The would strongly point to speech developing around that time, but there's no mention of language or speech in the article - odd.
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Also, while some central Asians could read and write (they had courrier relay to deliver letters), their administrative/taxing/military system, the decimal system, worked without any writing for two thousand years, only by making a mark on a wooden branch for each person in an Arban, a mark on another for each Arban, again for each Ja'un, again for each minggan. That's how they counted and this was taught without text for at least 1500 years (Mongols wrote something about it in the 13th century, but this system is at least from 300BCE and the Xiongnus)
The distinction between reason and language is not widely appreciated, and is a main if not the primary reason people overestimate the abilities of LLMs.
> One thinks in words
No. There are people who believe they think in words, because they haven't bothered to examine the question, but there are no people who think in words.
Think about the number of people you've ever seen do a double take at the idea that "I don't know how to put this into words".
I knew I was late to the party.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/25/11501230/blake-ross-cant-...
If there are people who can’t picture and people who don’t have an inner dialogue, I think it lends more credence to the idea that we don’t have free will and are just a bunch of chemicals controlling our behavior. It also makes you think about consciousness and whether it’s even real.
I bet you can answer all of these at a moment's notice, but where does your answer come from? Have you ever sat down and tried to reason out which one you like more? Or do you just 'know' the answer and then 'come up' with the justification afterwards?
People can think in words, but it's certainly not their only way of thinking. I think the thinking in words is kind of like "thinking on paper" where you're trying to explicitly reason through something. The thinking process itself seems to be something on a deeper level.
I'm sure you think that way too, you probably just layer a narrative over it. The sibling comment about picking up a spoon is an example I sometimes use - see yourself walk to the kitchen, move your hand to open the drawer, pick up a spoon, pour the tea, scoop the sugar. I can describe them but it's not natively linguistic to me.
I'm hell at rearranging furniture or putting together an engine, not so good at positive self talk.
From that perspective, the experience of thinking in words or pictures is distinct from actually thinking in words or pictures. Saying one thinks in one of these ways seems to be saying what they identify thinking with.
For example, I don't usually think of fantasy as thinking. If I day dream, I wouldn't say I am thinking, but that is fairly visual. To what degree am I saying something about myself vs my identity if I say I do or don't think in words given that context?
Relatedly, I've noticed that when it comes to remembering something, it is not 'I' that remember. Rather 'I' set up mental cues and direct focus, which then hopefully causes the memory to be placed within my awareness. This happens below the level of direct experience. But I might say I failed to remember, taking responsibility for something that 'I' - the part separated from the automatic functions of the body - did not do.
So I'm suggesting statements about words vs pictures are about ego, metaphor and meaning-building, and not about actual mechanisms or communicating actual differences in the experience of thinking.
It can be difficult to talk about these things because such conversations implicitly occur between our identities, not between who we actually are - something beyond our grasp - and the noise this introduces is something I don't know how to surmount, or if it can be surmounted.
One of the more cliche, and not super useful tests, is “imagine a ball on a table, someone pushes the ball and it begins to roll. What color is the ball?” For me that was a revelatory statement because I’d never consider that others might give the ball a color, or size, or texture as the imagine it. I assume not everyone with the ability to visualize does but it seems like many do according to the literature. To me it’s just a statement, a ball is rolling pushed by a nondescript person.
French is my first language, I'm fluent in English, and I know a bit about many languages... But I've never had an inner voice or thought in language, even when I was very young.
I’m not willing to die on this hill by the way so if someone else comes along and argues otherwise, I’m open to other ideas.
I suggest reading up about how we found the cure for scurvy and then lost it. The problem wasn’t that someone forgot to record “the cure for scurvy is vitamin C” the problem is that people were wrong with what they “knew” cured the disease.
Basically: the act of preserving and carrying on the wrong bits of knowledge lead to a regression with deadly consequences.
The social side of things can’t be ignored either. Rulers, religions, and pop culture can and does choose to selectively remember history. In recent years people even take delight in being uninformed about various topics.
So it seems like there’s a sort of knowledge decay working against general progress. The question is: will progress always (on average) increase faster than that decay or will we reach some kind of equilibrium or perhaps even regress (idiocracy, for example)?
