I recommend things to others – and attempt to learn what I can for myself, when I find something that interests me* – because that’s how humans have gotten to where we are now.
I had a realization some time ago that there’s very little difference between humans “now” and humans of the Stone Age. That is, except for the relatively slight and in some cases not even detectable biological / evolutionary differences between a baby born today and one born to human parents, say, a quarter-million years ago on the African savanna – the babies are the same. They share the same total ignorance about the world – and they also share the same capacity for learning. It’s an exciting thought.
Think about that for a moment, and think of the implications. Because along with “the children being the same” … so is “the world”. Except for the vagaries of nature, rising and falling sea levels, slight continental drift (and the structures that have come and gone since a quarter-million years ago), this is the same world first inhabited by humans. The elements are all the same, and for the most part so are most of the other animals and plants. Everything that we have now, including the computer I’m using to compose this essay and whatever device you’re using to read it, it all could have existed a quarter-million years ago. The reason it didn’t exist then, obviously, is “the missing ideas and discoveries” that have intervened in the meantime. That is: all of human creation, all of that learning that our Stone Age babies can now be exposed to.
- Language and the use of words to mean objects and concepts;
– Numbers and counting;
– The manipulation of symbols to represent shared ideas,
– And every single bit of human inventiveness, creativity, art and imagination that has occurred between then and now (and which has been recorded, comprehended and passed down to subsequent generations in whatever form: painting, writing in books, oral traditions of storytelling, and these days film, video and digital media) – and not to mention the innovations and ideas that build on other experiences and ideas that we’ve been exposed to – are what set us apart from those Stone Age ancestors.
Since our babies are exactly equal to those ancient babies, in a real sense we ourselves are exactly equal to those ancient people, except that we’ve had the benefit of exposure to more new things, more knowledge that wasn’t available to them, and which had to be hard-won over millennia.
Isaac Newton was remarked to have said that “If I see farther than others have seen, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.” He might as well have said, “I stand on … piles and piles of books.” Even “learning how to learn” is something that we haven’t mastered yet! But look what we know, despite our many handicaps. And there is so much more to know and discover.
So, you may think, “Big deal. We’re no longer living in the Stone Age. Who cares how little they understood of their world a quarter-million years ago?” And if you take that short-sighted view in only that backwards direction, then that’s an apt observation, as far as it goes.
But where might we be in another few years in the future (or the next quarter-million, if you want to take the longer view) as we learn more now that we don’t know yet? Who’s to say that we can’t learn the next quarter-million years’ worth of human knowledge in the next twenty, if only we could accelerate the process? That’s pretty exciting. I want all of my Stone Age babies of the present to start to learn more, faster and deeper. So I try to share.
Well, that, of course, and videos of cute puppies and kittens. Everybody likes puppies and kitties.
* Rather, “When I find something that makes me want to stop doing everything else that interests me to focus on one thing in particular”, because there is so much of interest to me.
