Stella Maris (The Passenger #2)

by Cormac McCarthy

Elbows. Skulls. The remnants of a soul.

Alas poor Yorkic I knew him Horatio.

I think you have to have language to have craziness.

you have to understand what the advent of language was like. The brain had done pretty well without it for quite a few million years. The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation. A parasitic invasion. Yes. You’re serious. Yes.

The extraordinary usefulness of language turned it into an overnight epidemic.

the unconscious system of guidance is millions of years old, speech less than a hundred thousand.

language evolved from no known need.

the unconscious doesnt like to speak to us because of its million year history devoid of language?

It is revealed in images during dreams

dreams are filled with drama and metaphor.

the advent of language, aside from the enormous value of it, was disruptive. Very disruptive. Of a piece with its value. Creative destruction. All sorts of talents and skills must have been lost. Mostly communicative. But also things like navigation and probably even the richness of dreams. In the end this strange new code must have replaced at least part of the world with what can be said about it. Reality with opinion. Narrative with commentary.

Language replaces deeper meaning within the brain that is a more natural form of communication subconscious to conscious. The way our minds relate to the world was forever changed by language. And other skills were lost forever.

synesthesia

Synesthesia might be ours as well. Now that I think about it. A synesthetic who sees the number five as red in arabic might very well see it red in roman as well. Which suggests that what they see as red is a concept and not the physical number.

It helps you to remember. What helps you to remember? Synesthesia. It’s easier to remember two things than one. It’s why it’s easier to remember the words of a song than the words of a poem. For instance. The music is an armature upon which you assemble the words.

We were jung and easily freudened. What is that? Nothing. A line from Joyce.

If they’d thought a bit more about biological evolution and spent less time cooking up nutty theories they might have uncovered a few simple truths.

Again the preoccupation with human evolution and the change from imagery to language. The Advent and creation of language systems that replaced other parts of the brain.

Is there a single insight that supports most of modern mathematics?

What type of a language is mathematics? Is it different from verbal and written language? Probably not. It still represents images.

to claim that numbers somehow exist in the Universe with no intelligence to enable them does not require a different sort of mathematics. It requires a different sort of universe.

See platonism

I think the dream is still there. I think it knows whether or not it should revisit me.

Objective reality without human cognition?

You think that math is done by the unconscious. Yes. I dont know any math. I just try to get it written down when it shows up.

Russell and Whitehead’s Principia.

They seldom spoke afterwards. A situation not helped by Russell’s continually trying to fuck Whitehead’s young wife. Russell had a limited social life at the time and he said that if you couldnt fuck your friends’ wives then who were you supposed to fuck?

After a while the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music.

Synesthesia

I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died.

Hold my hand. Hold your hand? Yes. I want you to. All right. Why? Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.