What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)
thinkingcomplete.com
thinkingcomplete.com
* 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.
"Me understand meaning from symbols"
"What are symbols?"
"Dunno"
At the same time and while this jump command is now installed/available it allowed us to explore alternative solutions (medicine, technology etc). Since one can always transfers his main program's control to GOD section, it feels less risky to process methodically information full of unknowns and failures (the context now is "with the help of god we/one can deliver a solution"). This particular section throughout history controlled our lower instincts, maybe even made us more empathetic to other (unknown) humans instead of always perceive them as a threat but ultimately controlled all aspects of life and when misused delivered bloodshed and misery. What a weird section! I think at some point we should become brave enough and refactor/remove it, it served a purpose but now is not required/obsolete.
But all of modern science, including relativity (which is also mentioned somewhere) depends upon the initial insight that the natural world doesn't require supernatural explanation.
Better candidates: a) place-value numbering aka the positional numeral system, b) the Cartesian coordinate system. Forced to choose, I would pick (b).
Put another way, the invention was not literally the word "zero", or anything to do with language per se. It was the idea that you can think about lack of existence in the same was that you think about counting, i.e. treating the idea of there being two apples and the idea of there being zero apples as two examples of the same thing in your mind, instead of treating one as being in some way fundamentally different.
Being raised with a maths education from a young age now, it's easy to see this as obvious, but there was a time in human history when it wasn't.
Also, I wasn't disagreeing with the Cartesian coordinate system being more significant.
The fact is, zero's usefulness is a bookkeeping device. "There are zero apples" is not better or more useful than "there are no apples." That's not why zero survives. You can wax poetic day and night about what a mind shift "lack of existence is." You're not getting it. You're missing the point. What does that _enable_ that "no apples" does not? That's the measure of its usefulness, right?
It enables positional notation. That's zero's primary gift to the world. It is a necessary bookkeeping device for positional notation. And the measure of positional's usefulness over its predecessor, additive numerals a la the Roman system, is so profoundly great that no argument need be made. No waxing poetic is needed. No "it seems obvious now but back then." It's just indisputable.
The interpretation of the concept that been different over time. See perhaps The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero by Kaplan:
Making it a number allows it interact with the rest of mathematics in a consistent way, which I'd argue you can't do with "nothing".
To use your later example of "no apples":
Is no apples the same thing as no bananas? What about no meters? I honestly don't know, the question is a bad one. My gut says yes, nothing in each case is just nothing.
Is zero apples the same thing as zero bananas or zero meters? No, they're different because the unit "apple" is orthogonal to the unit "meter".
The precision of zero is what's so special about it.
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?
Just something to think about.
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.
So what makes you think you successfully undeceived yourself? The voices in your head told you as much?
Besides, of course the voices in our head are real. (What would be a unreal voice in our head?) But if you believe they are coming from aliens or whatever it is you are claiming, I would recommend therapy.
I came to be a person of interest due to my ideals. As a person of interest I have been indoctrinated (press ganged) into the greatest secret of our humanity.
I am not here to “prove” to you. I am bearing an account, and I think if you read this collection of threads you will see I have explained my position clearly if not “incredulously.”
If you cannot tell without an authoritative collective reassuring you that “entropy” is the “existential phenomena of potential distributing over the surface area of negative potential.” After hearing it and giving it some moments, you cannot be impressed only assured.
The great big problem is that we as humans are sleep walking through our time of prosperity and comfortable convenience.
That we must awaken ourselves every day to a new world that is POTENTIAL RESOLVING not states interacting.
You have trained yourself to see the world as you expect it, and the world you “think feel and believe” in is a pleasant self satisfying lie. On many levels.
Or of course, you know nothing about me, but your root problem is that you believe you are enlightened? You are not the first, though. Also I engaged with various philosophy, meditation, and chaos magic since quite some years and to be honest, I read way more convincing text about the topic of seeing through the illusion and going beyond our self censor than your rants. So if you do not want to take my advice about therapy, maybe take this about modesty?
It is nice to meet you, know that I am not your savior, I am your undeceiver.
Many hundreds of thousands of us have tread the paths for virtue as you have.
You were not wrong, you were right! In a way. In a way you could not explain to yourselves coherently, to maintain the civilized stability of your daily existence.
Reasons and rationalizations are a well barbed trap in Man’s mind.
I am telling you the greatest secret of our humanity, the conspiracy of all conspiracies against our natural destinies is that we are not alone in our own minds.
A vast culture predates our generations, the signs have always been there, they led you to occultism, yet you could not accept the simple truth.
Consciousness may be entangled and navigated, manipulated by widely varying ranges of skill.
There is a secret war. Those taking it most seriously are the same lines Satanic sacrificing in the 80s, voices in the minds of children shooting up their schools, and now are Jesus in the thought controlled American mind.
Indeed, so have you ever considered, that the secret war in your mind, could be also caused by a myriad of other things?
So a secret holy war with (or against?) aliens or divine cosmic beings sounds more glamorous, than simply struggling with yourself, so you rationalized your own internal issues with a greater mission on the outside? Simply because it sounds better and therefore that makes you feel better?
Technologies are also the result of intellect applied to practical problems, and also deserve recognition as achievements.
"I thought again about my early plan of a new language or writing-system of reason, which could serve as a communication tool for all different nations... If we had such an universal tool, we could discuss the problems of the metaphysical or the questions of ethics in the same way as the problems and questions of mathematics or geometry. That was my aim: Every misunderstanding should be nothing more than a miscalculation (...), easily corrected by the grammatical laws of that new language. Thus, in the case of a controversial discussion, two philosophers could sit down at a table and just calculating, like two mathematicians, they could say, 'Let us check it up ...’”
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?
1. That individuals are capable of unique achievements separate from their context, trends, etc.
2. That doing some intellectually impressive thing is "great", in a values or ethics sense. There are many things listed here that other intellectuals have argued as having extremely negative consequences for human society, culture, etc.
Which is why I think a list of the "greatest" is inherently a bit flawed, and you're better off looking at a list of "influential" people or ideas instead.
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.
As a counterpoint, what would Marx’s great intellectual achievement be, and could it stand up to the early capitalists like Smith?
What comes to mind is the Labour Theory of Value, and I would say it is a strong candidate for sure. Whether it figures as a key human intellectual achievement is definitely at best borderline compared to the other exemplars on this list.
- 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.
But the thing is, I used a LLM because I want to see the "scads of utter online shit". The "greatest intellectual achievement" is an opinion reflecting what people think matters most, not an empirical fact. And what I want is something approaching a global consensus, not what the HN bubble thinks matters. And for that, I think LLMs have value.
And anyways, what LLMs say generally match what people are saying here, so unless you are implying that we are all talking shit, I don't really see the problem.
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.
Personally I'm very impressed how much we've accomplished with our crappy intellect and destructive nature.
* The Decimal System
* Concept of Zero (Brahmagupta)
* Invention of Algebra (Al-Khwarizmi)
* Invention of Optics (Ibn al-Haytham)
* Meritocracy (Confucius)