Not only his systemized thinking, but his metaphysics—especially since it got later taken up by Christianity/Catholicism. I doubt we would have gotten to Naturalism (and modern science) without his influence:
I agree. And modern Western science and political thought has followed Aristotle far more than Plato. In particular, the parts of Aristotle's science that got thrown out was the result of following out his empirical method further than he was able to. We have also followed his empirical approach to political philosophy rather than Plato's Republic.
I think that glass is under-appreciated. Without it we would not have telescopes and microscopes (and all the scientific (and later engineering) that came from them), and later movies and photography—the latter also led to photolithography.
Would also need laters: modern communications would be much different if we still had to use copper cable (esp. over long distances), or microwave relays.
Overall this list skews ridiculously to western classicism, and misses a great many more significant intellectual achievements. Here's some nobody's mentioned.
Mechanics: wheel, lever, screw, gear trains, cam/follower, crank‑slider, water/wind mills, mechanical clock, printing press, and the steam engine.
Every advance in basic metallurgy. Controlled smelting, casting, hot forging, alloying to make bronze, carburising to make early steel, blooms and bloomery furnaces, quenching/tempering, wrought‑iron forging, large‑scale iron production, advanced steels.
Coinage.
Sail.
Plumbing.
Refrigeration.
Plastics.
If you take the position these are not intellectual achievements, I think you under-appreciate how revolutionary they were at the time.
The compounded effect of having knowledge recorded for generations to come - thereby unlocking all the other things mentioned on this list - surely should count for something.
Hieroglyphics were probably generated over time (as they’re a simple progression from cave paintings) - but a standardized alphabet has to be, well; standardized by someone at a point in time.
One should also mention the creation of "God(s)" in any religion (sub)context. We are probably the only mammalian creature who delegated all his existential angst to an abstracted entity responsible for anything that it didn't make sense at the time. I think it is THE intellectual pinnacle of a brain trying to survive and process information full of null pointers without halting its programming:/)
Would be interesting to think about what works are currently out there, published, yet will not be recognized as great intellectual achievements until much later after the fact for some reason.
I actually had this 10 guy sort of thought last night:
There was a point where an organism became self aware, and then there was a point sometime after that where an organism realized that it was the first that had become self aware and all the implications of that.
To me that's a demarcation point in all of life -- the moment a creature realized that it was different from all the things that had come before it on the earth, whether they be non-living or living, as if there was a third category, living and self-aware.
I wonder if it considered it important to spread self-awareness or if it lamented that it had more important things to deal with like just surviving.
And what kind of organism was it -- was it a mammal? Or was it something that came before that?
Not often mentioned because joyless hard work, but standardization is in my eyes quite the archievement. All those synergies, systems suddenly becoming frictionless recimbineable and thus iterations faster is a pretty great achievement.
I'll put in a vote for the Panini Sutra (Aṣṭādhyāyī) [1], which is a sort of "Backus–Naur form" for classical Sanskrit grammar. I don't understand Sandskrit, but I've heard from people that I respect that the Panini Sutra should be considered as one of humanities great intellectual achievements.
Self-domestication. That in order to be more successful as a collective species we had to literally breed ourselves to become less violent and more playful and sociable.
And the nice part is that it wasn't just one person deciding this but the collective intellectual leap of all those people throughout our history who decided to reproduce with the less violent and more cooperative members of the opposite sex.
And it must have been intellectual, because on the animal level being more capable of violence is surely an individual advantage.
Advaita (non duality) is the highest intellectual achievement of the human civilization.
The list itself mentioned is interesting but it focuses on content of consciousness and not consciousness itself. The contents keep changing. Consciousness doesn't.
In other words humans appearing in consciousness discovering consciousness is more interesting than what appears on consciousness like laws of motion.
This is not to say Pythagorean laws are not cool.
It's cool. But it's just a ripple in consciousness.
Cantor is mentioned, but I'd also mention the idea that some infinities are equivalent (e.g. Integers and Rationals), but others are not (Rationals and Real numbers).
Modern information theory is wrong. Information is not the fundamental essence of existential reality, potential resolving into state is. This subtle difference propagates into the modern intellectual lies we tell ourselves. Reality is not “states.” It is “potential” resolving into “states” through constructive and destructive interference. The “number of states allowable in a system” is a function of boundary conditions of potential distribution.
I think you will find this agrees with Shannon’s original point and purpose as expressed in his seminal equation. Every interpretation since beginning with “the state of …” or “number of states …” is a misapprehension exhibiting the intellectual fallibility of our times.
This is only one for instance.
Read my threads, if you can find your way around my claims of the voices in our heads being real and waging a secret war among us, and the UFOs are actually a long familiar secret, you will find other arguments regarding the tightly held ideals so many believe as fundamental truths of this age.
Burtrand Russel and Einstein both agreed to their death beds that most of what we tell ourselves is true is merely what we have come to agree with among ourselves.
