Origins of Vision - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki
Freud
So if Linda B. Smith is right, and vision is what leads to language, then is Freud right, that upright gait changes vision? Or are the people who think it's about fruit and depth perception right?
The diminution of the olfactory stimuli seems itself to be a consequence of man’s raising himself from the ground, of his assumption of an upright gait; this made his genitals, which were previously concealed, visible and in need of protection, and so provoked feelings of shame in him.
-- Freud, Civilization and its Discontents.
There is even a possibility that it is the colour of snakes? These are obviously of interest given my Garden of Eden obsession.
This article suggests that upright gait started in A. ramidus (4.4 mya) and finished by H. erectus (1.89 mya).
- Fruit: Food search through the eyes of a monkey: A functional substitution approach for assessing the ecology of primate color vision - ScienceDirect
- Snakes: Snakes as agents of evolutionary change in primate brains - ScienceDirect
McGilchrist
This "stepping back" seems important for "dividing up" the world into categories:
By contrast theorein, the origin of our word ‘theory’, is a much later word. Here it takes on the meaning we normally associate with seeing, the eye apprehending an object. Interestingly it was not originally a verb, but is a back-formation from the word for a spectator, theoros. What I take from this is that it is derived from what was thought of as a special situation, one of greater than usual detachment from a ‘spectacle’. Words for ‘thinking’, in the sense of abstract cognition, and words for ‘seeing’ come to be closely related. The prominence, after the Homeric era, of theorein and noein, when compared with the earlier terms for seeing, marks a degree of abstraction from what is under consideration. A related distinction, touched on above, arises between aspects of the mind, between thymos and noos: very broadly thymos is instinct, what keeps the body in motion, coupled with emotion, whereas noos is reflection, ideas and images. Already, it would appear, the Greeks were making felt distinctions between thought and experience as mediated by the left hemisphere and as mediated by the right.