With actual vision, there's a pipeline of steps: light hits actual cone/rod cells -> optic nerve fires -> brain stage 1 -> brain stage 2 -> brain stage 3... where each of those stages also have various side effects associated with the experience of "seeing"
I can't synthesize "brain stage 1" at all I don't think, I need my optic nerve to send some signals to "see". But I think I might be synthesizing "brain stage 2" when I imagine seeing e.g. a red apple in a pretty similar way to actually seeing it - I can feel "red apple vibes" but there is no image of a red apple my field of view. My brain state certainly contains some data about the color of the imaginary apple and the shape of it, but it's not nearly the same as actually seeing it.
This is all astonishingly hard to explain in a way that communicates accurately between two people though.
The most notable difference is if you ask me to imagine something, there isn’t any detail in the “image” that I haven’t intentionally placed there. “Imagine the face of a stranger you haven’t met before; what color are their eyes?” Idk, I can add eye color to the image, but I certainly can’t just observe it, because both before and after it’s just the concept, not like a picture I can just look at.
Except for this part of thinking, paradoxically.
Is "just" a synonym for "exactly" in this context?
I've always thought of my mental model as an endless conversation with myself, but I think the more fitting description would be a "smooth" series of thoughts which only materialize into language when I explicitly focus on those thoughts as their own thing.
I do also think visually for things that have a visual component though.
Same thing happens if you ask “what surface is the table on” or “what country is this image in”. It’s layers I can add to the mental state, but if they’re not important they’re just not there.
I’d say the closest thing to what I was “seeing” before the color question is something like a wireframe, or maybe the gray color of a Blender model without colors/textures applied. Grey in the sense that you don’t really notice it’s grey, you just understand the grey color means color is absent.
Once imitation gets good enough (general and accurate) were capable of spreading behaviors (phenotypes) without having to wait for folks to be born and grow up.
As far as I can tell nobody is.
LLM is a great tool that helps our brains same way a hammer helps our hands.
Language certainly helps shape thoughts, even to the extent that, certainly for older kids and adults, different languages influence and constrain thought in different ways.
But consider dreams. These are adjacent to thoughts, and don't require language. Some dreamers are even able to express will not only on their actions, but over the dream itself. And if proof were needed of a conscious agent, it's there even in an apparently unconscious being.
the point (which I learned from the book) is how writting transformed human culture but did not define it, humans have a pre-literal (i.e. written) culture whose origin is literally really lost to history
I'm saying that tech transfer can absolutely be speech driven, but I admit that text driven technological transfer is in some ways an improved version of oral-only cultural transmision (i.e. knowledge preservation)
Basically he says one of the reasons China didn't experience the rapid growth Europe went through during the Renaissance was because Chinese society during those times had a strict hierarchy. You weren't allowed to rise through the ranks with your inventions or technologies, no matter how revolutionary they were. "No incentive, no change."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
It feels like bipedalism, opposable thumbs and strong social behaviour and other factores were the perfect storm at the perfect time.
"Clearly" because exterior stimuli clearly influence both thinking and feeling, a concept supported by common experience and scientific understanding of human cognition and emotions.
In my opinion though, "human" is the better word here for conveying the right mix of informality without implying the specific semantics of "Hominini sans Pan".
https://www.livescience.com/does-everyone-have-inner-monolog...
It seems more likely that a theory that bases being an intentional agent on the notion of an inner monologue is not the best model for what's happening.
Think of not only the replication crisis in science, but also the despair to retain "tacit knowledge" the failure of which often results in outright abandonment and outsourcing to somewhere else.
The technology to land on the Moon seems to be effectively lost. The supersonic airliner is for some reason not available either.
Same happened in Rome, and Rome itself together with Greece rediscovered civilization from a much darker age before them.
In light of that, the idea that any real knowledge could be retained for that long is preposterous.
I'd strongly suggest not getting bogged down in the details of what various forms of notional recording are --- ink on paper, etching on stone, holes punched in paper, magnetic field alignments in rust (spinning, sequential, or otherwise), bitfields in memory arrays, holographic images ...
Records are created by varying matter in space to transmit messages over time.
