random question

[doubleEntendre]

i was just thinking about this today. . .

what do you think is humankind's greatest achievement? whether it be an invention, meta-cognition, etc. i'm interested to hear what people have to say.

[mechanismj]

Love

[The Telepathic Kid]

Music

...but it also could be considered humankind's greatest stuff up, too.

*turns off the TV which is playing Soulja Boy*

*shivers*

[747Music]

i was just thinking about this today. . .

what do you think is humankind's greatest achievement? whether it be an invention, meta-cognition, etc. i'm interested to hear what people have to say.

It has yet to come.

[turquoise70]

In my opinion the answer to that question as it is currently phrased is a purely subjective matter. the parameters for 'greatness' are set differently in everyone's mind.

i'm not sure what i think the greatest thing is. i think society is pretty amazing, but so are a lot of other curiosities. i think our various neuroses and mutations are some of our great achievements too - i like to think of us as the genetically warped psycho killer children of earth. i think our uniqueness as an animal species is probably our greatest achievement, mostly stemming from our outstanding brilliance coupled with supreme destructive or protective insanity. it seems to me that human love can sometimes be as insane a mental state as the cognitions that lead us to homicide/suicide/war. we sure like the highest highs and lowest lows.

[hexagon son]

if it were a generational question (or centurial) this would be easier....



... perhaps the understanding, harnessing and the ability to make and control fire from a natural source. after that i'd say the wheel. after that i'd say technics SL 1200's. followed by nintendo.... and drugs.

[markNine]

Duct Tape.

[hills west]

murder

[harpoon dodger]

hamwiches

[Twoism-ist]

The tool.

[vonarx]

i'm sure buddhist monks know, but won't tell anyone.

[saturdayindex]

The internet, obviously.

[Phasen]

Meta-cognition would seem to be high on my list. Hell, just having any complex thoughts about life, the supernatural, death, relationships, our purpose, etc. is incredible. Most, if not all, other animals can't have these thoughts. It allows us to make our own world that we can control nature in, whereas nature controls everything else. If it weren't for medicine, cities, air conditioning, agriculture, transportation, plumbing, electricity, and so on, we'd be just like the next chimpanzees or zebras of the world.

[Infinite E]

Meta-cognition would seem to be high on my list. Hell, just having any complex thoughts about life, the supernatural, death, relationships, our purpose, etc. is incredible. Most, if not all, other animals can't have these thoughts. It allows us to make our own world that we can control nature in, whereas nature controls everything else. If it weren't for medicine, cities, air conditioning, agriculture, transportation, plumbing, electricity, and so on, we'd be just like the next chimpanzees or zebras of the world.

Aren't you conflating stuff we can make (because we can produce enough spare food to have people sit about and think about it) with all other kinds of abstract thought? People often seem to classify the ability to create science, art and technology as uniquely human characteristics. But really they're just a result of our form of social organisation- the relations of which of us are involved in production of wealth and how- reaching a critical mass in some societies. These traits aren't shared by all human societies and therefore can't be said to be inherently human.

For an amount of time that makes the entirety of recorded history look tiny, people identical to ourselves lived across most of the planet, leaving no record of their ever having been there other than their own fossilised corpses. If surviving societies who live under the same conditions today are anything to judge by, they had if anything a more developed religious and cultural life than people in post agricultural and industrial revolution societies.

If you follow that to the logical conclusion, it seems really anthropocentric and unfounded to presume that we're the only species to appreciate the world on a complicated, abstract level just because we produce a lot of spare food. The 'higher' mammals- apes, whales, elephants, etc- are known to have extremely complicated and learned communicative skills that we're far from understanding. We actually have no way to telling what they 'talk' about- if thats even an appropriate analogy or not. But our own history suggests that they might well have the skills of meta-cognition you're talking about. Imo, the products of our recent social development don't highlight anything that is either inherently or uniquely human when compared to other species.

[Shadowshocker]

I would have to say language and speech. To think of how one would go from having no sense of communication, and then developing a way of communicating by voice and writing is quite amazing.

[Phasen]

Meta-cognition would seem to be high on my list. Hell, just having any complex thoughts about life, the supernatural, death, relationships, our purpose, etc. is incredible. Most, if not all, other animals can't have these thoughts. It allows us to make our own world that we can control nature in, whereas nature controls everything else. If it weren't for medicine, cities, air conditioning, agriculture, transportation, plumbing, electricity, and so on, we'd be just like the next chimpanzees or zebras of the world.

Aren't you conflating stuff we can make (because we can produce enough spare food to have people sit about and think about it) with all other kinds of abstract thought? People often seem to classify the ability to create science, art and technology as uniquely human characteristics. But really they're just a result of our form of social organisation- the relations of which of us are involved in production of wealth and how- reaching a critical mass in some societies. These traits aren't shared by all human societies and therefore can't be said to be inherently human.

For an amount of time that makes the entirety of recorded history look tiny, people identical to ourselves lived across most of the planet, leaving no record of their ever having been there other than their own fossilised corpses. If surviving societies who live under the same conditions today are anything to judge by, they had if anything a more developed religious and cultural life than people in post agricultural and industrial revolution societies.

If you follow that to the logical conclusion, it seems really anthropocentric and unfounded to presume that we're the only species to appreciate the world on a complicated, abstract level just because we produce a lot of spare food. The 'higher' mammals- apes, whales, elephants, etc- are known to have extremely complicated and learned communicative skills that we're far from understanding. We actually have no way to telling what they 'talk' about- if thats even an appropriate analogy or not. But our own history suggests that they might well have the skills of meta-cognition you're talking about. Imo, the products of our recent social development don't highlight anything that is either inherently or uniquely human when compared to other species.

I'd agree with you on a lot of that. I'm an anthropology major, so I talk about this stuff a lot and I really like it.

I didn't mean to say that art, sedentary agriculture, etc are exclusively human, or necessarily appropriate. (hunter-gatherers had way more free time, better diets, less disease, longer life-spans, fewer cavities, etc than people who farmed commercially). I just meant that it is rather incredible to me. Sure, you see some art in nature- whales sing, birds sing, many animals dance, and so on. It's just that none of these can do it to the extent that humans can.

A bird or whale can sing, but they can't study music theory, or compose a symphony, or be trained in a whole bunch of styles/instruments like humans can.

Our skills as humans don't come from our ability to produce food, even a lot of it. Our skills come from us being homeothermic so that our brains are more constantly active. They come from our amazing brain, our anatomy (opposable thumbs and the like)...we have a lot going for us that other species don't have. That doesn't make us better, just luckier, and more widely skilled.

I may sound anthropocentric, but what other animal has done what we have done (although some could argue that all we have done is ruined the Earth by destroying it with greed...something no animal has been dumbenough to do...and they'd have a valid point), but we also have done some great things. Only we have gone to space (minus the animals we sent), only we can build an airplane, the internet, a mile long bridge, and only we can prescribe antibiotics for bacterial infections, only we can perform a heart transplant, make a TV show, write a book, or drive a car.
I feel like that warrants a slight anthropocentricity a little bit logical then, right?

[boardsofdublin]

Soap. The rest is history