How does Embodiment Science shift how we think about Thinking? (with Guy Claxton & Emily Poel)

Beautiful.

There's a really good book called The Gap, The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals.

And there's a little bit of kind of human exceptionalism going on.

But he says, and just exactly as you've been saying, he says the thing that separates us humans from other animals is our ability to imagine and reflect on scenarios and then our insatiable drive to link our minds together.

So imagining and then imagining together and linking our minds together to then creatively act.

I mean, again, it's just another confirmation of everything you're saying.

Right.

The ability to use thoughts, to use ideas, the bamboozle, may have a kind of minor evolutionary function.

But when it becomes the only game in town, then we're lost, really, aren't we?

Yeah.

But the other thing is, I forget the name of the researcher, that there was this theory that the actual origin of language was, I find this just such an interesting idea, that the origin of language was to help me explain this peak experience to you that I've just had.

So like they were experimenting with natural

psychedelics, right? And then it's like, you have this really profound experience

on a like spiritual experience or psychedelic experience or whatever and all i want to do is tell you about it because i'm just so bursting at like internally bursting to tell someone that i've had this amazing experience and that was the evolutionary drive to develop language Whether it's true or not, it's just a brilliant idea.

I

don't know, but there's a wonderful piece from a very influential spiritual writer, a guy called Alan Watts, who in one of his books was writing about the difficulty of doing exactly what you've just described.

The dilemma, the almost impossible job of being able to speak the unspeakable.

Scroot the inscrutable.

And the best one, F the ineffable.

Brilliant.

But that's why the wordscape and the lifescape is such an amazingly brilliant metaphor, because it's like we want to put everything into the wordscape to make it real.

And that's exactly what we're trying to do, right? And F-ing the ineffable is like, oh, well, it doesn't exist if I can't say it.

And so something that opens up this possibility of just the experience being more important than the ability to describe the experience.

I mean, it's like it just feels like such a timeless human

tension and issue.