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Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…
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I wrote this as an answer to a different question but I think it applies to what you're asking as well > Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's.…
1. Why is that a realization, are there really people who say "Scandinavians are just mechanical" or "9th century people were made out of wood"? Why would their lives be assumed not to be "real", what even is that mindset? 2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.
Yes, there are a very great many!
The philosopher David Gray says that most modern thinking sees our way of life and liberalism and "progress" as meaning growth and change. It implies it is inevitable, a kind of always changing improvement.
Change that has occurred is for the good and its impossible to go back. I like the ${current_year} meme where someone says "it's 2026 things have changed, sweety". The joke is funny because that's what people actually say and that they say this every year but they don't notice that they say that every year.
So the modern way of life has many people who view people in the past as not real, as figuratively made of wood, who are primitive, who didn't lead complex lives.
David Gray concludes by saying that Liberalism therefore needs to be constantly fought for, that you cannot rest on your laurels and think that humanity is naturally and inexorably progressing.
These scrolls and History as a whole challenges a fundamental psychological investment in modern liberalism.
To think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better directly opposes a kind of empathy about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are. The scrolls should humble us.
Given this.
> 2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.
They are more like ours than we like to imagine. We prefer to think of ourselves as improved.
I can understand in the freewheeling days of the 19th century, but I'm rather surprised that they'd be so cavalier in the 70s and 80s...
Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…
They already learned to use light and fire to transfer data over long distance. How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable? But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things like social media and AI, which destroy our brain. Ancient societies valued wisdom much more than us and were much more careful when introducing new technologies. It was fascinating for me to…
They would be impressed with our technology even if it has downsides. Wisdom is knowing humans and technology and imperfect tools.
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They already learned to use light and fire to transfer data over long distance. How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable? But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things like social media and AI, which destroy our brain. Ancient societies valued wisdom much more than us and were much more careful when introducing new technologies. It was fascinating for me to…
I suspect most of the critique even back then was around teaching from static written text, not the writing itself. In my experience that aligns well with modern education theory.
It's not that they didn't see the usefulness of books, it was more so about the overreliance on them and the effect it had on the education students would come away with, just as you say. A pretty reasonable concern, I think!
As an aside: One of the techniques students would be exposed to was the use of memory palaces, which remains helpful to this day where everyone has a computer in their pocket. Pretty cool stuff - technology of the mind!
> PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll: earlier attempts to open it by hand — in the nineteenth century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — destroyed its outer layers and left only the compact inner core, about 8 cm of an original height of 19–24 cm. I can understand in the freewheeling days of the 19th century, but I'm rather surprised that they'd be so cavalier in the 70s and 80s...
EDIT: Read some more into this. From Wikipedia and its sources:
> In 1969, Marcello Gigante founded the creation of the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri (Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi; CISPE). With the intention of working toward the resumption of the excavation of the Villa of the Papyri, and promoting the renewal of studies of the Herculaneum texts, the institution began a new method of unrolling. Using the 'Oslo' peeling method, the CISPE team separated individual layers of the papyri. One of the scrolls exploded into 300 parts, and another did similarly but to a lesser extent.
> The results were mixed: one of the scrolls literally exploded (into more than 300 bits) during the "peeling" and attempts to put the scraps back together gave little hope for success. The second - PHerc.Paris.2 -, on the other hand, had survived in a slightly less fragmented state.
So this was new science being done on the possibility of unrolling the scrolls and piecing together information from the fragments. Whether the fragments from PHerc. 1667 was decoded I'm not sure. The work has been digitized (and photographed with specific wavelengths of light where the ink is more distinguishable), but I couldn't figure out if it was open to the public anywhere.
Another interesting part: > In 1756, Abbot Piaggio, conserver of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library, used a machine he also invented, to unroll the first scroll, which took four years (millimeters per day). The results were then copied (since the writing disappeared: see above), reviewed by Hellenist academics, and then corrected once more, if necessary, by the unrolling/copying team.
So it's not like they never got anything useful out of the scrolls but kept on trying anyways.
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I am floored at these achievements. Such amazing work. If I may ask, when you started thinking about achieving this, what were the first attempts, ideas on how to go about it? What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve this ?
The process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building on previous work. Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously cl…
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> How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable? I mean, sure, the beacon fire transmits at the blistering rate of roughly one bit per several minutes, assuming nobody fell asleep on watch, the wood was dry, the fog cooperated, and the enemy hadn't already lit a fake beacon to mess with you. Fiber optic, by contrast, limps along at a measly several terabits per second. Not to mention the flex…
Well I didn't say it was achievable at the time. But is it really that unimaginable? > assuming nobody fell asleep on watch, the wood was dry, the fog cooperated, and the enemy hadn't already lit a fake beacon to mess with you. So you are talking about dealing with "packet" loss and data encryption, right? Those concepts were not new to them.
Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…
How about audio from pottery? That’s like magic.
Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…
They do, commonly, if you were to consider we may appear as nearly alien to Aristocreon and also consider that our contemporary idea of aliens as portrayed in sci-fi could just be humans of the future.