[ransackdev]

The more we discover about the past the more weird it all is and to me makes less sense overall. People have lived very similar to our societies today, for thousands and thousands of years. Some had plumbing. Some built pyramids. Some did complex math and science. Some made gunpowder and explosives and had rockets. Yet for thousands and thousands of years, nothing was really happening and then within the last 250ish years we went from electric becoming a thing, to super computers in our watches and robots in space. The part that doesn’t make sense is why that didn’t get kicked off thousands of years ago when there wasn’t much of a difference in terms of advancement. Why’d it explode one day almost like we got a helping hand? Shouldn’t we be 1000 years more advanced now than we currently are, because these things could have just as easily been kicked off then?

I am not at all able to say I know enough history to know if I’m way off base to ask that question. I must be glossing over some significant reasons that couldn’t have happened. It’s just weird to me.

A quote from Mad Men that helps demonstrate the sharp hockey stick of progress.

“She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She was an astronaut.”

[goodbyesf]

> Why’d it explode one day almost like we got a helping hand?

The fundamental difference between the past civilizations and modern civilization is that all past civilizations relied primarily on human/animal power and modern society relies on non-human power. This shift occurred in the early 1800s with the development of thermodynamics and the scientific understanding of the relationship between heat, work and energy. Once we could decouple work from human population, it allowed modern civilization to do more work with less humans. Something previous civilizations never were able to achieve. A train could carry more goods across the country far faster than a thousand horses. An excavator can dig out more dirt in an hour than a thousand men. Whether trains, excavators or super computers, the work that is done is due to thermodynamics.

[extasia]

Well for one there was no printing press via which to persist knowledge and translate it cheaply through time and space.

Imagine what an individual could achieve technologically today, if they were unable to access any materials or knowledge that was accrued over the history of our species. The result would probably be a subset of the things you describe as originating from before 250 years ago, but they would certainly not be splitting atoms or mapping the human genome.

[ransackdev]

Knowledge was spread in written form before the printing press. Yes less of it and a lot slower, but you don’t have plumbing systems or built pyramids without knowledge being persisted for generations. The printing press is a factor I think but it not existing doesn’t explain why no progress was made for so long imo.

[extasia]

Of course knowledge was persisted in written form, but it was not industrialised. I would imagine progress is dominated by a small number of individuals, if information is dispersed across society broadly, your chances of those capable individuals having access to the knowledge requisite to advance the field is much higher.

How many geniuses did not advance science because they were ignorant of the current state of the art?

[adolph]

One intriguing conjecture [0] about the difference of now compared to many thousands of years past is that human consciousness as we know it (if we know it) didn't exist until the last 2,000 years. The hardware was there but the thought patterns were not.

0. [In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes], Jaynes' idea was that if you went back and you looked at very early historical texts--particularly for him, the Iliad--the way that characters talk about their own minds and their own drives is extremely unusual, or you might say not at all modern. . . . But, what's actually going on, given what we know about the specialization between the hemispheres of the brain, is that essentially one side of the brain, one hemisphere of the brain is really communicating to the other. And, full human consciousness had not really been established at that time.

0. https://www.econtalk.org/erik-hoel-on-consciousness-free-wil...

[ransackdev]

Yet 12,000 years ago there existed cultures who were similar enough to have sequin ornaments for decoration. Sure, we are not the same as them, that’s fine, but also, we kinda were in terms of common societal things. We were putting sequins on stuff 12k years ago which means they had customs, traditions, ceremonies, organization, tools, knowledge retention and exchange. That’s stuff we still do today, so what caused 12k years to go by before we blasted into being an advanced species in 200 odd years? It’s interesting because every answer I get to explain it just makes me wonder why even more because the sudden progress just doesn’t plot, it should be earlier and we keep digging up more evidence we were more advanced long ago, and often before we thought too, then things seemingly just stalled and went nowhere for millennia

I can’t remember what culture it was but there’s evidence of primitive batteries in pottery. Long before electric. That is odd no?

[dmn322]

The baghdad batteries are nothing compared to the antikythera mechanism, which comes from a similar time frame. This timeframe is after Jayne's hypothesized breakdown of the bicameral mind, though, so it's not quite the same.

