_Tools_ have a response to this post.
is this a broken AI bot?
Looks like, though a shame if true, since the account is more than 10 years old and presumably had a person behind it at some point.
How art invented humanity
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: How art invented humanity
#12[dead]
Re: How art invented humanity
#13I've been reading Wengrow and Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything", and one of the main points they've made so far is that once modern humans became recognizable as such, we were doing all the human-type things we do now: thinking about our place in the world, debating different ways to live and their pros and cons, and so forth. We tend to think of prehistoric humans as being stupid cavemen, but I suspect we'd find th…
I wish there was any way to know when language was developed in (proto?) humans. Our complex grammar is pretty unique in the animal kingdom, and it's clearly linked to our cognition. You can get pretty far with mere vocabulary (just look at the great apes), but once you get into the world of words modifying words and recombining into sentences, you have an absolute explosion of expressible ideas.
When did that happen? IMO, it's pretty clear the Chompsky school is at least partially correct in that we have biological hardware for grammatical language. So we've probably had language as long as we've been homo sapiens. Neanderthals probably spoke, too. But what about Homo Erectus? Australopithecus?
Re: How art invented humanity
#14I've been reading Wengrow and Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything", and one of the main points they've made so far is that once modern humans became recognizable as such, we were doing all the human-type things we do now: thinking about our place in the world, debating different ways to live and their pros and cons, and so forth. We tend to think of prehistoric humans as being stupid cavemen, but I suspect we'd find th…
I wish there was any way to know when language was developed in (proto?) humans. Our complex grammar is pretty unique in the animal kingdom, and it's clearly linked to our cognition. You can get pretty far with mere vocabulary (just look at the great apes), but once you get into the world of words modifying words and recombining into sentences, you have an absolute explosion of expressible ideas. When did that happen…
My entirely layman and unsupported conspiracy theory about language is that early hominids likely developed complex sign language and some primitive forms of writing now long lost to time, but vocal language only came with the necessary biology.
Re: How art invented humanity
#15Fits the archaeological gap also because Homo erectus controlled fire yet left no art, clothing, or deliberate burials.
Re: How art invented humanity
#16I've been reading Wengrow and Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything", and one of the main points they've made so far is that once modern humans became recognizable as such, we were doing all the human-type things we do now: thinking about our place in the world, debating different ways to live and their pros and cons, and so forth. We tend to think of prehistoric humans as being stupid cavemen, but I suspect we'd find th…
I wish there was any way to know when language was developed in (proto?) humans. Our complex grammar is pretty unique in the animal kingdom, and it's clearly linked to our cognition. You can get pretty far with mere vocabulary (just look at the great apes), but once you get into the world of words modifying words and recombining into sentences, you have an absolute explosion of expressible ideas. When did that happen…
> ...and it's clearly linked to our cognition.
People with global aphasia can still do arithmetic, follow causal reasoning, play chess, pass theory-of-mind tasks, etc. During non-linguistic reasoning, math, music and executive tasks, neuroimaging has revealed that the language centers in the brain are pretty darn quiet.
So the link, and the causal direction if any, is not really known.
Re: How art invented humanity
#17Well this is fun, it is deliberately provocative but maybe not dumb. The title itself is something a literalist engineer (myself) would reject, but is about the development of thought that is reflective, self referential. That’s an interesting train of thought. So I looked at the author and found: Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice https://www.reclaimingart.com/reclaiming-art-in-the-age-of-a... Not sure if I agree…
> deliberately provocative Is it? Or perhaps it's a point of view that you don't agree with? What makes it "deliberate"? The author takes a different PoV than perhaps the most folks here but that's because most folks here are accountants: > [...] Werner Herzog, for instance, once defended his practice of staging or manipulating scenes in his documentaries by distinguishing two kinds of truth. The first is the purely…
> Is it?
Absolutely. It is the nature of sharing radical ideas with the world to be provocative. The range of reactions in this thread alone supports the "provocative" part, and of course it's deliberate. Otherwise you would be saying that the author is not aware of how uncommon these ideas are, which I would find extremely hard to believe.
> It's not black and white
Yet you are so firmly convinced that it's white that your whole comment only talks about why it can't possibly be black. You haven't shared your opinion, all you have done is try to invalidate the one you responded to.
> most folks here are accountants:
But it's not that black and white, remember?
Re: How art invented humanity
#18Well this is fun, it is deliberately provocative but maybe not dumb. The title itself is something a literalist engineer (myself) would reject, but is about the development of thought that is reflective, self referential. That’s an interesting train of thought. So I looked at the author and found: Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice https://www.reclaimingart.com/reclaiming-art-in-the-age-of-a... Not sure if I agree…
> deliberately provocative Is it? Or perhaps it's a point of view that you don't agree with? What makes it "deliberate"? The author takes a different PoV than perhaps the most folks here but that's because most folks here are accountants: > [...] Werner Herzog, for instance, once defended his practice of staging or manipulating scenes in his documentaries by distinguishing two kinds of truth. The first is the purely…
It doesn't even make sense, provocative is a good thing for an article to be to most people! It's nice to be moved whichever way by someone else's writing!
There is an assumption on this forum I see a lot that any published written work has some hypothetical ground-level, some wholly un-ornamented, just-the-facts form, and anything the writer adds beyond that is a kind immoral indulgence. With this, provocative is bad because its unnecessary to some 'truer' telos of the text.
It's a kind of funny misunderstanding of writing to see here, because its exactly the one you'd expect a programmer to have!
Re: How art invented humanity
#19I've been reading Wengrow and Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything", and one of the main points they've made so far is that once modern humans became recognizable as such, we were doing all the human-type things we do now: thinking about our place in the world, debating different ways to live and their pros and cons, and so forth. We tend to think of prehistoric humans as being stupid cavemen, but I suspect we'd find th…
I wish there was any way to know when language was developed in (proto?) humans. Our complex grammar is pretty unique in the animal kingdom, and it's clearly linked to our cognition. You can get pretty far with mere vocabulary (just look at the great apes), but once you get into the world of words modifying words and recombining into sentences, you have an absolute explosion of expressible ideas. When did that happen…
There’s a great book called Paleopoetics by Christopher Collin’s that looks at exactly that
Re: How art invented humanity
#20_Tools_ have a response to this post.
There's a lot of archaeological evidence that art + toys were made before tools by a good amount of time IIRC. It makes sense to me as humans were always social creative creatures and the ideas that we didn't want to express ourselves 300,000 years ago seems kinda silly.