Comment by a_lieb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a_lieb | Hacker News Reader

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There seems to be an accepted idea that ancient people had a totally different way of thinking: that up to around 300 BC, humans navigated through the world with a dream-like, pre-scientific logic, and didn't view the world as comprehensible or subject to predictable laws and patterns.

I've always wondered, do we actually know this for sure? What's the evidence? Just by introspection, it is so hard for me to imagine being in a state of mind where I didn't believe that if I dropped a rock off a cliff twice, under similar conditions, it would do pretty much the same thing the second time. Or that if I did it over and over again, I would start to see patterns that I could rely on for later. This feels as hard-wired as just about anything in my mind.

To me, it makes more sense to think that humans have always thought the same way, and these days we just have better tools and have learned to refine the cognitive abilities that are wired into us. But I'm really interested to hear the case for the other side.

I'm curious about how people who think that way react when you tell them about Babylonian mathematics;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_mathematics

For instance, there is a Babylonian clay tablet from ~1700 BC that gives an approximation of sqrt(2) as 1.414213 (correct to 6 decimal digits).

I don't think that's a generally accepted idea at all. It's an idea that, in various forms, some modern philosophers have floated. Because it's so radical it's something you'll hear (and remember) people chatter about, but that doesn't mean many people take it literally, especially people familiar with ancient works.

At best I think such ideas help challenge beliefs about ourselves in the modern era. At worst I think they perpetuate a tendency for people to dehumanize those whom we can't personally identify with.

I'm glad to hear that. I've definitely seen it mentioned by a bunch of experts/academics as if it were accepted fact (Jordan Peterson is the only one that comes right to mind).

I think the idea might partly come from the dream-like quality of ancient myths, but I feel like that underestimates the ability of people to partition those myths from daily life. It's not like our current religious stories are exactly logical.

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