Science Forums 2

[Boerseun]

Great thread, Pyro!

I suppose supporting the thesis could come from a more physical analogy; that of information storage.

We started with information hard-wired into our DNA. The information is there, but it's rather limited. But info stored in your DNA is more than sufficient to enable an organism to qualify as a 'living being'.

When the memory capacity of DNA became too restricted, brains evolved to supplement it. These brains do in fact make pattern recognition possible, Pavlov's Dog being a case in point. The Pavlovian response (which, although silly when a ringing bell is involved), does aid survival, but would be wholly impossible when your only tool is DNA. DNA must first code for a brain which would enable the Pavlovian response, but the DNA is not dynamic through the lifetime of the individual, although it will change over generations.

So when our brains became too restrictive, we invented another form of storage which our brains could understand, and which could be shared between individuals and across community borders. Heck, this medium could be shared across the ages! The written word! With this new 'brain addition' existing in the form of the Public Library (Using your reptile/mammalian/hominid onion-like brain-layer analogy, I guess the library would be the next layer). And we can only code into the library something that would be understood by our physical brains, otherwise the exercise would be futile. Thus, books are written in pure Linguistic Structures, otherwise our hominid brains won't 'get it'.

So, using another approach, I guess you may be right!

There's no 'Operating System' as such where our linguistic thoughts need to be translated into 'machine code' first before our bodies understand it. I think that our actual thoughts is the machine code itself!