This is retrofitting. It's not what these references mean.
These are entoptics. We've tested their neural sources for 40 years.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2743395
Google entoptics and look at the graphic array.
This is retrofitting. It's not what these references mean.
These are entoptics. We've tested their neural sources for 40 years.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2743395
Google entoptics and look at the graphic array.
Tested what, exactly?
I suggest the symbols are morospiles. That's a term from Greek meaning "stupid blemish". This too can be tested: get a bunch of stupid people together to paint on a wall, see what marks they make, measure the degree of similarity to cave art, write a paper about it titled "Maybe They Were Stupid?". Repeat this a hundred times and you've got a field of study to cite authoritatively.
Matching occipital and retinal/purkinje patterns and mapped them to these at scale.
The human mind is so oriented towards pattern matching that we perceive patterns in random noise.
Your statement is a narrative illusion. Science is about pattern seeking and then correlating data about those patterns. They have zilch to do with one another.
> These are entopics
Without a time machine, that opinion is no more valid than people keeping a consistent mapping and storytelling language by drawing in the dirt. There is evidence on both sides.
For example, the picture of the entrance stone on this page uses spirals:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_art
Not so. As these are isolated occurring form constants popping up outside of any possible diffusion, their universality prior to symbolic or pictographic coherences indicate an interim state between expression and symbol.
The rush to claim these are a language is unsupported and is quite suspicious of a retrofitting that's prone to pseudoscience.
I would read Paleoperformance and Paleopoetics for discussions about pre-literate, pre-symbolic cultures from the archeological evidence.
Imposing intent or causality onto these is a bit bizarre.
The spirals from Newgrange. Those are indeed claimed to "resemble phosphenes" in Does the Nervous System Have an Intrinsic Archaic Language? which this person posted in another comment. They are neolithic, which is a very long way from paleolithic, not just in time but in development of ideas. The paper has another montage of images with the Gundestrup cauldron in it! That was made in the small hundreds AD. It's just a grab-bag of anything that looks shamanic to support the thesis "maybe they were tripping", about everybody everywhere throughout time, and yes, fair point, maybe they were tripping, it's worth bearing in mind. Also, maybe they were stupid. So what? Is this a solution to any problem?