From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri May 23 2003 - 10:05:36 MDT
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> Let's imagine a forest dwelling HG tribe that have invented
> writing; they use specially prepared banana leaves and a plant
> based ink. What use is this writing? HG tribes are small and
> everybody is more or less in constant touch, so there is no need
> for internal memos. The shaman might benefit by noting down the
> sacred stories to give to his successor, but is that benefit
> larger than the effort to prepare the leaves and ink? And would
> the tribe benefit much from it in competition with other tribes?
> It does not seem like a cruicial thing in this kind of simple
> society. A genius could invent mathematics, but without
> significant trade, cattle herds or other applications it would
> just be a neat pastime easily forgotten the next lean time.
Yeah. In practice, it seems pretty hard to imagine knowledge growth
without agriculture. Though we may be biased by our own history, not
knowing any other way to do it - sentient elephants, wondering whether
intelligence can evolve without a trunk. But given that culture did go
along with agriculture in our own historical experience, I would not find
it particularly surprising if the end conclusion is that dissociation
would be difficult or impossible.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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