Signals are created by varying energy in time to transmit messages over space.
Or expanded slightly:
Signals transmit encoded symbolic messages from a transmitter across space through a channel by variations in energy over time to a receiver potentially creating a new record.
Records transmit encoded symbolic messages from a writer through a substrate across time by variations in matter over space to a reader potentially creating a new signal.
This is literally the first time Ive seen the word human applied to other hominids. I see many discussions about neanderthals and denisovians and so on. I have never seen them referred to as human.
The technology might be, but not the knowledge. The tech just became obsolete and probably not up to safety standards anyway. I doubt we'd have much trouble recreating a better equivalent if the incentives existed.
Video, 1h6m running time: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug>
(I'm aware Google / YouTube are making alternative interface usage more challenging. MPV handles this stream well, as should tools such as VLC which incorporate it and/or ytdl.)
Video is admittedly long but has high information density.
Natural history museum, for example, refers to them as early humans: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-were-the-neanderthals.htm...
I suspect people who say they think in language are not really thinking "in" language. I think we all have this abstract conceptual space in us. I'm not even sure what it means to think in language; where do the ideas and concepts come from that are being expressed? I guess some people have to internally "hear" a thought expressed before it is real to them.
https://www.amazon.com/Extinct-Humans-Ian-Tattersall/dp/0813...
If you look at what happened he could have benefited hugely if he was not obnoxious and had not gone out of his was to annoy people. He mocked the powerful, and he insisted that the Copernican cosmology (the sun is the centre of the universe) was not just a theory, but had been proven true.
This is just one of many examples of definitions being extremely unstandardized in human evolution. You get used to it after awhile.
What seems to be rare is the ability to use culture a medium to store and transmit tech.
You think "I will wash the dishes". You wash the dishes. Ta-daa, free will!
A paralyzed person thinks "I will raise my hand". Nothing happens. No free will!
An ADHD person says to themself "I will wash the dishes". They don't get washed. A different part is broken than to the paralyzed person, but the result is the same.
A lazy person says to their roommate "I refuse to wash the dishes". Free will? They "could", if they were not lazy. Just as the ADHD person "could" if they did not have executive dysfunction. Just as the paralyzed person "could" if their spinal cord were intact.
"Free will", as a philosophical construct, is nothing more than an attempt by the ego to regain a sense of control in the face of the irrefutable realization that the universe is governed by rigid laws, and we are made of universe. (And no, quantum randomness doesn't help you - a random choice is hardly more of an extension of will than a deterministic one).
Nope. You can pass on myths the same way. All that happens is that you get more refined myths, that always have "evidence" for them at any point in time because they are refined by each generation to fit any new observations.
It's worse with oral knowledge[1]: oral "knowledge" that is passed down is frequently more damaging than not passing anything down at all, because in the lack of any knowledge on the subject, people will try to gain some knowledge (whether experimentally or not), but with "knowledge" passed down, there will exist pockets of people who will actively resist any attempt to discard that "knowledge".[2]
[1] Ever play a game of telephone? Each generation changes the message enough so that even a short period of 30 generations is enough to completely obliterate any of the original message.
[2] See every religion ever.
When forced to dereference a color, it felt like an entire system was booted up. Not only did the ball have color, it also had specular reflections. There was lighting. The table gained an abstract sense of having texture.
What I find particularly fascinating is that my mind also assigned "red". I wonder if that is a coincidence, or a deep reflection of something about how brains work. Supporting evidence: in languages with only three words for color, the three colors are "light", "dark", and "red": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Stage_II_(red)
I spent 45 years or so thinking people were talking metaphorically when talking about picturing things, because surely they couldn't actually see things while awake?
I see things when I dream, so I know what it is like, and some years ago I had a single experience during meditation I've never managed to replicate, but otherwise nothing while awake.
[1] https://www.the-scientist.com/language-gene-dethroned-64608
Does this mean I am only part human?
You (and I) have no idea if the universe is or not a computer. If you don't see the connection of free will to error margin of a deterministic system then I'm not sure how else to put it. Just imagine a deterministic program getting a bit flipped by a cosmic ray and turning non deterministic and apply that to the universe's system of laws.