Jaynes suggests that a different state of mind... one of essentially hypnosis allowed civilization to expand up to a certain point. In this type of civilization... dubbed "bicameral", both the left and right hemispheres' linguistic areas were active. The right hemisphere essentially provided our "internal monologue" but in the form of auditory hallucinations. These hallucinations provided the basis for remote governance and were ultimately interpreted as gods by people, but these civilizations would fall apart beyond a certain size because the hallucinations would start to fade.

The elaborate rituals that became more elaborate as time went on was attributed to these hallucinations starting to fade as the world became more crowded with these types of civilizations. The part that gave me chills was his description of depictions of gods: up until a certain time, people were always depicted conversing with gods face to face. The gods were present, and the ruler described conversations with them. Until one point in Sumeria, when a frieze was made where god was simply a dot. Depictions of god as a dot or a symbol became more and more common, as did the deference that rulers had. Rather than conversing, they were kneeling and pleading. There were recorded complaints that the voice of the gods were fading. Eventually the voices became associated with demons. The bible records systematic purges of people who heard voices like these.

It's a pretty crazy yet weirdly hard to dismiss theory, and I wish there were more ways to find evidence to support it or debunk it.

An alternative theory for why there were so many "false starts" so to speak, is described by Joseph Tainter in "the collapse of complex societies"... which I find pretty interesting. It's much more mainstream. Basically he turns the question on its head and says "why does civilization exist at all?" That complexity takes energy. That energy wouldn't be wasted unless there were a reason... a positive return on investment in complexity. He says societies break down when the marginal returns on that investment inevitably decrease. So for instance a Native American tribe which developed around a water-sparse area and fluorished by creating cisterns and presumably trading water for other supplies developed, but as the created more cisterns, each new cistern provided less 'bang for the buck'. Eventually they hit the point where building more cisterns was actually counterproductive. The cisterns were too close together so they were cannibalizing each other's trade, and their source of water was starting to dry up, but that's what their society was organized around. Those with influence gained more wealth by creating more, even though the net benefit to the civilization was negative, so they kept doing it. You could say the society existed by virtue of a surplus-generating algorithm. But those algorithms eventually eat through the source of the surplus, and then you need something else.

[angiosperm]

Jaynes is certainly wrong in detail, but it is not too far-fetched to suggest that the notion of "self" was an invention, perhaps at first closely held among shamans, that then gradually spread to the wider population.

[ransackdev]

You’re saying the conscious or minds eye is an invention or do you mean something different. To me, everyone is born with the notion of “self”.

[dmn322]

Jaynes says the concept of self derived from linguistic metaphor. Until there was a concept of the “mind” as a container that could have thoughts “in” it, he says thoughts were experienced as hallucinations from the right temporal lobe, and people were essentially acting in a hypnotic state driven by those hallucinations

[ransackdev]

Hmm, I remember being 4 years old, not knowing anything at all about the brain, the mind, or much else for that matter. I actually was pretty confused about everything around me. But I knew the voice in my head was me thinking, and I know for a fact that not a single thing was taught to me directly or indirectly to influence that. I just knew that those were my thoughts, because I was thinking them. I’m not special so I’d guess most people “just know” that it’s their own mind, without having to know what a mind is a or have any knowledge at all, and that they aren’t hallucinations.

It’s pretty weird to me that many folks view the people in our past as being unable to be intelligent near or on par with today’s levels. These people were not hypnotized by hallucinations, that’s saying they were not smart enough to even have a thought that they could understand it came from themselves. Yet they were smart enough to develop pulleys and create pyramids, or many other wonders of the world. Things we literally do know how they weee able to do at that time in the past. Things that none of our modern structures will outlast. Things that took understanding of complex subjects, capacity planning, raw material refining, site surveying, astronomy, physics, math, weather patterns, etc.

I wonder in 12k years if humans will look at us and say we were incapable of knowing that our thoughts were ours and lived in a hypnotic state viewing our thoughts as hallucinations. They couldn’t possibly know for one. And also, doesn’t that seem like a odd way to view people who accomplished things we still don’t fully understand?

[angiosperm]

By the time you were 4, you had already absorbed much of the structure of your parents' language, including its models of self.