This is as true today.
The difficulty lies not in finding “Truths”, the difficulty is undeceiving the self.
No mention of Agriculture, Whitworths 3 plate method of making flat surfaces, The screw cutting lathe, The Micrometer, Gage blocks, Ford's mass production, the Haber-Bosch process for producing Ammonia.
Technologies are also the result of intellect applied to practical problems, and also deserve recognition as achievements.
>Descartes' launch of modern analytic philosophy
I find this questionable. If we go back there is a similar analyticity to Spinoza. Go forward and Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein are impossible to ignore given this framing.
I find it a bit depressing that this list is tied so closely to individuals. Obviously these individuals did great things, but it is typically by standing on the shoulders of giants (Isaac Newton) that any of this has been possible.
It might be a nice exercise to describe the larger waves of ideas that follow certain cultural currents. To list some random examples, capitalism has spurred many developments, as did religion. Setting up universities, introducing law, being able to replicate documents, all seem more relevant than some individuals taking credit for the cherry on top.
To contradict myself once more, where is Gutenberg in this list?
My votes for relatively modern stuff:
Ed Witten: Unification of various forms of string theory.
Category theory and the work building programming langauges on top of that.
If the whole thing pans out: Langlands Program (unifying most of mathematics).
Wofram Language and the math capability is pretty amazing for such a small team.
Anything that CERN touches, from the web to various quantum theories.
Genetic mapping and science.
The Lambda CDM model, and all the work that goes into constraining their predictions with limited data is pretty amazing.
Some of the things cryptanalysts and hackers do is pretty remarkable. Side channel attacks like Row hammer attacks (not strictly crypto), EM analysis, etc..., and things like hash collisions and Differential cryptanalysis.
Modern materials science is chock full of amazing intellectual achievements.
"Winning ways for your mathematical plays" as a book on game theory is a remarkable achievement by itself.
My personal hero is Shannon. He is underrated even in IT; the general public has never heard of him. But he had an enormous impact in the twentieth century.
The fact that Hegel is not there is ridiculous. Perhaps the most influential philosopher since Aristotle.
Not only did he influence the young hegelians and Marx, he continues to influence many philosophers across all kinds of schools and ideologies.
Marx not being there is an implicit moral judgement - if “great” means good in some ethical sense subjective, then OK. But if “great” means impactful or influential, that’s a problem.
Then no Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Tocqueville, Watt, Ramón y Cajal, Ford, Schumpeter, Cervantes…
On the latter, not a single mention of literature. Not even Homer. I find this list problematic in an innumerable amount of ways.
This was clearly written by someone with too little exposure to history and (comparably) too much to academic economics. No one else could think Coase belongs on such a list and forget Orsted/Faraday/Maxwell (initially...). And if you think John Locke did something important beyond adding philosophical veneer to capitalism as it was already practiced, you need to read Meiksins Wood's 'The Origin of Capitalism'.
This is the kind of questions I think a LLM work well for, because people are going to have different opinions. I think that most of us will think about science, maths, etc... But what about, say, monotheism, Athenian democracy, banking and accounting, etc... I also see that Freud is in there, a controversial take as his ideas are considered pseudoscience today, but it certainly opened the way for modern psychology, so what do you make of that.
Using a LLM trained on what is most of human written knowledge and carefully aligned will hopefully give a reasonable consensus. It is not perfect of course, but I think it is better than personal guesses.
Note: your experience may differ, not all LLMs are the same and your prompt matter, but I get similar results: mostly scientific achievements, with the one I cited usually getting top spots. A bit of social (democracy, human rights) but spirituality in general seems to be absent.
91 comments
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle
Not only his systemized thinking, but his metaphysics—especially since it got later taken up by Christianity/Catholicism. I doubt we would have gotten to Naturalism (and modern science) without his influence:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)
* https://old.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematic...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescope
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscope
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography
Nevermind the day-to-day quality of life improvements of eye glasses. Also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber
Would also need laters: modern communications would be much different if we still had to use copper cable (esp. over long distances), or microwave relays.
Mechanics: wheel, lever, screw, gear trains, cam/follower, crank‑slider, water/wind mills, mechanical clock, printing press, and the steam engine.
Every advance in basic metallurgy. Controlled smelting, casting, hot forging, alloying to make bronze, carburising to make early steel, blooms and bloomery furnaces, quenching/tempering, wrought‑iron forging, large‑scale iron production, advanced steels.
Coinage.
Sail.
Plumbing.
Refrigeration.
Plastics.
If you take the position these are not intellectual achievements, I think you under-appreciate how revolutionary they were at the time.
The compounded effect of having knowledge recorded for generations to come - thereby unlocking all the other things mentioned on this list - surely should count for something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15255847
There was a point where an organism became self aware, and then there was a point sometime after that where an organism realized that it was the first that had become self aware and all the implications of that.
