And what exactly are those higher functions except symbol manipulation? And why are they "higher" except that they allow us to justify extremely horrendous behavior.
..............
Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun", set many thousands of years from now during the waning centuries of the "Stellar Age", tells the story of Severian, a member of the Guild of Torturers who's banished from close contact with his order for committing the sin of mercy.
He begins traveling across the world, seeing the curious mixture of exquisitely advanced tech and faded imperial glory characteristic of his time.
At one point, he enters a dark wood and decides to settle in for the night.
As he watches the sky - filled with stars, the reflected light of derelict and active space craft and centuries of orbital debris, he hears inhuman sounds coming from deeper in the forest.
He reaches for his weapon, ready to kill whatever might be cavorting in the darkness.
After a while, figures can be seen emerging into the dim light of a clearing: human, but not quite. He recognizes them as those who've chosen to lose their complexity in favor of a genetically engineered regression. The world, and all its troubles, were too much for these folk. They idealized what they thought to be the pure joy of animals and, in a final act of human decision making, decided to become some analog of our earlier selves.
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After reading your brief post on the failings of our "higher functions" and the alleged beauties of a less cognitive state, I now imagine you as a modern primitive, forced to live in the world of super colliders and PSPs.
But as you slowly sip your morning coffee you dream, don't you, of the past...the distant past...the time before it all got underway. You dream of the sea we emerged from, the trees we climbed down from.
Come back, you whisper, come back.
.d.