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Is it? This is literally the first time Ive seen the word human applied to other hominids. I see many discussions about neanderthals and denisovians and so on. I have never seen them referred to as human.
I think it’s not uncommon to refer to Neanderthals as early humans, I’m sure I’ve read that in many places. Natural history museum, for example, refers to them as early humans: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-were-the-neanderthals.htm...
It’s fascinating to think about the number of PUs (procedural units) it takes to make a modern tool. Something as simple as a modern hammer must number in the thousands and a mobile phone in the millions or billions.
You might find the essay "I, Pencil" by Leonard Read interesting. It's told from the point of view of a pencil who talks about the complexity of his own creation and all of the components involved in the process
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Billions of transistors in a smart phone, and those took many^many machines to build
the genius of photolithography (and its descendents) is that each chip is printed all at once, all the transistors at once over several steps for the several layers. This is what makes chips inexpensive.
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I'm highly suspicious that the whole "inner vs no-inner monologue" thing doesn't actually exist and has more to do with these things being extremely hard to explain using language, and people describing their subjective experience in subtly different ways.
I 100% do not think in words or sentences or language. It feels more like node-traversing a graph of concepts, but it's all completely abstract. While I am able to consciously play back my thoughts linguistically or visually with some effort (and at the cost of efficiency), by default there are neither words nor images. French is my first language, I'm fluent in English, and I know a bit about many languages... But I…
I suspect people who say they think in language are not really thinking "in" language. I think we all have this abstract conceptual space in us. I'm not even sure what it means to think in language; where do the ideas and concepts come from that are being expressed? I guess some people have to internally "hear" a thought expressed before it is real to them.
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Where does "clearly" originate, and what does it refer to? Is "just" a synonym for "exactly" in this context?
"Clearly" refers to the obviousness or self-evidence of the statement. In this context, "just" means "similarly" or "in the same way," or ig "exactly" if you like. "Clearly" because exterior stimuli clearly influence both thinking and feeling, a concept supported by common experience and scientific understanding of human cognition and emotions.
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The word human is commonly used for both modern humans and members of the entire genus Homo. Hominids is a more general superset that isn't strictly correct here. The term hominin is more appropriate in this context and what they actually use in the abstract. In my opinion though, "human" is the better word here for conveying the right mix of informality without implying the specific semantics of "Hominini sans Pan".
Is it? This is literally the first time Ive seen the word human applied to other hominids. I see many discussions about neanderthals and denisovians and so on. I have never seen them referred to as human.
https://www.amazon.com/Extinct-Humans-Ian-Tattersall/dp/0813...
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Record keeping doesn't need writing. Like Incas with their knotted ropes (probably not how how you call it in English). Also, while some central Asians could read and write (they had courrier relay to deliver letters), their administrative/taxing/military system, the decimal system, worked without any writing for two thousand years, only by making a mark on a wooden branch for each person in an Arban, a mark on anoth…
What's amusing of course is that the word text shares a root with textiles and hence the notion of weaving thread or cloth. I'd strongly suggest not getting bogged down in the details of what various forms of notional recording are --- ink on paper, etching on stone, holes punched in paper, magnetic field alignments in rust (spinning, sequential, or otherwise), bitfields in memory arrays, holographic images ... Recor…
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Slightly unrelated, but James Burke explains this really well in Connections[1] S01E03. Basically he says one of the reasons China didn't experience the rapid growth Europe went through during the Renaissance was because Chinese society during those times had a strict hierarchy. You weren't allowed to rise through the ranks with your inventions or technologies, no matter how revolutionary they were. "No incentive, no…
Was the Renaissance driven by concerns of social mobility? Galileo's telescope was not calculated to improve his rank in society.
If you look at what happened he could have benefited hugely if he was not obnoxious and had not gone out of his was to annoy people. He mocked the powerful, and he insisted that the Copernican cosmology (the sun is the centre of the universe) was not just a theory, but had been proven true.
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That idea is pretty similar to "assembly theory" no? In the sense of how much information or evolution was necessary to generate some artifact, be it a benzene molecule, a stone tool, or an iphone
It took humans 300k years, all of us, our collective output to reach this point. Yet people insist on comparing a human who is part of society with a LLM alone, who doesn't even have search, and very limited contexts, just closed book mode remembering.
More recent history seems to paint another picture - knowledge is quickly gained as cognitive ability increases, and is even more rapidly lost once it diminishes. Think of not only the replication crisis in science, but also the despair to retain "tacit knowledge" the failure of which often results in outright abandonment and outsourcing to somewhere else. The technology to land on the Moon seems to be effectively lo…
>>> The technology to land on the Moon seems to be effectively lost. The technology might be, but not the knowledge. The tech just became obsolete and probably not up to safety standards anyway. I doubt we'd have much trouble recreating a better equivalent if the incentives existed.