Depending on how you look at it, we have all had this cognitive fall from grace, which began either around the third year of childhood (Bloom 2005), accompanying the development of language; or on the sixth day of Creation in the Garden of Eden (Adam naming all the animals); or in the middle of the first millennium BCE, the Axial Age, with the development of highly sophisticated philosophies and religions in ancient Greece, Israel, Persia, India, and China.
This latter date, historians suggest, was around when our sense of subjectivity, of being someone in here experiencing the world out there, became verbally and conceptually articulated, expressing a shift, at least among the literate classes, from a more embodied and socially embedded identity into a highly reified, abstract entity—an unchanging self. This development of an internal, abstracted sense of self was coupled with an increasing objectification of the external world—where objects appear to exist in and of themselves, thus becoming more open to manipulation and exploitation (Havelock 1983). These developments led to increasing levels of internal and external control and technical mastery, but at the same time they created confusion about the relationship between our sensorial processes on the one hand and abstract, reified concepts like self and objects on the other.
(Making Sense of Mind Only, William S. Waldron; 2023, Prologue)