Cosmic rays are just an example to explain that there's external causes of non-determinism to a deterministic system. Another example I gave above was the limit of precision of the system itself, allowing for "free will" (meaning something which isn't perfectly explainable by just the laws+starting conditions).
To me it's obvious the universe is deterministic, but the fun part is imagining ways in which it might not be. Comparing the universe to a computer is a fun way to think about it.
The Wikipedia article [1] on humans makes the same point. It does acknowledge that some use the term human to refer to all members of the genus homo, but this is not the common usage.
Yes, solo geniuses might often make unbelievable inventions on their own.
But science, progress and innovation are all social concepts at the end of the day.
I find this pretty amazing.
For me when someone asks “What color is it?” I think to myself “I don’t know you’re the one telling the story you tell me.”
Firstly, a person suffering from ADHD can do the dishes, despite the odds being against them. And a paralyzed person can raise their hand, given advances in technology.
And these are bad examples, as being incapacitated isn't an argument against free-will. The paralyzed still wants to raise their hand, even if they are unable at the moment. And the far more difficult question is if that want was entirely predetermined by the universe or not.
Quantum randomness and the huge number of variables at play point to the fact that believing that we don't have free-will is a non-falsifiable notion.
Consider this thought experiment: God comes to you and says ... "Here are 2 universes you can observe, one in which people have free-will, and another, that looks similar, but its people are just sophisticated automatons. Make an experiment to say which is which."
Your irrefutable argument quickly falls apart because there's no way you can show any relevant evidence for it. And it's worse than talking about the absence of God, because we experience free-will everyday. It's like talking of consciousness — we can't define it yet, but we know it's real, as we're thinking and talking about it. And a theory being non-falsifiable does not make it false. God could exist and you could have a soul.
You may or may not believe in free-will. But not believing in free-will is dangerous because it makes one believe that everything is predestined, so there's no point to doing anything, no point in struggling to achieve anything, no point in trying to escape your condition. If no free-will is possible, does life have any value at all? And that's the actual philosophical bullshit.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9
Here, we introduce AT, which addresses these challenges by describing how novelty generation and selection can operate in forward-evolving processes. The framework of AT allows us to predict features of new discoveries during selection, and to quantify how much selection was necessary to produce observed objects, without having to prespecify individuals or units of selection.
Generally Neanderthals are pointed out as an exception to cross species fertility since... humans have some Neanderthal DNA.
What's separates humans is we can construct common fictions that we actually believe in, eg "my job is to maximize shareholder value" where both the corporation and the responsibilities towards it are made up but generally believed.
There's of course a rather large elephant in this room, too, that decides a lot of things about our lives.
What color was the ball? I didn't have to think; I knew it was red. However, I can't tell you much about the cabinets or the arm or body attached to the hand. Totally unrendered and void.
This whole comment shows a solid amount of ignorance of history, but this particular quote is completely preposterous. "for some reason" is money, plain and simple. Just go read the Wikipedia article on Concorde. And there are plenty of supersonic military airplanes, the technology is definitely there.
> Same happened in Rome, and Rome itself together with Greece rediscovered civilization from a much darker age before them.
Did you ever hear about Ancient Egypt?
There's no such rule and Neanderthals are not notable as an exception. Fertility is just a very rough proxy for genetic distance, which is correlated to our arbitrary "species" buckets but by no means a real line or hard rule. Many, many reasonably closely related species can interbreed, like jaguars and lions. Most of homo that had the opportunity could probably interbreed.
One thing I remember is: There are some cultures out there hunting seals with some tools that are made using parts... of seals. Some European explorers almost perished where locals were just living their routine (supported by their cultural baggage).
I respectfully disagree, as started in my earlier post. It would be nice if human language worked like that, but it does not always. A "stone frigate" isn't a boat, an "iron lung" isn't a respiratory organ.
Wouldn't multiple transmission between generations and the comparison of diverging stories of the older generation in a newer generation work like an error correction?