To me that's a demarcation point in all of life -- the moment a creature realized that it was different from all the things that had come before it on the earth, whether they be non-living or living, as if there was a third category, living and self-aware.
I wonder if it considered it important to spread self-awareness or if it lamented that it had more important things to deal with like just surviving.
And what kind of organism was it -- was it a mammal? Or was it something that came before that?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%AD%C4%81dhy%C...
And the nice part is that it wasn't just one person deciding this but the collective intellectual leap of all those people throughout our history who decided to reproduce with the less violent and more cooperative members of the opposite sex.
And it must have been intellectual, because on the animal level being more capable of violence is surely an individual advantage.
The list itself mentioned is interesting but it focuses on content of consciousness and not consciousness itself. The contents keep changing. Consciousness doesn't.
In other words humans appearing in consciousness discovering consciousness is more interesting than what appears on consciousness like laws of motion.
This is not to say Pythagorean laws are not cool.
It's cool. But it's just a ripple in consciousness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta
Close your eyes. Where does the darkness appear?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_paradise
I think you will find this agrees with Shannon’s original point and purpose as expressed in his seminal equation. Every interpretation since beginning with “the state of …” or “number of states …” is a misapprehension exhibiting the intellectual fallibility of our times.
This is only one for instance.
Read my threads, if you can find your way around my claims of the voices in our heads being real and waging a secret war among us, and the UFOs are actually a long familiar secret, you will find other arguments regarding the tightly held ideals so many believe as fundamental truths of this age.
Burtrand Russel and Einstein both agreed to their death beds that most of what we tell ourselves is true is merely what we have come to agree with among ourselves.
This is as true today.
The difficulty lies not in finding “Truths”, the difficulty is undeceiving the self.
Technologies are also the result of intellect applied to practical problems, and also deserve recognition as achievements.
>Descartes' launch of modern analytic philosophy I find this questionable. If we go back there is a similar analyticity to Spinoza. Go forward and Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein are impossible to ignore given this framing.
It might be a nice exercise to describe the larger waves of ideas that follow certain cultural currents. To list some random examples, capitalism has spurred many developments, as did religion. Setting up universities, introducing law, being able to replicate documents, all seem more relevant than some individuals taking credit for the cherry on top.
To contradict myself once more, where is Gutenberg in this list?
Category theory and the work building programming langauges on top of that.
If the whole thing pans out: Langlands Program (unifying most of mathematics).
Wofram Language and the math capability is pretty amazing for such a small team.
Anything that CERN touches, from the web to various quantum theories.
Genetic mapping and science.
The Lambda CDM model, and all the work that goes into constraining their predictions with limited data is pretty amazing.
Some of the things cryptanalysts and hackers do is pretty remarkable. Side channel attacks like Row hammer attacks (not strictly crypto), EM analysis, etc..., and things like hash collisions and Differential cryptanalysis.
Modern materials science is chock full of amazing intellectual achievements.
"Winning ways for your mathematical plays" as a book on game theory is a remarkable achievement by itself.
I also nominate the invention of Clippy the friendly assistant.
Not only did he influence the young hegelians and Marx, he continues to influence many philosophers across all kinds of schools and ideologies.
Marx not being there is an implicit moral judgement - if “great” means good in some ethical sense subjective, then OK. But if “great” means impactful or influential, that’s a problem.
Then no Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Tocqueville, Watt, Ramón y Cajal, Ford, Schumpeter, Cervantes…
On the latter, not a single mention of literature. Not even Homer. I find this list problematic in an innumerable amount of ways.
- The scientific method
- Calculus
- Einstein's Relativity
- Darwin's Evolution
And more generally:
- The zero
- Formal logic
- The written language
This is the kind of questions I think a LLM work well for, because people are going to have different opinions. I think that most of us will think about science, maths, etc... But what about, say, monotheism, Athenian democracy, banking and accounting, etc... I also see that Freud is in there, a controversial take as his ideas are considered pseudoscience today, but it certainly opened the way for modern psychology, so what do you make of that.
Using a LLM trained on what is most of human written knowledge and carefully aligned will hopefully give a reasonable consensus. It is not perfect of course, but I think it is better than personal guesses.
Note: your experience may differ, not all LLMs are the same and your prompt matter, but I get similar results: mostly scientific achievements, with the one I cited usually getting top spots. A bit of social (democracy, human rights) but spirituality in general seems to be absent.
I’d also argue that Meitner and Noether deserve a mention.
Stepping outside my expertise, I’d argue Poppers description of what science and Pseudo-Science is, is essential.
Anyway great list!
Humans are incredible. Leaving the planet and taking a trip on the moon and possibly mars someday is no small feat.
We just need to fix our planet. Or to be honest, stop ruining it so it heals itself.
* The Decimal System
* Concept of Zero (Brahmagupta)
* Invention of Algebra (Al-Khwarizmi)
* Invention of Optics (Ibn al-Haytham)
* Meritocracy (Confucius)