[ldjkfkdsjnv]

When you think about the scope of human history, and how little we know, it's sad to think of all the lost work. We only know things going back a few thousand years, but men who have our same cognition have been around for far longer. Plato spoke of a golden age, now long lost, where the flaura and fuana were so plentiful that men didn't need to work. Atlantis is mentioned, stories of a distant time, with men who maybe lived better than we do.

[jl6]

Sure, but that’s the Greek mythological version of the Garden of Eden story.

I find the reality even more interesting. What were humans thinking about 40,000 years ago, with their modern bodies and brains?

[pacman2]

Were they thinking?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...

[DonaldFisk]

Of which Richard Dawkins wrote: “It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I’m hedging my bets.”

[dhosek]

Ah Julian Jaynes, the Erich von Däniken of psychology.

[Koshkin]

Even with the abundance of plant and animal food, they were preoccupied with survival. There were too many things to be taken care of: avoiding falling prey to carnivores (including fellow humans), injuries, sickness; need to hunt and/or collect food, tend to children. There was just no time to think about much else. But the prehistoric form of communism made survival easier. In the later, more individualist, times, if you wanted to be able to spend time and your thoughts on something other than mere subsistence, you had to have servants.

[AlotOfReading]

Please don't make people out to be weird, primitive aliens when it's completely untrue. If you had ever read any of the numerous ethnographies out there, you'd know that they gossip, tell stories, joke, and complain like any other people. Special emphasis on the complaining and joking, because those tend to be important social behaviors. 'resource-related' discussion happens mainly during work hours and then it's still not the majority of discussion in the numbers I've seen.

[cmrdporcupine]

I recall a rather flippant and sensationalist video with a YouTuber interviewing some present day hunter gatherers on more philosophical matters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAGjuRwx_Y8 "Asking Hunter-Gatherers Life's Toughest Questions"

I got the impression there was some language barrier stuff going on, but the answer to many questions was... "meat"

[decasteve]

I think of that too.

I also think about how some of the really great works have stood the test of time — like Plato’s. Then there are really great works that were once common and popular but have fallen out of contemporary thought.

Given the rich and documented history we do have at our disposal, it feels to me that the present era is much less diverse and more ignorant than it ought to be.

[dr_dshiv]

It is INSANE that we havent lost a single book of Plato's. In contrast, we lost 3/4 of Aristotle's books.

[dan-robertson]

One general thing is that it is the most ‘classic’ works that are copied the most and most frequently. Early works in philosophy from Plato or even Aristotle are much more likely to survive than, say, philosophers from later antiquity (can you even think of many?) Of course that isn’t to say that all the most ancient philosophers’ works survived—we have little of Parmenides for example. Perhaps another reason for Plato and Aristotle to survive particularly is their relevance to Christian theology, but I don’t really buy that as we have more Plato than Aristotle but Christian theology is more Aristotelian.

A simple argument about mathematics or engineering can be made by going to Constantinople and looking at the Hagia Sophia. Much technical and practical mathematical ability would have been needed at the time to construct it but we have little interesting mathematics from that time (6th century). I find it improbable that we would have such mathematicians as Archimedes and Apollonius around 250BCE, then roughly nothing for 750 years, and then the Hagia Sophia. I find it more believable that the tradition of mathematics continued but that only those most ancient, foundational and well-regarded works were sufficiently reproduced to make it to the present. To be clear, I am not trying to claim that one needs the kind of mathematicians produced by Apollonius to build a large dome but rather that a society capable of continuing that kind of technical ability for so long ought to have also been supporting the continuation of technical mathematics.

One then has to wonder: if this work was being done in the Greek-speaking world, what did this continuation look like? Among the known works, some of Apollonius’ work was not really improved upon until Riemann over 2000 years after his death.

[dr_dshiv]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_of_Eupalinos

Also the Temple of Hera was an accomplishment then. Pythagoras must have been strongly influenced by this amazing math/engineering culture. But the evidence was in the artifacts, not books.

[dan-robertson]

Pythagoras probably didn’t exist.

[dr_dshiv]

How do you figure? He didn't write anything, but his contemporary Heraclitus did. And Heraclitus insulted him for being a syncretic thinker. Why would he if he didn't exist?

[pessimizer]

> Plato spoke of a golden age, now long lost, where the flaura and fuana were so plentiful that men didn't need to work.

That's an example of the belief that all things were known in a golden age, and that the process of discovery is actually rediscovery of the knowledge of the elders. Common in a lot of pre-modern societies that had ancestor-worship. In old B.C.E. pre-imperial Chinese philosophy, before deductive reasoning had been formalized/discovered, one of the basic tests of whether a thing was true was "conformity to the teaching and practice of the ancient sage kings." Which meant that you had to cite a mention in works about the ancients of the practice or belief that you were recommending, or grounds for a reasonable belief that they practiced it.

It's the opposite of Whig history.

[coliveira]

You don't need to go to old China to give an example of this phenomenon. Fundamentalist christians nowadays still have the same mindset, nothing can be true if it's not supported by their ancient texts.

[ARandomerDude]

> nothing can be true if it's not supported by their ancient texts

I'm probably what most people would call a fundamentalist Christian but your claim is wildly inaccurate. For example I know we're discussing this on HN even though the Bible says no such thing.

Everyone has an epistemology that includes multiple sources of knowledge. There is some form of knowledge that every person thinks is ultimately authoritative. In other words if two sources make competing claims, whom do I believe? This varies based on the credibility of the claimant and the reasons for the claim. For example, if a con-artist told you he would deposit $1M in your bank account if you give him your credentials, and an FBI agent told you the guy was a scammer, based on the facts and reputations of those involved you would probably believe the FBI agent. The greater the credibility of the source, the more confidence you have in their claims. At some point you reach a level of what you think is the ultimate foundation for what you know (even if that foundation is you).

