I mean, this is like refusing to eat food because Fritz Haber was morally dubious. Ooooh his wife committed suicide because he went against his promise to her and made chemical weapons! We mustn’t use his fertilisers.
I mean, I get it, but if we ran humanity this way we’d still be licking rocks and strangling animals one by one.
I dunno, I’d be hauling them out and laying them on the beach next to boca chica like dead whales. We’ve gotta start our first spaceship graveyard somewhere.
I suppose in today’s world it’s hard to know what was sabotage and what was an accident, and where the buck stops - particularly in marine matters. Was that anchor drag intentional? Did the operator know their charts were out of date? Did that trawl net really fail and snag like that?
I often think that a more interesting question would be that if there were another civilisation here on earth right now, would we even recognise it as such?
We are terribly preoccupied with tool use and physical artefacts as a defining factor of intelligence - anthropocentrism is of course pretty much inevitable, even when we talk of cephalopods.
> We are terribly preoccupied with tool use and physical artefacts as a defining factor of intelligence
In the context of civilisation, intelligence isn’t enough. Nomadic tribes are sapient, intelligent and have rich cultures, but they aren’t strictly civilisations.
The urban distinction is important because of economies of scale: pastoral societies are energy constrained. That doesn’t make them less interesting, again strictly speaking, personally it sort of does, but it does make them less powerful.
Within the Silurian context, the urban distinction is almost demanding: if humans stopped at Neolithic pastoralism, there is a good chance all evidence of our tool use would have disappeared within a few millennia, let alone millions of years.
> Some pastoral societies have taken serious issue with this view
Where is the evidence the Mongols took issue with this view? They certainly seemed to recognise the value of cities.
To my knowledge, the practice of falsely conflating intelligence and civilisation to be offended that not every society formed a civilisation is a modern occupation.
This is a slightly silly discussion because the 'civilization' the Silurian hypothesis is concerned with is something like human civilization as a whole.
Whether pastoralists are a 'civilization' (or even more fraught, 'civilized') seems like a completely arbitrary distinction to try to make, especially on the basis of something like 'cities'. The ability to organize, direct, coordinate, supply and project military power over great distances is a hallmark of plenty of things we think of as 'civilizations' and the Mongols were easily the world heavyweight champion of that, in their day. A great number of people found out the fact a stone wall is much harder to move than a yurt is not the tremendous civilizational advantage they thought it was.
> is a slightly silly discussion because the 'civilization' the Silurian hypothesis is concerned with is something like human civilization as a whole
Going back to the top comment: “Within the Silurian context, the urban distinction is almost demanding: if humans stopped at Neolithic pastoralism, there is a good chance all evidence of our tool use would have disappeared within a few millennia, let alone millions of years.”
I've done archaeological work in Mongolia. The oldest things I've found predate the last glacial maximum. Those rocks might not have survived a few million more years, but I can certainly think of lithics that would.
Maybe but it's also because these things are evidence of cultural transmission - a thing for which there hasn't been strong evidence of in other species and people do look for it in other ways.
When talking about aliens people often use the word "civilisation" to mean just "intelligence" and perhaps that's what you're doing because you're thinking about something that doesn't resemble a human civilisation. I agree with you that an alien intelligence might be very different from a human civilisation. Also, an alien intelligence might not even qualify as a form of life (it might be an artificial intelligence).
our senses are only equipped to experience small subsets of the whole - there's a huge range of sounds impercetible to human ears, our eyes can only perceive light in the visible spectrum, a dog's nose can detect orders of magnitude more information than a human's.
if the five senses can only percieve a fraction of that which they have been honed for over millennia, it's not unreasonable to wonder if there is much more to the world/earth than meets the eye, inaccessible and unintelligible to physical ape life or existing in ways we aren't equipped to percieve.
> hallmark of civilization is right in the etymology -- the existence of cities.
That is not really the etymology of "civilisation" though. City and civilisation share etymological roots, but city is not the etymological origin of the world civilisation.
And of course then we just ask the question: what are cities? Do gopher, or prairie dog colonies count? (or are those just towns? :)) How about ant colonies or bee hives?
Clearly all of the above share some similarities with some human settlements. They also have important differences of course. So if we want to decide if there are other "civilisations" on Earth parallel with us, we have to be more precise with our definitions.
> city is not the etymological origin of the world civilisation
Civilisations are a subset of societies [1]. Urbanisation is commonly held as a divider between complex societies and full-blown civilisations.
> then we just ask the question: what are cities?
This is valid. I’d say the defining attribute is economies of scale. Ant colonies and bee hives demonstrate elements of this; the sum is greater than the whole.
Whether ants and bees form complex societies is less debatable, unless we reduce the terms to mean intricate where we begin enveloping colonies of trees and every social animal, potentially even just multicellular life, which while poetically pleasing isn’t useful.
Or a beehive. Bees moved into the basement window of my house and watching them go in and out it seemed to me that this single beehive had more departures and arrivals than all the commercial airports in the world put together.
If you look at the problem of "bee decline" from the viewpoint of the beekeeper where you are responsible for it you are responsible for a "city" of 50,000 insects that faces all kinds of threats from the inside and outside.
