schilling.klaus

no positivist-materialist approach will ever be able to understand myths,
as myths deal with the metaphysical

KlausSchilling

neilgodfrey

but the things we label 'metaphysical', as well as the concept 'metaphysical' itself, are inevitably products of our neurons . . . .

Clivedurdle

But indirect products - freedom evolves Dennett.

This link is of note,

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi...e/dennett.html

neilgodfrey

Yep, but indirect products have to live and be manufactured somewhere and somehow -- they may be illusions but they aren't immaterial ghosts, and if illusions they should be explicable. The brain's indirect products are still its products.

Dennett is a nice intro, or at least that's how I found his latest book. But a much richer experience in grasping what we think we might be learning about consciousness etc can be found by reading him beside Dawkins, Pinker, Davies, Greenfield, D'Aquili (in Zygon), Newberg, most recently (for me) Lewis-Williams, and probably some others I can't think of at the moment. Dennett unfortunately seems to couch a lot of his stuff in modifications that bend backwards in efforts to avoid offence to Americans.

andrewcriddle

The problem of a single explanation of myths is, according to Kirk, partly an issue of the very varied nature of the things we class as myths.

People who say myths are all about X tend to end up saying that some stories that most of us would call myths aren't really myths because they have nothing to do with X.

Andrew Criddle

judge

Which cultures lacked them?

Thanks

Solitary Man

The Roman concept of the afterlife, as well as the Jewish one, were both imports.

neilgodfrey

To take just one myth: the notion that one can travel, or that one's soul can travel, to the underground which is an abode of other spirits.

One possible neurological explanation for this begins with an exploration of the experiences of altered states of consciousness. These are naughty no-no's in our culture today, but have not always been so in human societies. Witness shamanism and the central place it and its cousin institutions have held in pre-modern societies. It's easy to let our cultural baggage underestimate how significant altered states of consciousness have been as common and natural -- even sometimes central -- human experiences.

The belief about the underground being a place of spirits to which we in some form can communicate or experience, can be explained as originating as an interpretation of the experiences commonly associated with trance -- experiences of feeling one's body descending through the ground, of hearing other voices and seeing other shapes (common shapes related to the structure of whatever are those parts at the back of our eyes) in the process. The details of interpretation will vary across time and cultures, but only within the limits of the "very real" experience which is common in primitive societies, and as witnessed in their art, even back to Paleolithic times.

Not everyone experiences such a trance naturally. But others do have enough experience to be persuaded of its reality. e.g. dreams. As late as Greek and Roman times we still read of mediums having trances in caves (the doors to that underworld) and the social importance of these people and the beliefs associated with them.

There will be different cultural interpretations of these sorts of experiences. But they'll be variant explanations of a common and natural human experience. No doubt different cultural interpretations will reflect specific social needs and experiences, but these various interpretations may well be rooted in a common psychoneurological phenomenon.

There's much more to than this to a neurological accounting of mythic thought of course. This is by way of just one illustration of what I meant by suggesting the possibility of a common explanation for myths.

schilling.klaus

that's a deception of materialists

Klaus Schilling

Solitary Man

I'll have to check for exact people's, but some tribes in either Amazon or Africa (I think the former) find the idea alien. I find the idea strange, too. Am I neurologically defunct then?