Like many of us, mariner keeps a neat and accessible office. One must acknowledge that cleaning an office is not a recyclable state of existence. It is more like a continuous evolution that never stops. While engaged in this ongoing process, mariner found a gem buried in one of the stored dump piles against the East wall. It is a conversation about humans offered by the great and famous Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996 – worth a search engine lookup). Spoken in the more innocent days of computerization during the 1970s, Carl is able to present the future without fear or avarice.
“… I think we’re constrained in how far we can go. Not by the scientific method; it seems to me the only reasonable approach, the one that confronts the data. Otherwise how would you ever know if a view were right or wrong? I think we’re constrained by our minds. Our minds are put together the way they are because of the needs of a very different sort of existence in which human beings evolved – a hunter/gatherer society – and now we’re asking that sort of brain to approach quite different circumstances.
It’s remarkable that it does as well as it does. The thing that I find astonishing is that we are able to invent simple rules and constructs which are able to predict quantitatively a wide range of natural phenomena. I mean, how is it that we can have one little simple equation which describes pretty closely how bodies fall, no matter where on earth they fall or where you throw them or what their shapes are. You know, it’s just a couple of little equations which are taught in high school physics. Why is the world put together in such a way that we are able to construct these little equations which explain such a wide variety of phenomena? That’s the astonishing thing.
The answer to that may be merely that things falling were pretty important to our ancestors, who lived in trees or something, so our minds evolved in such a way that things falling was something we had to understand. Those guys that couldn’t understand it all fell out of the trees and broke their necks. We’re not their descendants. We’re the descendants of the guys who could understand how things fell.”
It is time again, Carl. Humans will not be descendants of those who knew algebra and geometry, the new human will be one that lives in a static world where falling is unknown and hunting will become the ability to search reality simply by thinking about it.
Ancient Mariner
I think there is a lot to think about in this short piece. I can’t imagine what our brains will evolve into in a hundred, thousand or million years. I wonder if parts of our brains that have been dormant through most of history (or prehistory) will suddenly pop into use. What could they do? I seem to remember a piece about human evolution that discusses the sudden inexplicable spurts of growth that have occurred from time to time. Could there be built-in timers that activate some part of our brains? Here’s a free sci-fi plot. Thanks for giving me so many pieces to think about even if they tend to the morbid and gloomy.
I share your thoughts, Robert – we are more like a rubber band than we make think. Consider the hummingbird, an ascendant from dinosaurs or the whale, it’s ancestors were beach combing wolves.
Carl was right though, The human brain is little more than a piece of meat in a slow crock pot. It was only since 1940 that humans had a lifespan of 40.instead of 78.
Sorry for Amos’s negative tongue – he’s getting old.