Evidence 1: I heard this great story on radiolab the other day. It was about how it is entirely possible that members of ancient cultures, despite the same physical capacity as modern people, could not identify the color blue. Apparently such a distinction had no inherent value for them (no blue food, enemies, art, etc.).
Evidence 2: There was a decade in there when I got really into drawing copies of nature photos (originally my ADD coping strategy for college lectures). One if the discoveries I made, which drastically improved the quality of the drawings was that there are no real lines in nature; that separations are all gradations with various degrees of severity. If you draw harsh lines on the edges of anything, it ceases to look realistic.
Evidence 3: They say babies are born unable to distinguish anything from themselves. The separations that define ”this” and ”that” are not immediately apparent. Gradually, as necessities and interests develop, one thing or another becomes important, and children learn to identify the particular thing. Some learning occurs when a distinction dawns on a person, and previously fluid concepts become discrete, at which point new conceptual manipulations become possible.
Conclusion/hypothesis: Separations are artificial constructs of the human mind. We (everything) are all one, maybe.
If this is true, then what of those elegant manipulations? Are they commonly accepted because they reflect some objective reality, or merely because we develop in a shared society, with reference frames overlapping?
Sounds like the wisdom of the great religions and of what many folks were talking about in the 60's...and of course the deep ecologists who talk about how the separation mindset leads to environmental degradation while the connected one leads to caring for the biosphere as we realize we aren't separate from it but embedded in it.
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