Not to be able to have evidence that you were there? Even if you weren’t?
I feel like the whole thing is like some kind of cognitive hangover - “this ticket is important and I must not lose it before the show” turns into “I can never, ever dispose of this piece of paper”.
I understand. I struggle to get rid of things, not because I like the stuff, but because I don't have a great memory, and things are what trigger memories for me.
The point of an experience is totally about the experience, it's why I don't even take my phone out to take pictures or videos at a show. People get hung up thinking this is about "proving" you were at a show, they even get surprisingly angry in comments about this on my ads, but it's totally not the point.
This has nothing to do with the actual concert experience or proof, it has to do with your tradition of collecting ticket stubs that you can go back to for that nostalgia bump and/or to keep track of every event you went to. It's about having a jar/box/album of memories.
If you've been collecting for 20 years and suddenly someone takes away your ability to add to your collection, you are going to get pissed off, and trust me, people definitely do.
Sure you can do anything else to collect, but the power of a streak/tradition/collection is real. It drove me to create this entire business because looking at a printed email or post-it note just made me mad instead of nostalgic.
Going through my binder and remembering that I saw Nine Inch Nails at a 1000 person venue is awesome, or when we saw Sabaton with 40 people and the singer just came into the audience to put his arm around me while singing, and it's not like I'm going to stop going to 10-30 concerts a year for the rest of my life, so more cool things will happen, memories will need to be preserved and it's nice to have them all fit into one album instead of anything else. I've got tickets for shows I've forgotten I've even seen, but it's in there with the mix which is handy. Forgotten venues, crazy low prices, "holy shit this massive band opened for these guys back then???".
Some people see tickets as trash and clutter, that's fine, for others it's a precious memento, despite how useless, wasteful, or unnecessary it is. I've got room for junk in my house that's meaningful for me, so it doesn't bother me to have, quite the opposite.
The token, whatever it is, is a cue or an index card for those experiences and memories. I have a few stashes of old concert tickets and others in scattered drawers, pockets and containers. Stumbling on one is a great rush of memories, and I move it to the aggregated collection.
We really lost something with Print At Home tickets, it's just garbage afterwards, not a permanent thing tied to that event.
I love this idea and want to backfill some select tickets into my bucket of memory cues.
you could say the same about taking a picture of a special moment, it's a souvenir, people have been keeping things that remind them of past experiences since like forever
Well if you've got a pile of ticket stubs that you've been collecting for 20 years and suddenly you can't keep that tradition alive, it kind of ticks you off. Sure you can start adding printed photos or something else, but it ruins your consistent collection and/or your streak.
I specifically have a ticket stub binder and seeing blank spots, or print outs or post it notes just made me mad instead of nostalgic. I can't shove tour posters or tshirts in there, so this was the solution for me. I have over 200 band tshirts, but I don't buy one at every show.
Never discount the power of a streak or continuing a tradition or collection. I just talked to a guy the other day whose jar of ticket stubs is his prized collection, even if he never opens it to reflect. Some people go to one concert every few years, others go to shows and games every week.
Yes, the experience is the point. But the memory afterward can be just powerful. Visual and tactical stimuli can enhance the memory of the experience, long after it occurred.
Yeah, there’s fundamental stuff that animals just don't know. Like cats have the instinct to hunt, and are good at that - but unless they’ve seen another cat eating prey, they don’t realise that that’s a thing that they can do, and you’d think that would be a pretty core learning to pass on.
Yeah, this is precisely the kind of stuff I was talking about 48 hours ago, when everyone was telling me that ML will never find any kind of practical application.
There are so many fundamental fields - engineering, chemistry, biology, physics - which stand to have absolute quantum leaps in knowledge and capability with this technology.
You say this, yet people such as Helen Keller suggest that a full sensorium is not necessary to be a full human. She had some grasp of the idea of colour, of sound, and could use the words around them appropriately - yet had no firsthand experience of either. Is it really so different?
I think “we” each comprise a number of models, language being just one of them - however an extremely powerful one, as it allows the transmission of thought across time and space. It’s therefore understandable that much of what we recognise as conscious thought, of a model of the world, emerges from such an information dense system. It’s literally developed to describe the world, efficiently and completely, and so that symbol map an LLM carries possibly isn’t that different to our own.
It's not about the necessity of specific sensory inputs, but rather about the difference in type of model that will be built when the goal is passive, and auto-regressive, as opposed to when the goal is interactive.
In the passive/auto-regressive case you just need to model predictive contexts.
In the interactive case you need to model dynamical behaviors.
I don’t know that I see the difference - but I suppose we’re getting into Brains In Vats territory. In my view (well, Baudrillard’s view, but who’s counting?) a perfect description of a thing is as good as the thing itself, and we in fact interact with our semantic description of reality, rather than with raw reality itself - the latter, when it manifests in humans, results in vast cognitive dysfunction - Sachs wrote somewhat in the topic of unfiltered sensorium and the impact on the ability to operate in the world.
So yeah. I think what these models do and what we do is more similar than we might realise.
I mean, I get it, but if we ran humanity this way we’d still be licking rocks and strangling animals one by one.
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