When I want to feel a sheer sense of vertigo, I remind myself that "modern" humans have only had written language for ~1/10th of their existence*. And then, some (probably smallish) set of people invented it! Then: now! Ahh!
*as far as we know; depending on how exactly you count
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I try to imagine what it must have been like to be that person. The cognitive shear to suddenly be thinking in time-binding terms. It must have been terrifying, like eating the mushroom and never coming down.
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I wonder how many people were truly pivotal. Interestingly, there's some evidence that multiple civilizations simultaneously developed forms of writing without contact.
But also, I suspect it may have felt mundane—slow abstraction of ideograms and added emphasis on morphemes.
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at some point we were rich enough to spend time thinking. Food was not an issue, Safety and survival was not that hard. Za caveman days. rich enough to not worry about surviving. Rich enough to care about choice.
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This is good! My vertigo generator is thinking about how there are orders of magnitude more stars in the galaxy than seconds you'll be alive and that many galaxies as well, each with as many stars.
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Ahhhh!!!!
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See also Phil Eklund's fascinating, nonesuch simulation of the acquisition of linguistic facility in the early bicameral brain, Neanderthal:
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I haven't actually heard this hypothesized before but I suspect music was an early 'written' language. Australian Aboriginals use music to encode maps so it seems plausible. It would explain why music is still such an important part of our culture.
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In what sense is music "written"? I see how it's a mnemonic, but it's ephemeral: it goes away once you stop singing/performing it.
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Yeah, it's hubris to think we're at a point in history where there won't be other new tech as big as writing.
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I actually get vertigo thinking about the 9/10th of human existence before writing and how much better at oral language they were than us today.
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Indeed. And when I want to amplify that feeling - I re-read Neil Postman's brilliant en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_O