6 ms·

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 y

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.

decasteve 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_of_Eupalinos 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 5y ago
        Pythagoras probably didn’t exist.
        dr_dshiv 5y ago
        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?
jl6 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Were they thinking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...
  - Koshkin 5y ago
    > In ... the book, "The Mind of the Iliad", Jaynes states that people of the era had no consciousness. R-riight...
    - new_guy 5y ago
      > R-riight... Says the guy/gal who dismissed the guys life work because they skimmed a shitty Wikipedia summary for all of 5 seconds. Try actually reading it before commenting.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    Ah Julian Jaynes, the Erich von Däniken of psychology.
  - DonaldFisk 5y ago
    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.”
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Koshkin 5y ago
  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.
bombcar 5y ago
It’s also possible that much of what was lost was frankly not worth preserving, perhaps time has acted as a great filter.
- cjsplat 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Gilgamesh definitely reads like a comic book. I would be surprised if it weren’t popular entertainment.
- golemotron 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pessimizer 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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.
  - aksss 5y ago
    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%201&version=ESV 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.
  - ARandomerDude 5y ago
    > 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.

decasteve 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_of_Eupalinos 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 5y ago
      Pythagoras probably didn’t exist.
      - dr_dshiv 5y ago
        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?

jl6 5y ago

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 5y ago
Were they thinking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...
- Koshkin 5y ago
  > In ... the book, "The Mind of the Iliad", Jaynes states that people of the era had no consciousness. R-riight...
  - new_guy 5y ago
    > R-riight... Says the guy/gal who dismissed the guys life work because they skimmed a shitty Wikipedia summary for all of 5 seconds. Try actually reading it before commenting.
- dhosek 5y ago
  Ah Julian Jaynes, the Erich von Däniken of psychology.
- DonaldFisk 5y ago
  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.”
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Koshkin 5y ago
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.

bombcar 5y ago

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

cjsplat 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Gilgamesh definitely reads like a comic book. I would be surprised if it weren’t popular entertainment.
golemotron 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pessimizer 5y ago

> 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 5y ago
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.
- aksss 5y ago
  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%201&version=ESV 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.
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  > 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.