A collective brain is what you'd have if human communication prior to the incident associated with the tower of Babel were basically telepathic (which is one interpretation of Julian Jayne's findings), if Jaynes were correct in thinking that consciousness as we know it did not exist 4000 years ago, and if consciousness in those days were basically general rather than individual.
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Telepathy, WTF? Lady, the story is about people speaking the same language and then after they tried to build a tower (funny how we can now build skyscrapers and god doesn't seem to care anymore) they were given different languages. If the story of the Tower of Babel is as much about telepathy and consciousness as Finding Nemo is about psychic levitation.
As you (via the Bible) suggests, prior to the Tower of Babel 'incident', man had no intellectual capacity to create their own unique languages; the same can be said to this day, amirite?
Two words, wendy1946: Esperanto. Klingon.
I love the smell of destroyed arguments in the morning. Smells like... victory.
Good luck with rationalising your way out of that one. Qapla'. (that's 'Success' in Klingon, for the hard of thinking like you, wendypoos.)
Truly, fundies will believe absolutely anything as long as it's untrue. Well, they had to do it. They had to take my faith in humanity, print it out, shred the paper it's printed on to pieces, burn the remains, and scatter the ashes out at sea. Why must I share the same species as these people?!?!?!
The story of the Towel of Babel is set after the events of the Great Flood, hence after the incident of Noah's drunkenness and his sons' intervention. In that account, Noah acts and speaks as an individual, as do Ham, Shem and Japheth.
Your explanation does not even agree with your own book of fairytales. Apologetics fail.
Is this like how a lot of ESP proponents claim that cavemen were able to communicate telepathically, but since it was a bad thing for everyone to read everyone's thoughts we developed the ability to hide our telepathic abilities so that now only a few people known as "psychics" have that ability?
Or are you just stark raving mad?
If everybody shared the same thoughts we would be a collective brain just like our neurons sharing their information with each other makes us one brain rather than a society of neurons.
Since there is no evidence of everyone in the world living together much less sharing the stame thoughts we can say this didn't happen.
Basically, there is no basis in fact for your hypothesis. Basically, there is no basis in fact for the "godidit" explanation for an under-engineered tower collapsing, assuming that it wasn't just a metaphor to begin with. Basically, you are attempting to falsely attribute a theory of psychic powers to Jaynes, who postulated auditory hallucinations. Basically, Jaynes missed the mark and so did you.
Gotta love fundies. Humans were all semi-immortal, psychic giants before that magic world-wide flood that carved out the Grand Canyon in 40 days and left the rest of surface relatively unsculpted. And who needs physical evidence for these fantastical beliefs, as long as the person shoveling this shit to them does it in the name of Phantom Jeebus?
Why are your justifications for these myths always so goddamned ridiculous? I've heard people justify the bible saying that god changed the speed of light for a couple of hundred of years!
The SIMPLEST solution is the best, NOT the DUMBEST!!
For those who are interested, in a nutshell, the Bicameral Mind was Jaynes' theory that humans prior to around 3000 B.C were essentially only externally-aware in much the same way that other higher animals are. They weren't truly self-aware or conscious in any way that we would understand, and weren't capable of the sort of abstract thought or autobiographical conscious that we take for granted--rather, those people would experience what we think of as "thought" or inspiration as a hallucinatory sort of voice from the portions of their brains that exercised what we think of as metaconscious cognition, and were compelled to obey its commands without any ability to recognize "why" they were doing whatever they were doing, in a manner somewhat akin to that of a modern-day schizophrenic. At some point in the distant past, this state broke down and the human mind completely integrated into what we recognize as a normal conscious state, and the "voices" commanding people to courses of action mostly stopped. This event marked the beginning of what we think of as civilization today.
It's interesting to note that even IF Jaynes' theory is actually true, then it means that what humans thought of as the voices of the gods commanding and compelling men were nothing more than the chatter of the "thinking" portions of their brain telling them what to do, and that the beginnings of most religions are rooted in the struggle of the now fully-self-aware people to bring the voices back.
@P
"Also Babel is a story until proven factual"
Burj Khalifa, Dubai. International Space Station (NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA).
Esperanto. Klingon.
I love the smell of annihilated arguments in the morning. Smells like... victory.
Heh! Just another loony, but at least this one is entertaining.
@Old man of mountain:
"Babiru nisei is not documentary"
You, sir, win an Internet! :P
The Good: Hmm, yes, I suppose a "collective brain" would be pretty much what would result from the situation you describe.
The Bad: Everything leading up to and from that conclusion is batshit crazy spaghetti confetti bananahammock.
I do believe in the paranormal.
I also believe that wendy, here, is full of shit, and this "Julian Jayne" fellow is most likely a fraud.
@WMDKitty: no, Jaynes isn't a fraud.
His theory of the Bicameral Mind is almost certainly wrong, however.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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