> Although some scientists equate the term "humans" with all members of the genus Homo, in common usage it generally refers to Homo sapiens, the only extant member. All other members of the genus Homo, which are now extinct, are known as archaic humans, and the term "modern human" is used to distinguish Homo sapiens from archaic humans.
other primates don't show signs of using vocal language either, yet humans have it
>there aren’t many or any purely sign languages still around
we're the only species of modern humans who survived, maybe Neanderthals/Denisovans etc. used sign language, who knows
maybe the fact that we started using vocal language made us much more superior evolutionarily speaking, making other similar species without developed vocal tracts extinct (by our warfare/assimilation)
deaf/mute people around the world have always historically come up with ways to talk using signs (different unrelated systems), i.e. we still have the means to do it, but it's unnecessary when you can produce sounds (freeing your hands to do work)
The other thing to consider is that they reached a point where they could gather food / survive more easily. If less time needs to be spent getting food - because they've reached a level of intelligence where they can, for example, store food for longer, or prepare / cook it for more efficient calorie gathering, or grow food, or share food / acquire more than an individual needs, etc - then there's more time left for cultural exchange, experimentation and play. That is, spend more time experimenting with a stone tool to make it better beyond the base necessity.
disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. I don't actually believe early humans spent that much time surviving, looking at apes they seem to spend a lot of time just sitting around.
I doubt it - which one is the "correct" message is going to be up to chance, not up to a network effect.
Even if you take the optimistic approach and only retain that knowledge that is common to all branches, there is a vanishingly small chance that the correct knowledge would be retained, because the errors in transmission are not going to be completely random - the sort of error one oral storyteller introduces is going to be similar to the errors introduced by other storytellers.[1]
It's why the history of tribes who did not write things down is treated as myths: the myth-makers are likely to weave whatever current affairs into existing mythology to "explain" new observations, in the process discarding what was there in the first place.
When the record is written down, at least we can read what was thought at the time of writing.
[1] Completely made-up example: Original story -> Crocodile dragged off tribes best warrior. Probable error after gen-10 -> Crocodile is double the original size. Probable error after gen-20 -> Longer than a man. Probable error after gen-30 -> Taller than a man. Probable error after gen-40 -> Walks around, bipedal.
But 1000 or more years, unfathomable. It's the one reason where I wish time travel or suspended animation was real, just so I can see what the future might bring. Assuming it meanders on as it has for the past few thousand years, and there's no Great Filter event.
Think about it. The first manmade object on the moon was in 1959. The first pineapple on pizza was in 1962. Coincidence, or lunar monolith? You decide!
I think it's a case of the classic issue of trying to make sharp boundaries in a continuum. There just are no fully satisfying answers.
That's fine in general. Many words are like that. But it makes it flawed as a scientific concept.
What other animals make fire? Cooked food was the game changer.
https://www.livescience.com/5946-chimps-master-step-controll...
Some say it was language.
Others say it was the development of consciousness, which came with an improved theory of mind.
Others say it was thinking in what-if/hypothetical scenarios.
Maybe they all developed in lockstep, somehow.
For example monkeys have been known to exhibit fashion trends (hanging a bit of grass out of their ear). But these trends fizzle out over time. Before more behaviors can be layered on top.
I think you’re right about those factors creating a good environment for this to happen and I bet they’re sufficient but not necessary. Too bad we don’t have another example :)
If most animals are operating on a calorie deficit and fixing this can lead to larger brains then why haven’t domesticated animals evolved towards our level of intelligence?
Trying to describe culture with stories feels like trying to describe biology with proteins. It gets us most of the way there but also adds a whole ton of complexity because it misses the fundamental nature of the system.
Humans are great at general and accurate imitation. This probably seeded a runaway evolutionary process, the result of which was tools, fire, and language.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-were-the-neanderthals.htm...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/are-neanderthals-human...
EDIT: This is a great article about Ed Catmull and aphantasia: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47830256
I wouldnt think the fairly self evident assertion that exterior stimulus changes both the internal state of a person as well as their behavior would be controversial.
At this point in history "free will" is really just the god of the gaps and those gaps shrink every year. Its probably a useful religious concept but as far as reality goes its the least interesting question one could ask about the whole human experience.
