5 ms·

The more we discover about the past the more weird it all is and to me makes less sense overall. People have lived very similar to our societies today, for thou

The more we discover about the past the more weird it all is and to me makes less sense overall. People have lived very similar to our societies today, for thousands and thousands of years. Some had plumbing. Some built pyramids. Some did complex math and science. Some made gunpowder and explosives and had rockets. Yet for thousands and thousands of years, nothing was really happening and then within the last 250ish years we went from electric becoming a thing, to super computers in our watches and robots in space. The part that doesn’t make sense is why that didn’t get kicked off thousands of years ago when there wasn’t much of a difference in terms of advancement. Why’d it explode one day almost like we got a helping hand? Shouldn’t we be 1000 years more advanced now than we currently are, because these things could have just as easily been kicked off then? I am not at all able to say I know enough history to know if I’m way off base to ask that question. I must be glossing over some significant reasons that couldn’t have happened. It’s just weird to me. A quote from Mad Men that helps demonstrate the sharp hockey stick of progress. “She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She was an astronaut.”

extasia 3y ago
Well for one there was no printing press via which to persist knowledge and translate it cheaply through time and space. Imagine what an individual could achieve technologically today, if they were unable to access any materials or knowledge that was accrued over the history of our species. The result would probably be a subset of the things you describe as originating from before 250 years ago, but they would certainly not be splitting atoms or mapping the human genome.
- ransackdev 3y ago
  Knowledge was spread in written form before the printing press. Yes less of it and a lot slower, but you don’t have plumbing systems or built pyramids without knowledge being persisted for generations. The printing press is a factor I think but it not existing doesn’t explain why no progress was made for so long imo.
  - extasia 3y ago
    Of course knowledge was persisted in written form, but it was not industrialised. I would imagine progress is dominated by a small number of individuals, if information is dispersed across society broadly, your chances of those capable individuals having access to the knowledge requisite to advance the field is much higher. How many geniuses did not advance science because they were ignorant of the current state of the art?
adolph 3y ago
One intriguing conjecture [0] about the difference of now compared to many thousands of years past is that human consciousness as we know it (if we know it) didn't exist until the last 2,000 years. The hardware was there but the thought patterns were not. 0. [In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes], Jaynes' idea was that if you went back and you looked at very early historical texts--particularly for him, the Iliad--the way that characters talk about their own minds and their own drives is extremely unusual, or you might say not at all modern. . . . But, what's actually going on, given what we know about the specialization between the hemispheres of the brain, is that essentially one side of the brain, one hemisphere of the brain is really communicating to the other. And, full human consciousness had not really been established at that time. 0. https://www.econtalk.org/erik-hoel-on-consciousness-free-will-and-the-limits-of-science/ https://www.econtalk.org/erik-hoel-on-consciousness-free-wil...
- angiosperm 3y ago
  Jaynes is certainly wrong in detail, but it is not too far-fetched to suggest that the notion of "self" was an invention, perhaps at first closely held among shamans, that then gradually spread to the wider population.
  - ransackdev 3y ago
    You’re saying the conscious or minds eye is an invention or do you mean something different. To me, everyone is born with the notion of “self”.
    - dmn322 3y ago
      Jaynes says the concept of self derived from linguistic metaphor. Until there was a concept of the “mind” as a container that could have thoughts “in” it, he says thoughts were experienced as hallucinations from the right temporal lobe, and people were essentially acting in a hypnotic state driven by those hallucinations
      - 3y ago
goodbyesf 3y ago
> Why’d it explode one day almost like we got a helping hand? The fundamental difference between the past civilizations and modern civilization is that all past civilizations relied primarily on human/animal power and modern society relies on non-human power. This shift occurred in the early 1800s with the development of thermodynamics and the scientific understanding of the relationship between heat, work and energy. Once we could decouple work from human population, it allowed modern civilization to do more work with less humans. Something previous civilizations never were able to achieve. A train could carry more goods across the country far faster than a thousand horses. An excavator can dig out more dirt in an hour than a thousand men. Whether trains, excavators or super computers, the work that is done is due to thermodynamics.

extasia 3y ago

Well for one there was no printing press via which to persist knowledge and translate it cheaply through time and space. Imagine what an individual could achieve technologically today, if they were unable to access any materials or knowledge that was accrued over the history of our species. The result would probably be a subset of the things you describe as originating from before 250 years ago, but they would certainly not be splitting atoms or mapping the human genome.

ransackdev 3y ago
Knowledge was spread in written form before the printing press. Yes less of it and a lot slower, but you don’t have plumbing systems or built pyramids without knowledge being persisted for generations. The printing press is a factor I think but it not existing doesn’t explain why no progress was made for so long imo.
- extasia 3y ago
  Of course knowledge was persisted in written form, but it was not industrialised. I would imagine progress is dominated by a small number of individuals, if information is dispersed across society broadly, your chances of those capable individuals having access to the knowledge requisite to advance the field is much higher. How many geniuses did not advance science because they were ignorant of the current state of the art?

adolph 3y ago

One intriguing conjecture [0] about the difference of now compared to many thousands of years past is that human consciousness as we know it (if we know it) didn't exist until the last 2,000 years. The hardware was there but the thought patterns were not. 0. [In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes], Jaynes' idea was that if you went back and you looked at very early historical texts--particularly for him, the Iliad--the way that characters talk about their own minds and their own drives is extremely unusual, or you might say not at all modern. . . . But, what's actually going on, given what we know about the specialization between the hemispheres of the brain, is that essentially one side of the brain, one hemisphere of the brain is really communicating to the other. And, full human consciousness had not really been established at that time. 0. https://www.econtalk.org/erik-hoel-on-consciousness-free-will-and-the-limits-of-science/ https://www.econtalk.org/erik-hoel-on-consciousness-free-wil...

angiosperm 3y ago
Jaynes is certainly wrong in detail, but it is not too far-fetched to suggest that the notion of "self" was an invention, perhaps at first closely held among shamans, that then gradually spread to the wider population.
- ransackdev 3y ago
  You’re saying the conscious or minds eye is an invention or do you mean something different. To me, everyone is born with the notion of “self”.
  - dmn322 3y ago
    Jaynes says the concept of self derived from linguistic metaphor. Until there was a concept of the “mind” as a container that could have thoughts “in” it, he says thoughts were experienced as hallucinations from the right temporal lobe, and people were essentially acting in a hypnotic state driven by those hallucinations
    - 3y ago

goodbyesf 3y ago

> Why’d it explode one day almost like we got a helping hand? The fundamental difference between the past civilizations and modern civilization is that all past civilizations relied primarily on human/animal power and modern society relies on non-human power. This shift occurred in the early 1800s with the development of thermodynamics and the scientific understanding of the relationship between heat, work and energy. Once we could decouple work from human population, it allowed modern civilization to do more work with less humans. Something previous civilizations never were able to achieve. A train could carry more goods across the country far faster than a thousand horses. An excavator can dig out more dirt in an hour than a thousand men. Whether trains, excavators or super computers, the work that is done is due to thermodynamics.