People were not less intelligent in the past, but they knew less, and had a radically smaller fund of inventions, including mental models and practices, to draw upon. Late speculation about "hypnosis" and "hallucinations" have to be understood as analogies. We know with certainty, anyway, that notions of gods and sacrifice were invented at some particular time, and passed along. And, we know it was common in many places to perceive carved figures talking.

In 12ky, if we don't eliminate ourselves, we will certainly have many inventions that we will be unable to understand life without, and be left to try to imagine it.

[dmn322]

I'm not saying I agree with his hypothesis, but I admire its craziness. He's well aware that it's out there, and he makes some pretty compelling points... doing a pretty thorough analysis of the earliest available literature. For instance in the Illiad, there are essentially no direct references to thoughts or even feeling. He lists the many points where people literally say they're talking to god all throughout ancient literature. They say it in a way that doesn't sound like a metaphor at all. The rulers say something like "<insert god's name> told me to gather 1000lbs of barley and feed him 10 lbs and take him for a procession"... so that is their edict.

I don't think he's suggesting they were stupid. I think what he's suggesting is much more a reflection on the power of metaphor and the sort of fragility of the psyche more than anything. And he addresses something that I've never seen anyone else address. If previous civilizations were so similar psychologically, why don't we see more literature before 2000 bc that contains metaphor. Why doesn't the earliest writing contain self-reflection?

In fact if you see all these ancient people worshipping gods, building gigantic monuments to them, sacrificing humans (many of whom happily participated)... then it seems like you must assume they're stupid on some level to believe they were psychologically the same as us but they just lacked the critical thinking to put their labor to better use. And that they were just lying when they said they were talking to gods, depicting it on friezes, etc.

Hellen Keller said she really did not feel conscious until after she learned language. She had no concept of self. I could never make sense of that either. It seemed like it must be a fluke, like she was exaggerating it to play into people's expectations. But her description sounds 100% sincere.

As for you being 4 years old and being able to differentiate yourself and the thoughts in your head. That's years after you learned "I" and "you".. Years after you learned to remember.

Anyway, when I first started reading the book, it was with extreme skepticism... kind of hate-reading. The book was a gift, and I read it because I liked Westworld, the HBO show which heavily references it. But I have to say, as someone who has been staunchly anti-humanist.. who has advocated for the same basic thought you're advocating for... studying history through the lens of an average person who is just like us... believing that the average people didn't really believe the religious stuff and it was just forced on them by the elites.. this book made me question those deeply held assumptions. I'm still not sold, but I think it needs to not be dismissed offhand without a legitimate evidence-based criticism.

[angiosperm]

Except we don't really know enough about neuroanatomy to connect anything about lobes to anything historical. What we do know is that neuroanatomy hasn't changed in the last 50,000 years. So what did change is, necessarily, in the domain of the software, which in brains means ideas and concepts. And inventions. Inventing a theory of mind must have been mind-blowing.

[dmn322]

We do know that stimulating the right temporal lobe with electrodes causes auditory hallucinations. This is the same area that is responsible for actual speech processing on the left side.

We also know that the left side wernicke and broca's areas are used in conscious language production while the right side does not seem to be at all (in the vast majority of people, with some exceptions where the lateralization is flipped).

Where it gets interesting is his review of historical literature and cataloguing use of metaphor (or lack thereof) in ancient writing.

He takes the Illiad and shows where in the original greek, there's essentially no metaphor for internal emotional or psychological states that's conclusively non-physical. Even apparent references to emotional states reference physiological responses, not specifically emotions. This was right on the cusp of when he suggests the change occured. In the Illiad when someone describes their motivation, it's almost always attributed to a god telling them to do it. Similar accounts abound in literature.

There are many accounts of ancient rulers directly conversing with some hallucinated being as if they're there. As is there art depicting it. But it slows down around and stops around the time of the bronze age collapse in the region.

His suggestion is that it originated with people hallucinating their dead relatives, their dead tribal leaders etc. which is why they would sort of prop them up like they're still alive and have something to say.

I was very, very skeptical at first, but the neuroscience was actually pretty thorough for being written in the 80s and I couldn't find any of it that has been debunked to my knowledge.