Because, and this may shock you: we are not all the same person
You make an excellent point that people respond differently to a given stimulus. This is explained by those people having had different genetics, environments, upbringings and even breakfasts leading up to the point of the test. It has been demonstrated that your metabolic state will vastly change your response to stimuli throughout a day.
I ate something different for breakfast today than yesterday because one sounded tastier than the other. I made this decision not because I have an eternal soul making randomized decisions like a roulette machine but because yesterday I craved salty food and today yogurt sounded better. I am different person today than I was yesterday. My gut, brain and everything else has been changed by all the stimulus I experienced yesterday and is now influencing my responses today.
Stone tools remained essentially unchanged for a long, long time. 600kya would have been within the range where there were still multiple homo species occupying very similar regions. An important thing to remember is that the homo family tree is more like a bush than a tree, with lines getting very blurry and a lot of interbreeding. It makes me wonder how much technology like this actually came from our precise lineage or was shared/stolen/learned amongst human species.
This seems like a rather recursively self-referential problem.
>If most animals are operating on a calorie deficit and fixing this can lead to larger brains then why haven’t domesticated animals evolved towards our level of intelligence?
Because farm animals do not evolve, they are bred. We have directed their evolutionary paths for centuries, away from what it would do on it's own, towards creatures that produce more milk, more meat, or fattier meat.
From a calories-per-unit-of-labor standpoint, dogs and cats have now clearly eclipsed humanity, using their emotional intelligence to create a post-scarcity Marxian utopia where they can mostly do whatever they want all day while humans toil for them.
You actually cannot just say "Man, the universe is so complicated, so it is possible it could be anything!"
That's a non-sequitur and not sound reasoning or logic.
...to make an entire circuit (and package and attach connecting leads to it)...
is the invention of the integrated circuit
and photolithography made that possible. It subsequently had a large number of important follow on innovations, but which were conceptually proper subsets of it.
had some other process made integrated circuits possible, that other process would have subsequently had many important innovations.
what flowed from photolithographic chip making is still flowing today.
Private experiences may be very important for individuals and like I said elsewhere, free-will is certainly a useful idea in religious contexts. I do not believe this has any bearing on practical matters such as our ability to predict or understand the actions taken by any given system such as humans or computers.
Sometimes people seem to not be sure how to describe the experience of thinking... Which I suppose explains a lot! /laughs
I have some experience with a meditative/dissociative state in which that monologue - which I think of as the "narrator process" - can be observed as just one of many mental subsystems, neither containing the whole of my consciousness nor acting as the agent of my will. The narrator merely describes the feelings which arise in other mental components and arranges them, along with the actions I take, into some plausible linear causal sequence.
Minds differ in many ways, and perhaps one way your mind and mine differ is that words flow quickly for me and do not feel slow or limiting; so I suppose I am easily fooled into perceiving that narrative as the medium of thought in itself. It had not occurred to me to describe the activities of the other mental subsystems as thoughts, but why shouldn't they be? And now I have a better guess at what it might be like to experience the world in a different way. Thank you!
Like, where are the details of how you are "measuring" these things? And what measurement instrument returns values like "is clearly" and "is really just"? I can think of only one.
The symmetric equivalence between records and signals is one that I seem to have come up with myself (I'm unaware of it being noted elsewhere, though bits of it have been observed, e.g., speech is conversation in space, writing is conversation in time). How significant it is I really don't know, though something tells me it should be important.
Yes what I am describing is my opinion which I have formed from looking at evidence. My opinion isnt really a measurement in the sense that one can measure activity in parts of a brain with an MRI. It is really just the state of the system.
I'm not really interested in abstract epistemological definitions of free will because they arent useful in the way that neurology psychology and biology are generally. I am interested in predicting or explaining behavior or observations mostly. You might be interested in that kind of exploration which is great! If you think it does have bearing on such things I am totally interested in hearing how.
I propose that for the longest march of human prehistory, small villages along a trade route that shared genes and language, goods and services, was a very stable unit of human society. And I mean civilized on every scale and over time, where the simple desire of young to start a family and live eventful fulfilling lives in peace is the norm and they had done so. This tale is in the subtle and expressive language of today and happens in fast-time with a single individual, but consider that the events and astronomical observations could have unfolded on any timescale. Over a lifetime, or even several. The end result being that even ancient people could glimpse their place in the universe, and essential truth about their world.
