As in dont ask a question you dont know the answer to.

Yes. Anyway, what about dogs with rabies?

Rabies is not a mental illness. It’s a disease of the brain.

Interesting distinction. All right, why? They’re not smart enough?

I dont think that’s it. Cetaceans are pretty smart and they dont appear to be afflicted with lunacy. I think you have to have language to have craziness.

I guess so you can hear the voices in your head.

Not sure why. But you have to understand what the advent of language was like. The brain had done pretty well without it for quite a few million years. The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.

A parasitic invasion.

Yes.

You’re serious.

Yes. The inner guidance of a living system is as necessary to its survival as oxygen and hydrogen. The governance of any system evolves coevally with the system itself. Everything from a blink to a cough to a decision to run for your life. Every faculty but language has the same history. The only rules of evolution that language follows are those necessary to its own construction. A process that took little more than an eyeblink. The extraordinary usefulness of language turned it into an overnight epidemic. It seems to have spread to every remote pocket of humanity almost instantly. The same isolation of groups that led to their uniqueness would seem to have been no protection at all against this invasion and both the form of language and the strategies by which it gained purchase in the brain seem all but universal. The most immediate requirement was for an increased capacity for making sounds. Language seems to have originated in South Africa and this requirement probably accounts for the clicks in the Khoisan languages. The fact that there were more things to name than sounds to name them with. In any case the physical facility for speech was probably the most difficult hurdle. The pharynx became elongated until the apparatus in its present form has all but strangled its owner. We’re the only mammalian species that cant swallow and articulate at the same time. Think of a cat growling while it eats and then try it yourself. Anyway, the unconscious system of guidance is millions of years old, speech less than a hundred thousand. The brain had no idea any of this was coming. The unconscious must have had to do all sorts of scrambling around to accommodate a system that proved perfectly relentless. Not only is it comparable to a parasitic invasion, it’s not comparable to anything else.

That’s quite a dissertation.

What makes it interesting is that language evolved from no known need. It was just an idea. Lysenko rising from the dead. And the idea, again, was that one thing could represent another. A biological system under successful assault by human reason.

I’m not sure I’ve heard evolutionary biology discussed in such warlike terms. And the unconscious doesnt like to speak to us because of its million year history devoid of language?