Could human beings really change reality and nature?

From reading the Ape, Primitive and Child, I've got a sense that the main difference between humans and primitive man are our capability of using tools and signs to manipulate external resources, making them adapt to our survival needs. However, for ape and primitive people, they could merely use those external tools and signs to adapt themselves to the external environment. But how could humans be able to use signs and symbols as internalized tools to control themselves so as to manage external resources? There seems a lack of huge gap theoretically.

Vygotsky mentioned the role of memory in shaping human's perceptions. While, for apes or primitive people, we could probably only say the perceptions shape their memory. As Vygotsky illustrated, although the concrete memories of primitive man (eidetic memory) could help them memorize details of their surrounding in a very fast speed, this superious capability also put boundaries in their imagination which may need people to reconstruct the external world by de-constructing various parts from the wholeness. As we've talked in previous classes, this capability of humans might only be developed by formulating abstract concepts so as to distinguish various things by their unique properties. In this process, the language may exert a strong influence by developing people's abstract thinking.

But I'm wondering whether the reconstruction of images from the external world could shape people's perceptions or not. Since most often, I would consider the significant role of biological functioning in developing perceptions rather than from a perspective of psychological way. And I also don't quite understand the role of work in human's historical development and find it's hard to connect labor with people's psychological development related to memory and perception.



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