Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We've forgotten how to build pyramids What exactly has led you to believe this...?
Taking what I said literally :D
I see no indication in your comment that it was meant any other way :D
Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids
171–180 of 194 posts
Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids
#172I don't think humans really invented raisins.
Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. You are correct it's not very far. 2. "Not far" is the difference between "land humans on the surface of the moon and return them safely to Earth" and not doing that. Some of this stuff was unbelievably lucky, go read about the F1 engine baffles - getting that right was pure stupid luck as much as it was engineered. And there were literally hundreds of these examples - across five different space vehicles and the…
Yes, it's absolutely a lot of work, cost, and risk to design and qualify a new rocket for human spaceflight from scratch. Especially if you've let all your institutional knowledge drift away in the meantime. I just don't think that comes close to meeting the bar of "lost technology" in the sense that term is used by the extraterrestrial pyramid theorists (i.e., the manipulation of fundamental physical forces allowing…
I agree with you about that. We are facing an engineering challenge, not a physics challenge.
Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids
#174"I personally can't conceive of how one might built this, and I must be a million times smarter than people 4500 years ago, ergo people didn't build this." is how the Ancient Aliens theory always sounds to me.
Wait until you hear about "I don't remember leaving my phone in the toilets" ergo "There must be alternative parallel timelines we regularly jump to and from"
...and also CERN is to blame somehow.
Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are ideas that ancient human thinking was very different and primitive compared to modern. For example (and others): The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (1976)
probably this is an effect of a much more simple environment and tasks in the past: Sleep, hunt and not been hunted, eat, reproduce. the minds seems simpler, but is apparent. We live in a more complex world, this produce someting more complex, culture, ideas, knowledge, tasks, technology, craps.. but basic intelligence i think is the same (if not better in the past, less "pollution")
If I was to sum up Jaynes' most relevant idea, I'd say it is that language is a technological advancement that evolved to handle more abstract and powerful concepts over time. Ten thousand years ago, humans were biologically the same as today, but their tool of language wasn't advanced enough to effectively communicate or contemplate some concepts, and it led to a reduced inner monologue and explicit self-awareness.
When I first read it, I remember thinking that this was the most interesting book I've read that is probably wrong.
Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Romans, huh? Many of them were slaves, they believed they could learn the future by looking at the patterns of birds in flight, a Roman's bloodline was very important to the Roman's importance. You can take "behaviorally identical" too far, ideas got better over time, people in the past had bad ideas.
If that's sarcastic, good one :) If genuine, I'm puzzled. In the current world we have a tremendous amount of people who hold various superstitious beliefs as well as spend tremendous amount of time on their genealogy. And nepotism never went away. I agree those are "bad ideas", but don't see how they differentiate us from people 5k years ago?
I guess I got downvoted for not supplying very persuasive examples. The point is, cleverness is having good ideas-about-ideas, and these have obviously improved over time, so people in the past were obviously not so clever.
I could point at all the self-help books that promise to improve the way you think, or Wikipedias list of fallacies, but I don't those are great examples either. It's frustrating that I can't make a simple point just because it needs more research. I hoped people would find better examples themselves.
I don't think your word "tremendous" works, I think superstition declined and values improved, but it's hard to nail this down for people who are keen to disagree. Does that include you? Why?
Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand the downvote, it's like "nooo, their ideas were exactly as good as the ones we have today, humans don't learn over time, how dare you imply we used to be stupider, it's sacrilege". So I object to this weird article of faith every time it comes up, we can't have been exactly as sensible and exactly as clever in the past as we are today, it doesn't make any sense to say that. But it's somehow become…
We have access to different data points today. But the way I read the original post is that human mind as such did not meaningful change. If you took a Roman or Egyptian embryo from 5k years ago and incubated it today, you'd have a modern human. The fact that many people back then had crazy ideas, is orthogonal to the biological argument at hand - and that's before we look at amount of people with crazy ideas today,…
Yes, but I don't know why we'd be talking about biology in the first place, unless everybody's going around assessing everybody else a biologically stupid or smart. (If so, where do they think the smart ones get their good ideas from, are those ideas supposed to be inborn? Or exuded from a strong and genetically healthy idea-gland?)
Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well no, not even as good. For instance, your comment invokes the idea of prejudice, and the value of being unprejudiced. Did Romans know about that, and consider it important? Maybe, I couldn't say offhand, but my point is that they might not have had some valuable idea like that. I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking. That makes the ancients all worse at t…
They certainly understood the value of being unprejudiced, indeed many of the ideas of how to think that permeate Western Civilization came from the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. >I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking. I believe there is one idea that they lacked which is that of the Scientific Method, and perhaps some others that helped ignite the…
> For that to follow you would have to show that those ideas were more valuable to the process of thinking than all the others that they did have.
OK, good logic. But that implies could be still very valuable ideas of the ancients which are now lost. I suppose that's what classicism was all about. But we've been through classicism already a couple of times (starting in the renaissance). It seems likely we caught up with most of the powerful ideas of the ancient world.
I'm picking up a "bring back the seven liberal arts!" vibe from your comment, and it has a certain something going for it as an idea, I must admit. Even so ...
Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well no, not even as good. For instance, your comment invokes the idea of prejudice, and the value of being unprejudiced. Did Romans know about that, and consider it important? Maybe, I couldn't say offhand, but my point is that they might not have had some valuable idea like that. I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking. That makes the ancients all worse at t…
Seneca wrote slaves and free men were equal essentially. The Torah said foreigners should be treated as natives. You lacked the idea of begging the question seemingly.
I don't flaming care about the specifics! I keep picking bad examples, examples are hard, you should argue my side and do the examples for me.
Re: Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
probably this is an effect of a much more simple environment and tasks in the past: Sleep, hunt and not been hunted, eat, reproduce. the minds seems simpler, but is apparent. We live in a more complex world, this produce someting more complex, culture, ideas, knowledge, tasks, technology, craps.. but basic intelligence i think is the same (if not better in the past, less "pollution")
If I was to sum up Jaynes' most relevant idea, I'd say it is that language is a technological advancement that evolved to handle more abstract and powerful concepts over time. Ten thousand years ago, humans were biologically the same as today, but their tool of language wasn't advanced enough to effectively communicate or contemplate some concepts, and it led to a reduced inner monologue and explicit self-awareness.…
I don't have read jaines. To me the language was different yes, but the mind is another thing, but the two are cleary related.
I think humans need (and create) more concepts, more complex/different idea, to grasp/describe a more complex world around, but the mind is equally capable now as 50k-years ago.
Probably in the past minds can contemplate things we are not more aware today, who know? is not all about rational and scientific thinking, is not more or less advanced, is simply different, and in the past humans needed a quite different set of ideas and tools than today.
Just travel to Papua-NewGuinea and check with some tribe in a lost valley, straigh from Neolythic, some does not have a concept of "3", but children can learn arithmetic as everyone else, they can contemplate every concept we have, given the right path.