 40 years ahead of the very best technology that is commercially available, and, that there are developmental vectors that are completely obscured from public access.

The existence of thorium reactors, subterrenes, superconducting flywheels around major urban areas, ion-drive rocket propulsion etc..., are all tip of the iceberg of known and proven capabilities that have simply been taken "off the table".

To date, I see no reason whatsoever to equate UFO's with exobiological entities and exobio activity.

nomad said...

This is news to me. What kinds of flight potential does this technology have. Links? Much of what has been observed of UFO capabilities is beyond conventional rocket propulsion. What is ion-drive?
Again, a bit of occam's razor here. I find the gov being capable of this technology less believable than space aliens. Technology that can improve transportation by at least 1000 % and the gov is keeping it secret? Please. Human financial greed mitigates against that. And, anyway, we.re talking about technology a lot further advanced than 40 years beyond our own. Add a zero.

nomad said...

This is especially true when gov goes to war. I mean REAL war. Where stakes are highest. They pull out the stops. If they got atomic weapons, they gonna use 'em. That would apply to any other advanced technology they had, right? In WW II war planes were shadowed by an advanced "object" that each side thought was a secret development of the other side. Foo fighters. So, no. The govs got black projects for sure, but nothing this advanced. And even, ha!, if they do now, what gov was behind the foo fighters? Be they crafts or holograms they still would require technology beyond our capabilities at the time.

CNu said...

Ion Drive here http://johnkurman.blogspot.com/2012/01/space-is-place-continued.html

Do you know what the infamous and often ufologically misrepresented Nazi Bell's were?

Tom said...

What did you see?

nomad said...

It was 7 AM. About 5 years ago. I looked up and saw what appeared to me to be a jet liner. I didn't pay it much attention at first. Ive seen this sight countless times. But there seemed something odd about this one. I immediately realized that it was because it had no wings or tail. I watched it for three or four minutes till it disappeared over the horizon.

As I found out later indeed some UFOs sighted in the past have been described as similarly ("cigar") shaped.

CNu said...

Those rare but not entirely implausible airship encounters can be a little off-putting https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sugexp=lttmoc&tok=RT3dOCCluLQZSK9N9E3uVg&cp=16&gs_id=cc&xhr=t&q=military+airships&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&biw=1600&bih=771&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=YzojT4aNNMLm0QGKiKCwCA

nomad said...

Yeah, right. It must have been an airship. Why didn't I think of that. 

CNu said...

Given that you didn't describe any unconventional acceleration or other distinguishing aerobatic behavior - we're to conclude that your cigar shape that you mistook for an airliner is a large exobiological spacecraft capable of both interstellar travel/acceleration and moving around in a fairly dense atmosphere, as well?

btw - you never provided an answer for what you believe that perennially popular, nearly living-memory anomaly the Nazi Bell might have been?

nomad said...

Hey, I'm not an expert witness. So it doesn't matter what I think.  I think I'm runningout of space. But I'm not trying to convince you.I just saying that's partof what convinced me. I don't claim to be an expert witness. Challenge  the astronauts'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlkV1ybBnHI 

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