

How Star Trek May Show the Emergence of Human Consciousness - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/how-star-trek-may-show-the-emergence-of-human-consciousness-rd

======
Terr_
Reminds me of some of the ideas in Snow Crash (spoiler alert.) To boil it down
with some minor edits:

> "Bear with me. This language--the mother tongue--is a vestige of an earlier
> phase of human social development. Primitive societies were controlled by
> verbal rules called me. The me were like little programs for humans. [...]
> The Sumerian word for 'mind,' or 'wisdom,' is identical to the word for
> 'ear.' That's all those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive
> receivers of information."

> "But Enki was different. [...] He was, actually, the first modern man, a
> fully conscious human being, just like us. At some point, Enki realized that
> Sumer was stuck in a rut. People were carrying out the same old me all the
> time, not coming up with new ones, not thinking for themselves. I suspect
> that he was lonely, being one of the few--perhaps the only--conscious human
> being in the world." [...]

> "Some probably did [die]. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and
> figure it out. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings
> of human consciousness--when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the
> beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to
> think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil."

