Our brains have evolved such that it has allowed for forms/expressions of intelligence that is not found in the same capacity in our evolutionary timeline though. Capacity for language, empathy, meta-cognition, etc. are all part of that history of development.



I accept that we share evolutionary ancestry, yes.

As you said people are more similar than different, I value independent autonomy probably just as much as you do but what that actually means to either of us and how we each believe it can be achieved are probably very different.

This is what I meant about the different worldviews, it isn't something that can be debated easily because we are almost speaking a separate language.

I'm sensing that we're perhaps viewing the question from different scopes of timeline. I don't disagree that intelligence is less variable from the timelines you're mentioning. My own perspective is rooted in looking at our evolutionary history from an even further vantage point.

What do you mean by evolutionary timeline?

100k years? Yeah probably. 500k? Absolutely.

And perhaps you do. I don't have a sense of what your worldview is though, given that (unless I'm mistaken), posting in PaRD isn't something you've done for very long--or, if you have, we've rarely had any exchanges I can remember.

I think that we just don't have the information to make a conclusive assessment on what humans from thousands of years ago thought, with respect to empathy, meta-cognition and the like. There just isn't enough written records that have survived, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I fully believe that humans 10 thousand years ago had all the same thoughts & attributes we have now, just that they may not have had a language or written word to express them.

This post was edited by El1te on Jun 9 2023 03:29pm

Yeah, I'm looking at it from lengths of time such as those or beyond--I don't have any specifics in mind because I'm not familiar with seminal time periods (in terms of their actual numbers) in our evolutionary timeline.

And, perhaps my wording wasn't the best way to describe what I meant in my post that led to this direction. While I do think we've become increasingly intelligent on the highly macro-level, it is utility of that intelligence that has expanded to the point where we're able to engage in meta-cognition about the continuation of the human species. That's not necessarily new, as natalist and anti-natalists have been exploring this in the world of philosophy for quite some time. I don't think it inherently makes anyone anti-human to be asking those questions (as some people in this thread have suggested).

The numbers are something like

Civilization - 10k
Basic groups - 50k
Basically monkey with more tools - 100k-500k
Literally monkey - 500k - 2m

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Jun 9 2023 03:35pm

I'd say we should go back, but I don't think there were anime waifus some 50K years ago.

the pyramid is an example of things being more complex in the past. there is no construction project that even comes close the pyramids.



evolution "macro" is a imaginary story buried in millions of years. its not obsevable testable or repeatable, its not science.