We had socialized and innovated but had no need for stone monuments to cheat time, and they would not have anyway. If there are, they are buried in the deep sediments of East Africa. You and I are their only legacy.
~Stargazer: A Novel of One Million Years Ago
Are you saying that these two claims have some sort of scientific ~proofs:
1.Thinking isn't even a path to "free will".
2a. Thinking is pretty clearly determined by exterior stimulus
2b. just like feeling is.
Note: a definition for "determined by" (in percentage of total causality) would be required in the specification, as would a non-ambiguous definition for "just like".
It's really unfortunate that schools tend to simplify the definition of species in this way, because it's just not really not meaningfully true at all. We could "make" it true by actually defining species this way (at least for animals) but it'd radically transform our taxonomies.
Have you an opinion on whether your opinion is necessarily true?
> If you think it does have bearing on such things I am totally interested in hearing how.
I happen to believe humans have > 0 free will, and that if we do it derives from cognition, at least primarily. If this is the case, I believe that it would be advantageous to be able to exert control over cognition on demand. I also believe that doing something often requires trying to do it, and that if one doesn't think something can be done, it decreases the chances that one will try to do it, in turn decreasing the chances that it gets done.
I believe this to be > 0 "true", and that it has extremely broad applicability.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=man+from+earth Viewable at no charge on Youtube!
I guess what I am asking is what is causing you to exert control over cognition? I would say its the sum of too many variables to count (including previous states of the system) acting on you to cause you, the system to be in such a state that that is just what it does. Given enough time and resources we could probably come up with a half decent accounting of the most important of those variables and be able to explain why the system is doing a given thing. In this example that means explaining why the system is modifying its own state in some way. What would you say is the cause?
> Have you an opinion on whether your opinion is necessarily true?
Yes my opinion is that my opinion is likely true as I believe it is supported by evidence. I would bet on it but I am not certain about it.
No. I think this statement is a conclusion only indirectly supported by scientific fact. This is a logical leap from more and more behaviors and internal states being correlated with various external stimulus over time. I believe it only a matter of time until it becomes entirely possible (though silly and will likely not be done because it only serves to prove a foregone conclusion and would be a unfathomably huge undertaking) to provide a complete accounting of all the factors that influence a system bringing it to the state where it reacts in a given way to some stimulus.
The only other conclusion I can see is that human beings are not deterministic and there is some magical spark IE everlasting soul making randomized decisions for us.
So the shared genes alone can't be used as a reason to call Neanderthals human.
If you're on HN, I assume this hasn't impacted you academically?
I use the term "visualize" because that is what I thought people meant when they said to visualize or imagine things. I remember the shape of the visual rendition of source code, for example, and that is usually the basis for how I navigate large code bases. And I know what parts of papers I last read 30 years ago look like, but I can't see them.
I think the biggest way it has impacted me is that e.g. when it comes to fiction, I find visual descriptions of things usually bore me unless the language used in itself is particularly compelling because the words themselves are beautiful to me. So I often skip and skim visual descriptions.
Can you expand on this "supported by" scientific fact? Is it something more than is not inconsistent with, and more towards must be, necessarily?
Can you explain how it is not? As I see it, my theory is directly breaking out of determinism.
> I guess what I am asking is what is causing you to exert control over cognition?
Consciousness (self-awareness, will & determination, etc...the "how" of which I make no claims of knowledge about). I absolutely agree that it is substantially out of our control and thus at least semi-deterministic, where we would differ (at least) is on the 100% part.
There are many problems, here are some:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decidability_(logic)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency
Men decide to build a tower to Heaven. God isn't having that so he scrambles every language so the workers can't communicate with each other. They put down their tools and migrate to other locations around the globe.
Some human had Neanderthal ancestors, some did not, as you rightly suggest. However, all humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor that's much more recent than our last common ancestor with chimps.
Ie we only have 'chimp DNA' in the sense that we share a lot of DNA with them, and that we haven't changed too much since our last common ancestor. Exactly the same is true of us and Neanderthals.