The "fundamentalist" position is that God is the most credible being, given his infallibility and omniscience. If a person disagrees with God, no matter how fervently, my epistemology is that the person is mistaken and God is correct.

That is, however, very different from believing that the Bible is the only source of knowledge. In fact, the Bible explicitly states that there are other sources of knowledge (which common sense would also tell you), for example Psalm 19 and Romans 1.

[coliveira]

Your reasoning is circular: nobody is "disagreeing with God", because nobody knows what "God" thinks. Fundamentalists just follow ancient texts that present themselves as the "word of God".

[aksss]

I think that's a little different though - the Christian critique isn't that 'once everyone knew everything', but more that everything new presents challenges and opportunities to the human experience that are fundamentally no different than those that humans have always grappled with. Thus, every new challenge can be informed by principles in received wisdom. That's far less golden-agey, maybe more jaded or stoic. Read Ecclesiastes for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...

"There is nothing new under the sun" comes from this. I've never read this as saying that in a material sense there is nothing new, but more that the base class library and the primitive types don't change, if I may accost you with a silly analogy.

[bombcar]

It’s also possible that much of what was lost was frankly not worth preserving, perhaps time has acted as a great filter.

[cjsplat]

Or also vice-versa, and what we have is a sample of the quantity peak, rather than quality.

Perhaps Gilgamesh is the equivalent of I Dream of Jeannie.

:-)

[User23]

Gilgamesh definitely reads like a comic book. I would be surprised if it weren’t popular entertainment.

[quotemstr]

Aeschylus did great work, winning prize after prize in playwriting competitions. Only seven of his 90 or so plays survive. It'd be great to read the rest of this work and there's no particular reason to believe it's of low quality.

[periphrasis]

Yeah, I was about to make the exact same comment albeit mentioning Sophocles and his roughly 120 plays.

If you’re into classical literature, what was lost can be extremely tantalizing. I read Cicero’s De Re Publica recently, of which only about 35-ish% survived. What’s there is so interesting, both for what it says about the structure of the Roman republic as it existed, and what an educated traditional Roman of the senatorial class thought about how best to structure society and government. The concluding Dream of Scipio is enough to make you cry, not just for its extreme beauty and elegiac tone, but also for the fact that the dialogue it concludes only came down to us in a mutilated state.

While much of what was lost was surely dross, we also lost some of the great achievements of human culture too.

[tragomaskhalos]

This quote from the great Carl Sagan, concerning the library of Alexandria but generally applicable: "We do know that of the 123 plays of Sophocles in the Library, only 7 survived. One of those seven is Oedipus Rex. Similar numbers apply to the works of Aeschylus and Euripides. It is a little as if the only surviving works of a man named William Shakespeare were Coriolanus and A Winter’s Tale, but we had heard that he had written certain other plays, unknown to us but apparently prized in his time – works entitled Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet."

[quickthrowman]

> If you’re into classical literature, what was lost can be extremely tantalizing.

I would very much like to read Suetonius’ Lives of Famous Whores and would bet I’m not the only one.

[sramsay]

Or Diogenes’ On Farting.

[867-5309]

and Steinbacchus' Of Nice Women

[User23]

I don’t disagree. Back then copying manuscripts was exceedingly expensive, so it’s not unreasonable to suppose that the other 83 were good, but insufficiently so for enough copies to be made to assure survival.

At least we have Bignose’s[1] pickup and breakup manuals.

[1] Publius Ovidius Naso

[golemotron]

Strangely like the filter we are creating now. Digital storage may be more ephemeral than stone. I would not lose sleep if much of the content created so far this century were lost.

[bombcar]

There’s a form of democracy of duplication - on average the more popular (which isn’t necessarily a substitute for quality to be sure) things will be more duplicated, and more chances to survive.

[MeinBlutIstBlau]

This is how I perceive it as well. I'm not necessarily advocating for christianity or islam here, but there's a reason they've been much more successful than other various pagan religions.

[dr_dshiv]

Yet, they are not as successful as the secret Platonic influence underlying Christianity, Islam and the secular Academy. There are many mysteries about the past still to be discovered in the future.

[iammisc]

There is no secret platonic influence in catholicism. In the latin church, it's openly encouraged. I was just discussing platonic ideals after mass today with fellow parishioners and how important it is to pursue truth. The priest had even mentioned Plato in his homily on the nature of truth There's nothing secret here. Christianity is openly and unashamedly compatible with many aspects of Plato's philosophy. In fact, the catholic church has also ruled on the validity of other similarly secular philosophies of other civilizations (see the Chinese rites controversy or Merton's books on Taoism -- Christ the eternal Tao). In general, other than the protestants, Christianity does not require you to immediately reject the works of secular philosophers.

In fact, Islam and christianity are why we still study Plato today. There is no secret or conspiracy.

[dr_dshiv]

I really appreciate your exposition. Maybe "open secret" is more appropriate. It is certainly esoteric, but not a conspiracy as you say.

But let me put it this way. Most Christians would be surprised to discover that the original conception of god is Platonic — i.e., a god of cosmic unity, a god of ineffable oneness, as opposed to a singular god. After all, it is only in the esoteric Judaic tradition that the god of Moses is a principle and not a person.

Pope Theophilus supposedly massacred 10,000 monks who believed in the non-person version of God. Happy to share links on that history.

[iammisc]

I'm not sure you can call the original conception of the abrahamic god as platonic. Platonism comes in when we start getting Jews who are awaiting the Logos, Jesus Christ. Certainly platonism helped pave the way for the success of Christianity.

Also I don't think there was a pope Theophilus. Perhaps you are referring to a non roman pontiff.