Chapters 1 argued that life, mind, and culture all hinge on feedback loops that keep internal models in sync with external reality. Chapter 2 (the present essay) zooms in on the moment those loops overloaded—when symbols, tools, and rival minds began to outrun the natural bandwidth of a single human organism. Each “fall” myth below pinpoints a different layer of that overload: Hebraic self-awareness, Buddhist map-versus-territory tension, Greek techno-economic acceleration, and Mesopotamian urban scale.

2.1 Paradise Lost — The Fall of Eden

There is an inflection point in human history—recorded across many cultures—when humankind stopped believing it was merely animal. The best-known version is the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit, but Greek and Buddhist scriptures offer close cousins. Information-theoretically, the Buddhist paradise lost is both remedy and consequence of the two earlier losses: the Greek fall signals an abrupt jump in economic complexity, pushing rivalry onto an intellectual battlefield, while the Hebraic fall marks the birth of self-consciousness. Judaism’s foundation myth laments this new imbalance in information traffic: more chatter inside one skull than between people and the world.

The Eden narrative foreshadows later chapters on financial bubbles (Ch. 10) and social-media echo chambers (Ch. 11), where internal chatter again outruns contact with reality.

So central is this rupture that it opens the Bible. Adam and Eve, living in Eden, must not eat one tree’s fruit. Eve persuades Adam; Adam eats; God confronts him. Adam blurts, “I am naked.” Not the dawn of consciousness in general, but of **self-**consciousness: the ego has snapped into place.

2.2 The Ego

The ego is the boundary that completes the model of self. In bandwidth terms, it appears when internal information flow outstrips external flow—you spend more time thinking than experiencing. The ego is the renormalisation group that crystallises what we call consciousness.

Chapters 1 defined life as matter whose internal messages dominate external perturbations; the Eden story shows that principle migrating from the cell to the psyche.

2.3 The Eastern Paradise Lost — Meditation

The Secrets of the Golden Flower. On his way to die in the Himalayas, Lao-tzu reputedly told a border guard that the “secret” of becoming a golden flower (enlightened) cannot be written down; symbols are antithetical to the state itself. Map and territory must part company before the flower can bloom.

Mindfulness. Meditation is the practical science of awareness: attention training. By turning attention outward—toward actuality, not the mind’s map—you rebalance bandwidth, experiencing present homeostasis instead of merely modelling future homeostasis.

The Buddhist fix anticipates cyber-detox therapies that try to tame post-modern data floods; both prescribe throttling symbol traffic to restore sensory bandwidth.

2.4 Prometheus — The Greek Paradise Lost

For the Greeks, the rupture is not sexual shame but Prometheus’s theft of fire. Zeus punishes him by sending an eagle to eat his liver each day. Fire ends the Stone Age and launches the Bronze Age.

Economically, fire is the first order of production: the pre-condition for smelting metal, baking bread, hardening clay. Stable food and tools allow permanent settlements, letting society scale beyond hunter-gather bands.

Just as fungi externalised digestion to conquer soil, humans externalised heat to conquer matter. The Industrial Revolution will repeat that logic with steam and electricity.

2.5 Babylon Rising

Fire-powered metallurgy births the first urban workshops—Uruk, then Babylon—where external symbolic traffic again swamps the individual mind. Babylon’s splendour rested on conquest; to the exiled Jews it became evil incarnate.

“Away from the big city where a man cannot be free…” — The Velvet Underground, Heroin

Rome’s persecuted Christians inherited that anti-Babylon posture, and Revelation brands the city “Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots.” The trope survives in Rastafarian lyrics:

“Big city life, me try fi get by—Babylon de pon me case.” — Mattafix, Big City Life

Cities have been fertility sinks since industrialisation (urban TFR has sat 0.5–1.0 births below rural levels for over a century; UN DESA 2024, table 2). Their head-counts grow only because fresh migrants keep arriving.

Chapter 6 will show how railways and telegraph lines widened Babylon from walls of brick to networks of wire, accelerating the same demographic drain.

2.6 Memetic Desire

Faced with an information landscape too dense to grasp directly, humans copy one another’s goals. We pick models, imitate them, then compete with them—a triangular pattern René Girard called memetic desire. Scarcity frustrates the triangle; archetypes (Jungian or fictional) can substitute for flesh-and-blood rivals.

2.7 A Memetic Theory of Evolutionary Intelligence

Human intelligence is a costly adaptation favoured by sexual and social competition: brains compress energy into information more efficiently than muscle converts it into force. As population density rose, so did mind-to-mind rivalry, amplifying the payoff to intelligence.

The same energy-for-information bargain will reappear when we measure the carbon footprint of global data centres.

2.8 Into the Wild — Map Versus Territory

Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild recounts Chris McCandless, who fled consumer America for the Alaskan wilderness. He carried a guide to edible plants—but the book omitted that one edible yam’s seeds are toxic. McCandless died of starvation and poisoning: the original sin of mistaking the map of the terrain from the terrain itself, imagination for actuality.

2.9 The Pre-lapsarian Fallacy

Nature is not a gentle garden. Cordyceps fungi liquefy insects from within; hormesis teaches that small stresses toughen but large ones kill. Most moderns would not survive long in the wild we romanticise.

Marx, for instance, pictured primitive man hunting communally—“to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon…” (German Ideology, 1845). In reality, weaker hunters were often culled, and the alpha ate first. It was never “each according to his means,” but “each according to his end.” Any economics that ignores competition’s teeth—Marxism included—misreads our species’ deep history.

Having traced how symbolic overload toppled paradises and birthed Babylon, the next chapter investigates how life’s oldest networks—mycelia and microbiomes—avoid that fate by routing information instead of hoarding it.