When encountering a panther with your mind unencumbered by thought models, there’s no telling how you’d reconcile or percieve the experience in a way that you could talk about it.

It may be that when the Piraha see a panther, they see something very different than what we do.

Excellent point - perhaps the “panther = spirit” equation is simply a result of translating into a western mindset, and not their own.

Okay, so they say they have direct experience of these spirits. I’m willing to accept that. But the equation of “panther = spirit” makes me wonder, just what is an abstraction anyway? Is an abstraction an identification of one thing with another? Is an abstraction a method of understanding or explaining something? When exactly does an abstraction arrive and do these people truly not have them?

It may be that when the Piraha see a panther, they see something very different than what we do.

I think what is so fascinating is that everything cascades from their liminality - they truly live in the moment.

From this the need for tenses, numbers, etc. all fall away. Their need for a creation myth evaporates as their world “just is” - it always has been and always will. Their complex demonology also arises from this - things that leave their immediate experiences actually vanish and creatures you can hear, but not see, could easily be actual spirits. The idea of parallel dimensions then seems a natural extension of this from which they then derive the idea that illness, etc. is caused by their things from this alternate reality.

While I don’t think this is some kind of ideal to aspire to (or even some kind of view of a “primitive” state - it is as “artificial” as other modes of dealing with the world and is probably relatively recent - at least when compared to systems like that of the Australian Aboriginals) what it does show us is that we can fundamentally alter the way we view reality. Our own “reality” with its numbers, tenses, Gods and Creation Myths all cascade from our own needs and thinking (seasonality, which they don’t have in rain forests, imposes a concept of time and the need for planning ahead). It also suggests we have the flexibility to fundamentally change the way we perceive the world.

My mind often goes back to the Subanthropic Principle and the above would suggest that it might not be that we are too stupid but that we just don’t have the right mental framework for dealing with certain events and leads to things like the alien abduction scenario or reports of high strangeness that emerge from places like Skinwalker Ranch - we are currently just grasping at straws.

One wonders if the military-occult complex have a better grasp on this yet - they (and in particular the NIDS) have clearly been very interested in the various fields that could lead to a breakthrough on this front. Somehow I doubt it.