How is civilization and history even real? This is the most baffling thing ever for me. We were monkeys in the jungle and then just somehow some of us organized ourselves and a invented nuclear weapons and a means to blow up the world? I mean the few groups of us that managed it have categorized and ordered the world in ways never done before, where does that come from? There was just a magic light switch and we got consciousness? "We started using fire/eating bone marrow/tripping on lsd and our brain size exploded" all of these simple answers are clearly bullshit for such a profound question.
Add monkeys with big brains, wait a few hundred thousand years, eventually they figure out that putting plants in the ground and waiting is, while less nutritious as a baseline, a far more consistent way of getting the food they need to survive. They start to organize themselves around putting plants in the ground. They need people with authority to organize the putting of plants in the ground, people to give them meaning and purpose while they work in the fields, people to defend them from others who want to take their plants, people to build buildings to help them store and protect their plants, people to record transfers of plants and methods of plant ground putting, lots of people in one area because you need scale to produce these things. A tribe of 20 or so doesn't have room for scholars and priests, much less a warrior class. Yata yata yata, civilization.That's basically it.
>>17436525A completely retarded redditor answer.
>>17436529SPBP
>>17436525This, it's just iteration over hundreds of thousands of years of not trying to starve or die early deaths>>17436529Retarded contrarian 4troonz user
>>17436525>dolphins>whales>elephantsall have been around longer with a brain larger then modern humans
>>17436538Yes, and they didn't need opposable thumbs or big brains to survive in their environments. Natural selection doesn't arrive at some final destination, it just produces iterative changes based on environmental pressures.Humans happened to be in such a place, with such a body, that a large brain and opposable thumbs were beneficial adaptations. You need those things to make tools, you need tools to build civilization.
>>174365381. Brain to body ratios are smaller in all of them2. No opposable thumbs to engage in effective tool construction3. Cetaceans and pachyderms have been shown to have quite complex language and social hierarchies. Fully expecting them to finally drop the observation act when the aliens arrive to intervene and save us from total extermination
>>17436516>be ooga booga chieftan>notice that wild grains are pretty neat >start growing them >other ooga booga chieftains pose a threat, so you have your people grow more grain to support more people and so on >repeat for about twelve thousand years
>>17436516Reality is just shared belief.If you just go live in the woods and do your own thing, that will be your reality.If you go do it with a bunch of other people, you can make a new shared reality, often called a cult.If you go to Mars & do it, you can create a new civilization.
the grail
>>17436546>>17436554>humans were just super super special teeheeliteral narrative a toddler would think up
>>17436593The first post you replied to literally points out that humans aren't special. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong random mutations that put us in this unfortunate current state. And by "we" and "us" I mean some random ape looking creature crawling around in the Kenyan savannah or whatever. Evolution is the equivalent of banging your head into a wall until it stops hurting in a specific point
>>17436516Why would progress need to take place gradually over 10000s of years? Why is it so far fetched that progress would occur in sudden jumps? It is in fact more logical to expect it would happen after this or that breakthrough.• Hunter gatherers produced so little food they had to constantly migrate from one place to another, then when they discovered how to farm wheat it allowed them to expand their populations in an area about 10 to 100 times.• In the middle ages like 95% of people were farmers, as soon as someone discovered a labor saving device people moved to the towns and cities to work, which in turn stimulated further industry.• As soon as semiconductors were discovered it opened up a whole new avenue for computing, within decades we now have simulated neural networks like our own brains• Consider the first microbes or the Cambrian explosion in evolutionary history. As soon as life evolved a set of useful adaptations allowing it to expand, it did so, it went from some blob in primordial ooze to spreading throughout the worldMany such cases.
>>17436537The two absolutely essential things that allowed human beings to create advanced societies were 1. language and 2. suitable land. The first happened in what is called the cognitive revolution estimated to have happened 150,000 years ago, regardless if you believe the dating of this accurate or not- from then on as speaking beings, we began to filter the objects we encounter through the symbolic world of language even before concretely experienced, and this world of words becomes the world of things, and there you have the birth of the unconscious.The second comes with the end of the ice age, the Natufian culture of the levant becomes the first to domesticate crops and build settlements, Europe's ice begins to melt and Anatolian farmers migrate to Europe and begin the neolithic revolution. China by this point had already been millennia's into there agricultural revolution. Some settlements like Uruk grew to relatively large sizes with a population of 80,000 in the 3rd millennium BCE, they inherited the politic and structure of the neolithic tribes preceding only now a temple as a mediator and central institution. Being geographically where it was allowed it to better facilitate trade and so emphasized the need for record keeping and accounting which gave birth to writing (although many societies at this point already had rune).>>17436525Reddit brain explanation. You actually think civilization is like a video game where you have a bar to satisfy so you invest military/religion/art>people to give them meaning and purpose while they work in the fieldsjust embarrassingly stupid>lots of people in one area because you need scale to produce these thingswasn't the case at all for neolithic or bronze age societies>A tribe of 20 or so doesn't have room for scholars and priestsas if there was some chief thinking to himself "damnit my tribe is too small to develop my scholar class"
>>17436516>We were monkeys in the jungleNo.
>>17436529this
>>17436651>Why would progress need to take place gradually over 10000s of years? Why is it so far fetched that progress would occur in sudden jumps? It is in fact more logical to expect it would happen after this or that breakthrough.Because that's how these manchildren were taught evolution in high school and they're interpreting the world with there stupid child brain. They think that "evolution took billions of years" means that every year in that time we were inching 0.00001% closer to where we are now, rather than the fact that all evolutionary change corresponded one to one with the rapid geological changes unfolding periodically throughout earths history. That biological as well as technological/cultural changes all happen very rapidly when the right circumstances emerge.
Do whatever you want, but don’t pick that banana from the tree.
Everything you’ve been taught is a means to control you.
>>17436529holy rent free
>>17436749>trumpanzee schizobabbleit's so tiresome
>>17436516Some people are just better than othersThey get born somewhere and drive civilization to some other placeZarathustra is an example, most persian were iliterate but he was just born with a big brain aparently.
>>17436516This is why I think it's totally possible that we are the only intelligent, technologically advanced life in the universe. It really seems like an incredibly unlikely event, so unlikely that it might have not happened yet before.There were millions of geni of animals, and only 1 developed higher intelligence. And then, even that genus spent 99% of it's history so far just being primitive tribes, AND even after that, most technological advances happened only in the last 300 years and in a limited geographic area. Only a handful of cultures even developed agriculture by themselves.So all of the developments that led to here were extremely unlikely by themselves. So even if life can develop on other planets, how likely is it that one of them got above just being animals, when even on Earth it only happened once?
