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Thu 18 Jan, 2007 07:59 am
Ego says, HOLD IT, TIME OUT!
The ego is our command center; it is the "internal gyroscope" and creator of time for the human. It controls the individual; especially it controls individual's response to the external environment. It keeps the individual independent from the environment by giving the individual time to think before acting. It is the device that other animal do not have and thus they instinctively respond immediately to the world.
The id is our animal self. It is the human without the ego control center. The id is reactive life and the ego changes that reactive life into delayed thoughtful life. The ego is also the timer that provides us with a sense of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. By doing so it makes us into philosophical beings conscious of our self as being separate from the ?'other' and placed in a river of time with a terminal point?-death. This time creation allows us to become creatures responding to symbolic reality that we alone create.
As a result of the id there is a "me" to which everything has a focus of being. The most important job the ego has is to control anxiety that paradoxically the ego has created. With a sense of time there comes a sense of termination and with this sense of death comes anxiety that the ego embraces and gives the "me" time to consider how not to have to encounter anxiety.
Evidence indicates that there is an "intrinsic symbolic process" is some primates. Such animals may be able to create in memory other events that are not presently going on. "But intrinsic symbolization is not enough. In order to become a social act, the symbol must be joined to some extrinsic mode; there must exist an external graphic mode to convey what the individual has to express
but it also shows how separate are the worlds we live in, unless we join our inner apprehensions to those of others by means of socially agreed symbols."
"What they needed for a true ego was a symbolic rallying point, a personal and social symbol?-an "I", in order to thoroughly unjumble himself from his world the animal must have a precise designation of himself. The "I", in a word, has to take shape linguistically
the self (or ego) is largely a verbal edifice
The ego thus builds up a world in which it can act with equanimity, largely by naming names." The primate may have a brain large enough for "me" but it must go a step further that requires linguistic ability that permits an "I" that can develop controlled symbols with "which to put some distance between him and immediate internal and external experience."
I conclude from this that many primates have the brain that is large enough to be human but in the process of evolution the biological apparatus that makes speech possible was the catalyst that led to the modern human species. The ability to emit more sophisticated sounds was the stepping stone to the evolution of wo/man. This ability to control the vocal sounds promoted the development of the human brain.
Ideas and quotes from "Birth and Death of Meaning"?-Ernest Becker
To say that there is no other animal with the sofisticated level of intelligence and communication skills is an assumption.
Evidence shows that some primates understand symbolic representation. The gorilla Amy is one, even though she's learned it from humans.
And research also shows that dolphins can understand and relate to symbols.
The only thing we can safely say is that there are no other species that retain "human" consiousness, but we cannot say for sure that there are no kinds of consciousness that are equal to that of humans in sophistication.
A quote from Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy: (just because it's a fun quote)
"It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."
Cyracuz
I would say it is perhaps a conjecture or theory but I would not say it is an assumption. As Popper tells us we can never prove a proposition to be true but we can only prove it to be false. If someone finds a primate that is capable of reading and discussing Hamlet with some coherence then certainly the conjecture would be proven false.
From wikipedia: (keyword "Koko (gorilla)" )
"Koko (born July 4, 1971, in San Francisco, California) is the name of a captive, acculturated gorilla trained by Dr. Francine 'Penny' Patterson and other scientists at Stanford University to allegedly communicate with more than 1,000 signs based on American Sign Language, and understand approximately 2,000 words of spoken English."
I saw a tv show about this. This gorilla had been taught the word for bracelet and the word for finger.
One day one of her trainers wasn't wearing her weddingband, and the gorilla remarked that it wasn't there. She combined the words bracelet and finger, into the word fingerbracelet.
More from wikipedia:
"However, Dr. Patterson has documented Koko inventing new signs to communicate novel thoughts. For example, she claims that nobody taught Koko the word for "ring", therefore to refer to it she combined the words "finger" and "bracelet", hence "finger bracelet"."
Since words are symbolic representations of things we see, it is reasonable to say, provided this is actually true, that this gorilla has some understanding of symbols.
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