I am enjoying your skepticism.
Why does millions of dollars spent in technology prove a difficulty of proving self awareness, though?
Old guys in bathrobes is an appeal to try to reduce someone’s authority by making them seen incompetent, old and stupid.
and Descartes’s language simpler? Come on…
The hardware and software of humans hasn’t changed in 100,000 years.
We’re capable of the same concepts at any point in our history. Homo sapien is homo sapien.
What’s changed is the amount of distractions we have and the types of tools we have to work with.
But we have gained many biases along the way, just as we have lost other biases.
By that same token, and I’d happily say it to prove a point (and also because I believe it’s true): You’re too old for true innovation now. The concepts embedded within you from the ages of 0-12 or so are pretty much all you got to work with, and everything since then is just reflections of stereotypical patterns you learned when you were young.
Things that confused you at 10, will confuse you at 18, at 30, at 50, and at 80. If you’re lucky, you’ll figure a few things out.
But breaking past prejudices you learn young? Very difficult because of the forgetting curve. Instead, we repeat patterns over and over again, thinking they’re new.. but they’re just rehashings of the same ol’ questions we asked when we were young.
It doesn’t matter how old Einstein was when he did the Theory of Relativity. 30 or so? I forget. We only think of him as an old man.
Why doesn’t it matter? It’s because it is the BOY EINSTEIN that was answering that question.
It just took him a few decades to go to school, university, learn all the background stuff, so the boy einstein could finally give the world an answer.
He just happened to be 20 years older by then.
and THEN after a few more years, he became a celebrity.
Thank you – I mean you didn’t _have_ to defend yourself but I’m glad you did.
Self-awareness is a lifetime study. You can achieve it at any age. What deepens is your vocabulary and ability to comprehend the nuances and travel down its mazes.
But the fundamentals are there. If you stared off into space when you were young, you may learn to not stare off into space when you’re older (social reasons) yet you may instead absorb yourself in the computer and do research.. .staring at a piece of glass and letting it reflect your thoughts using the words of others, instead of having it bounce around within your own brain so much.
But it’s still being in your head… just – extending the size of it to include the things you read and see around you and bringing them within.
Of course I’m speaking mostly of personality tendencies.
Well there are gaps in our knowledge that is based upon our education.
Let me try a test on you:
Describe, as long or short, the period between the 5th and 15th centuries in culture and technology. What was it like then?
Many people (including me until my mid 20s) have a gap built-in to our knowledge of that period that… well, wrong. I wonder if you have it as well.
You don’t have to answer of course; I’m not showing off. But we’re taught from a young age that “Today, We Have Arrived. It won’t be long now before we have achieved it all.”
And we believe it.
But it’s not true.
And they still teach it.