Human Dev Symbols, the Mind, and the

Human Dev Symbols, the Mind, and the Animal State In Chapter 7 of Maps of Time, David Christian (2011) discusses how human language is built not only of "icons" and "indices," which are types of recognition, correlation, and communication that many organisms from bacteria to dogs can use, but primarily of symbols -- a more complex and higher-order level of communication (p. 172). This is only part of a larger discussion on the development of human history, however it is worthy of consideration simply as its own advancement and unique feature.

An understanding of how language is a definitive feature of humanity, and of the implications of a division between man and nature, creates valuable insights for understanding human development. As explained by Christian (2011), certain associations can be made by many organisms between similar or concurrent experiences in a way that might appear to be symbolic learning or communication, but that falls short of true symbolism.

This is certainly not the first time it has been asserted that language -- true language, not the rudiments of communicating about concrete objects -- has been said to separate man from beast. This is, however, one of the more subtle yet rigidly codified explanations for this assertion; there is a strong construct that allows for animal communication and carefully describes the difference between such communication and human language, which can incorporate groups or classifications of these lower-order communication aids into otherwise unrelated symbols (Christian, 2011).

In a sense, then, it is the abstraction of the symbols of language that makes them uniquely human, as only man can conceive of himself as abstractly independent of the natural world. The philosophizing on the very real and concrete "life" of a carbon atom that Primo Levi (1975) provides is one very unique example of this common attitude of abstraction.

Even while Levi (1975) is noting the degree to which everything is very concretely and physically intertwined, with a single carbon atom being borne on the air for a century, spending some years in a tree, and being stored in a human liver until needed in a sudden burst of energy, there is the sense that man is special not because of the carbon atom, but because he can notice and comment on the carbon atom.

It is this ability to observe and to draw connections that enabled man to step out of nature, if only slightly, and to begin to record his past and so control his future. An interesting and perhaps accidental commentary on this situation is provided in the film The Day After Tomorrow (2004), directed by Roland Emmerich.

The film's action involves the sudden onset of a mini ice age, possibly as a response to global warming, and late in the film a small group of people have attempted to find protection from the elements in a room in the New York City Public Library. In their near-animalistic conditions, with their immediate survival a point of real concern, the people turn to burning books to generate heat and ward off the well-below-freezing temperatures. This.