Here are a few strange books that could be useful. But before offering them, I will pose a few significant questions to add context.
Why is there a (just one, we know of) formally representational animal like us? If nature was purposive, why might a living world conduct something like the human experiment, with all its attendant risks?
How and why did that peculiarly dangerous form of cognition arise (what were the phases of the development of human representational cognition and language, did we re-experience them ourselves, as children)?
What are organisms actually doing? The goal here is to get an idea that has more dimensionality, and is more like actual organisms and what they are doing than those we are used to, and then repeat that process from there.
What is a slightly more accurate idea of the identity of any of the following: language, spacetime, light, worlds, stars, eyes. As above, re-iterate this process upon any success.
Such questions are peculiar in that they cannot really be answered in mere concepts or ideas. Some »direct experience of their referents is required, and such experiences can be unexpectedly profound, while yet remaining ‘apparently ordinary’.
Here are a few books:
Understanding Comics (McCloud): Read as if titled: understanding the evolution of human consciousness, with images.
Science and Sanity (Korzybyski): Read as if a madman unconvered a few pivotal problems in human thinking and awareness, getting quite a bit of it right.
The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: (Janes): Read as if a really brilliant scholar discovered something impossible, got a lot of it right, and a few things wrong, a couple probably backwards (relating to hemispheric lateralization/and the RH relation to Schizophrenia/Voice Hearing).
The Master and His Emissary: (McGilchrist): Seminal work on the Abel :|: Cain problem, which is central to our developmental story as humans, and fundamental to the nature of our awareness and experience.
