From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri May 23 2003 - 05:48:47 MDT
On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 06:19:58AM -0400, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
> Just because humanity *did in fact* follow the path of agriculture to
> science, this doesn't mean that humanity *must* have followed this path.
> Now it seems to me there's a very strong argument that even if a band of
> hunter-gatherers invents literacy and some kind of social process with
> Bayes-structure (science is one example), agriculture would soon follow
> since it seems like a very obvious technology.
I wonder how obvious agriculture really is. Diamond makes a good
case that it is not likely to start outside certain very special
regions due to the presence of useful species (suggesting that had
the climate or geography been a bit different we might still be
stuck in the caves), and even there it took plenty of time to
happen.
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.
To me it seems that there are certain technologies that are
possible to invent (and may actually be invented from time to
time) but given the current socioecological situation they will
not be selected for (writing in a HG society, steam engines in
classical times). Other technologies have strong selection effects
(using flint for tools, agriculture) and will open up new
possibilities. These possibilities are sometimes taken, and create
new socioecological situations where technologies that previously
were of little use become far more useful.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri May 23 2003 - 05:55:29 MDT