empiricism

Somewhat of an understatement to say it was interesting to hear Paul Stamets riff on the world of fungi courtesy the folks at Longevity Now. But I was surprised to hear the oft repeated suggestion that our ancestors lived out an empirical worldview, that this kind of trial and error approach is what accounts for the evolution of understanding we now profit from in terms of both materia medicum and prosaic usage schemes for the variegated bounty of this earth. Its a frequently repeated idea but I can't get behind it.

It seems more plausible to me that our ancestors enjoyed an unbroken continuum with archetypal consciousness. The human mind was not compartmentalized and fractured as it was to become in the service of all that led to modernity and its exploitation of the rational axis for construct and progress. Instead mind was a part of the numen of matter, the vent of the jungle. It had not yet sought to see itself as distinct for the purposes of abstraction and mastery. It was still in the garden of eden, conversant with the powers of time and place and the mother earth forces. We see vestiges of this in the plant theologies of the Amazon basin, the technology of animal totems employed by shamans thru the ages.

There was no need for a concept such as synchrony for the world was experienced as a defacto interlocutor of both spiritual and practical mysteries, the as yet undivided heaven and hell of pitiless exposure and tender harbour. Our ancestors walked in ever-present communion within the living, ribald world. Ecstatic states and extreme adjuncts on consciousness via deprivation or feats of endurance made the veil between worlds even thinner, permitting knowledge to reveal itself in aristotelean alacrity. The forest taught the man what he already knew, not thru chance observation or cunning experiment, but by silting itself into the deep stream of the unformed mind where everything is at once already understood, already discovered, already known, already cultivated, already employed, already defiled, already destroyed, already returned to the ash of ages and born of light again and again and again...
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For further reading I recommend The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes and anything by Jeremy Narby and Joseph Campbell.