why don't we feel any smarter than our ancestors?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

From studying human history, I am convinced that if we could build a working time machine that allowed us to interview our ancestors from throughout all of human history, we would find that ALL of our ancestors were just as confident in their ideas as we are in ours today. That is, if we traveled to various points in time throughout history and asked a random sample of people “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate mankind’s overall understanding of the world you live in?”, I am convinced that the average answer would be the same for every point in time.

Our ancestors didn’t write about how dumb they felt or about how overwhelming the world was. Instead, they wrote about their concepts of truth and their ideas about “the way things are supposed to be”; just as people do today.

So, my question is this: If all of our scientific/intellectual achievements over the past 1,000 years or so represent a true display of intelligence, then why don’t we feel any smarter than our earliest ancestors?

Or to put it another way: How could beings with such a limited concept of reality feel just as intelligent as beings that have, what appear to be, much more sophisticated concepts of reality?

2

In a nut shell, we aren’t. We just have more words to prove it.

3

Currently
there is no difference between
you
and
the first caveman.

See:
lmajors.freeservers.com/You.htm

.

4

We’re not.

We just have more information to draw from.

By and large much of human existence is information relocation. Very few actually contribute anything new to the pile, though many contribute to different ways in which to move the information.

5

If I hold a ‘concept of reality’, it is because I believe it to be the best one available. It is the best one, because it has the most evidence supporting it. But since my knowledge of the world is finite (for the moment, at least), there will be an overwhelming amount of factors which I am not aware of. When I become aware of some factor which invalidates the concept I have until then viewed best, that concept is demoted and replaced by some other, which takes in account the new information.

It is in the human nature to make generalizations about other people, in the format of 'if I am x, then others should be x as well." This is because such generalizations are necessary to get along other people, as one can only ever know how it feels to be oneself. However, this leads one to believe that if one does not know of any evidence which argues against a concept of reality, then neither doe anyone else – which brings us close to thinking there is no countering evidence. And thus, certainty that our concept is the ultimate truth. As much certainty as there can be. Just like everyone else in history.

6

Oskari V. wrote:

I’m not so sure about this, Oskari V.. You cannot always choose what you believe, particularly in an ontological context. William James’ explantion of belief is one of the most compelling philosophical pieces I’ve come across. Basically, he argues that what you believe more or less chooses you in the sense that you cannot ‘make’ yourself belief in ‘x’ if you don’t, or vice versa. Belief is not a purely rational endeavor.

To address the OP, I’d disagree on this point:

jde_glad wrote:

Well, I personally feel smarter than our early ancestors. I understand the way the world operates much more accurately than early ancestors. In fact, any one of us could go back as little as 300 years ago with our public school educations and be considered Einsteinian.

And I’m not just saying that because I know the Earth revolves around the sun, or that pulleys make work easier. I’m saying it because the proof is in the pudding. All of these bits of information that we take for granted add up to a better quality of life. We live longer and better than we ever had in history. It’s this cumulative knowledge that allows us to learn new things based on correct presumptions.

We truly stand on the shoulders of giants.

7

Has he heard of Pavlov’s dogs?

8

Haha I like the reply tentative!

Well maybe you could bring in the conception of cognition, (yeah more big words) that we have the ability to think beyond our current ability, but by the time we’re there, we get ‘comfortable’. So anyone who holds a particular viewpoint holds it because they are ‘comfortable’ with what they have defined for themselves. By that very nature, it doesn’t matter how ‘intelligent’ their truths and ideas are, as long as they hold that conviction, its quite hard to sway them from what they believe. What one says is believed by others insofar as they can persuade others that one holds this belief truly.

Perhaps ties into the argument of the hardest thing to argue are beliefs, because beliefs are based on faith (hey - we have faith that logic works for us. If we didn’t, then we may not have used it.)

Maybe it has something to do more with emotion rather than being smart?

Your asking how come we ‘feel’ just as intelligent? When feeling doesn’t really play too much of a part when it comes to explaining ones understanding of a world we live in.

We all have similar emotions -hurt, anger, frustration, as well as love, connection, and inspiration. Different ways of explaining the same general emotions.

I actually have to say, I believe some of our ancestors acted with much more intelligence than we currently do. We rely on television etc entertainment value in things that are easy to grasp and take no brainpower whatsoever. You could almost say we can sit back and be spoonfed mainstream information nowadays.

Perhaps some field of interest may be mob/crowd psychology? There is quite a huge gap, I think, in the individual and the collective. They both have different motives (I’m talking about them in more specific terms now) the individual to strive to make a change, to make a difference, and a crowd (or majority) which look to a collective safety ‘what’s best for everyone’.

Anyone know what these fields are called? Specifically?

9

d0rkyd00d wrote:

No, d0rkyd00d, he would not have. Pavlov’s experiments were carried out in 1900, and weren’t known to western scientists until 1927. James died in 1910. There, now you know that.

10

Duende, you may “believe” that you are smarter than people who lived 300 years ago, but I would argue that you do not “feel” any smarter than they did. As I mentioned in my first post, if we conducted a survey where we asked people to rank their understanding of the world from 1 to 10, the people who lived 300 years ago would have ranked themselves just as highly as people would today. Thus they “felt” just as intelligent as people do today.

At some point human beings are going to realize that our ideas do not make sense to us because they are true (or even accurate). We will realize that the world makes sense to us because that is what our mind is built to do. It is built to make sense out of whatever environment it is exposed to.

So if we take a newborn baby, we could place it with any family of any nationality, and even from any period of time throughout history, and the baby would do just fine. It will learn to speak whatever language it is exposed to and adopt whatever cultural influences it is exposed to.

In short, “The Truth” is that the world is far beyond our comprehension. Our ideas today are still painfully naive, but they appear to make a great deal of sense to us because of the way in which our mind functions, not because we are actually intelligent beings. The same process that fooled our ancestors into thinking that they were much smarter than they actually were is still fooling us today. In the future, our ideas today will look just as naive to the people of the future as our ancestor’ ideas look to us today.

11

Actually we should feel less smart. Maybe not comparativley dumber, but we should be more humble about what we know and don’t know.

People have in the past believed may things which they “knew” were certainties but which over time were revised or completley rejected. Think of those who were so smart they knew that everything is made from water, or that the sun revolves around the earth or that blood letting will cure fevers. As time, knowledge and technology progressed, these things were exposed to be untruths. So just as we look back at our ancestors with greater knowledge than they had, our proginey will, with a far greater repository of knowledge and technology at their disposal, look back on us and be smarter than us.

There are things, ideas, social and cultural practices that we hold today that will look ridiculous 50, 100, 1000 years from now. Knowing that, we shouldn’t think we are as smart as we do.