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Originally Posted by lemit
Don't trust the acid, trust me. It has happened. My own experience is that I don't know what has happened to me until long after. The rational, literate part of me rejects what the irrational part of me has experienced. But I know, in retrospect, that I have experienced something.
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Perhaps coming to grips with your experience in a literal way is the necessary process of gaining human consciousness.
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It's something beyond that. It's the circular, rambling, spinning argument that is being drawn into a vortex it knows exists but denies. It is what people do drugs to get, but they, like Jway has suggested, already have it inside them. It is at the same time sense and nonsense.
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I think Helen Keller had the potential for human consciousness, which was actuated by communication with her therapist. That could not have happened without employing a symbolic language with syntax.
btw: Why couldn't human consciousness be an extended phenotype, in the Dawkinsian sense, emerging with the invention of a symbolic language?
