Cave Logic is a Paleo Diet for the mind.

Civilization has filled our heads with a lot of things that we take to be real but are not. Our sense of reality is bloated with calcified metaphors that we take literally. This has corrupted common sense. The solution is to do an etymological deconstruction of civilization, to distinguish our common sense beliefs from our unquestioned abstract beliefs. Not all of our abstract ideas are worthless, so the goal is not to throw them out; we just want to do a mental cleanse, and then accept back the useful abstract ideas – but being conscious that they are conventions, not part of natural reality.

Cave Logic is a way to distinguish between literal meanings and abstract concepts denoted by words. One of the inherent evils of civilization is that we inherit systems of thought developed over thousands of years that we learn as children and never question.

Think of it as a zeroing out method of cleaning the junk out of your garage. The first step is that you take everything out and put it in the driveway. Then you put back the useful things you want to keep in an orderly way, and get rid of the rest – throw it away or give it away.

The presupposition of Cave Logic  is that language arose in the context of action, which means that the syntactical structure of language is founded on the form of action. All words referred initially to concrete objects of the here or now, and of the use of the basic six senses: vision, hearing, feeling, tasting, touching or smelling. It makes sense that in the early development of language there was an initial literal stage, and that is the stage we call Cave Logic