This is a good piece to consider in light of some stuff I've been thinking about with LLMs - new technology, that is. I've been reflecting on how some tech changes our relationship with the world, and can do so with such thoroughness that we forget that other ways of thinking even existed.
Plato didn't like books. Trithemius stood up for the scriptorium against the onslaught of the printing press. Baudelaire lamented photography as a refuge for lazy painters. And on it goes.
Mirrors are so commoditized now that they are a mere utility, but there was a time when they were miraculous...mirror..aculous...never mind. Special. That's fun to think about. Especially thinking about something like Snow White, a story that people still understand but probably has a link or two to the past with the "mirror on the wall who's the fairest of them all" stuff.
> can do so with such thoroughness that we forget that other ways of thinking even existed.
There is a debate between Chomsky and Foucault [1] where they discuss exactly that at some point (I don't remember the timestamp, sorry). There is an argument about how most of the knowledge of a specific era is "lost" when there is a big discovery. It was a random recommendation from YouTube, and I was quite pleased when I decided to give it a watch.
I was actually talking with some small children recently about the snow white story, and I found it amazing how for them there was nothing magical about the mirror on the wall - it's just a different form factor of a google home device.
Edit: on a separate note, this got me thinking - why does the story make it a mirror? I don't recall it ever being used for its reflective property. Is there supposed to be some deeper meaning to the mirror being a reflection of the queen? Because otherwise, it could have just been a magic talking picture.
I'd caution against looking for deliberate symbolism in these ancient tales. The Grimm brothers wrote these in the early 19th century, but the folk tales they drew from are far older. But the mirror seems to be a representation of vanity. The Queen is gazing in the mirror because she's obsessed with her beauty, which is why she's jealous of the younger Snow White.
I don't know for sure, but it's worth noting that the original story was from 1812, which is...based on a quick wiki search, right on the cusp of mirrors being made for the masses. (Seems like they would have been available for royalty though.) And as the story was retold, it wasn't always a mirror.
However these are both just published versions of oral folktales. The basic outline of the story might go back hundreds of years earlier, and nobody will ever be able to say when the mirror first showed up.
To the extent that I'm trying to make a point, I think this supports it!
> By the time Richilde is fifteen, she is an orphan and the new Countess. Her dying mother warned her to be virtuous and never use the mirror for frivolity
This is something that would be a lot harder to synthesize in a world where mirrors are abundant, and the link between self-reflection and vanity is strong here.
Mirrors have many supernatural associations. Vampires, for instance, cast no reflection within them. They invoke spirits if the spirt's name is spoken three times. Sometimes, they can trap spirits or demons (must be a dozen modern movies that still utilize this trope, though the writers don't necessarily even recognize where the trope originates).
It's some very ancient meme (in the true sense of the word) that follows humans around without them even recognizing that it's there.
I'd like to read the accounts of contemporary curmudgeons bemoaning the way young Greeks are clamoring for mom's mirror, and how you should limit your kids to no more than one twelfth of a day of mirror time, setting the clepsydra if necessary.
Yeah, for sure! I mean, Narcissus is in the public consciousness there to back up your idea.
It's an interesting idea: that a piece of tech can represent one thing and have certain moral sensibilities that form around it, and then some innovation or something changes our relationship with it (in this case, puts it on a wall in every bathroom).
Maybe it changed us in ways we can't fully know! Maybe commoditizing the mirror largely robbed it of its power. Or maybe we're all a bunch of narcissists in ways we can't comprehend because we don't have the anti-mirror people out there scolding us.
I thought you were going to go a different direction and point out that many people don’t realize how easily LLMs can act like “mirrors” and reflect their own thoughts back to them.
Now you've duped everyone with the wrong headline, let's discuss what we thought it was about.
I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now.
I'm sure Romans were sitting there with their cities and aqueducts and street vendors and Colosseum and huge empire thinking this is as good as society had ever been.
Nobody was sitting there saying "we don't even have electricity" or "of course light doesn't come out of our eyes to see, that easily fails the scientific method" because they didn't know those things existed.
I get the thrust of what you say but this wasn't always the case. The idea of linear progress upwards is not universal. Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in their past, before some corruption or decay took place -the ultimate expression of such would be like the biblical story of the Fall, but it also existed on less cosmic scales. The golden age when people were better, seeing your age as decay against the valorized past is in fact more common.
Also just because others thought similar things doesn't mean it isn't true now. The progress since sometime in the 1800s has been insane. If in 100,000 years a super smart civilization, unimaginably advanced, looks at an estimated world population time series, they will be objectively impressed that those guys figured out / stumbled upon some impressive things to manage that. It's really interesting to think about just how desolate the world was even a few hundred years ago. Almost all our big cities today were little towns, except for like 1 or 2 globally. The change is undeniable. It's not all subjective and "they said X, we say X, nobody can decide if X is true, what is truth anyway, etc"
In many cultures, there is/was also the idea of cyclical history. Things don't go forward or backward, they just repeat themselves in slightly different ways infinitely.
It reminds me of Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought trilogy, especially the observation the traders make in the second book that all planet-bound civilizations are doomed to collapse at some point. They are usually able to restore technological progress more quickly the more records they have, but without leaving the planet are still doomed to repeat the cycle. IIRC there is even more-or-less standardized "uplift" protocols - series of technological reveals for less-developed civilizations to rapidly advance/restore their capabilities.
I wonder if there is academic study comparing past-focused, future-focused, and cyclical views of human progress in literature.
Not having half of your kids die, could be one thing:
"For most of human history, around 1 in 2 newborns died before reaching the age of 15. By 1950, that figure had declined to around one-quarter globally. By 2020, it had fallen to 4%."
Towards maximizing the sum of individual happiness, power, beauty and knowledge. Maybe a few other attributes in there, but these are the bare minimum that no civilization would deny for itself.
The question of course is 'how'. For the last few centuries, the answer has been technology.
Victory over the terror of the natural world on all of its fronts. That doesn't mean decimation of natural beauty, but answering the question "how will I live comfortably and not die today?" everyday for everyone forever.
Leaving aside the heart death of the universe, I can imagine a future that's a more utopian version of the Altered Carbon universe, where everyone who wants to have daily backups, which they could set to restore either in the cloud or in a biological/robotic body in the case of an unintended death.
I don't know if it's a laudable goal, but I think it'll eventually be possible.
I was asked about the direction of the destination. Saying the direction and having everyone agree on it is worth a lot when the current bus driver is heading towards a cliff. I do think things get better if we all pursued this destination together.
If you asked me several years ago I would have said "yes, the star trek future is at least partially attainable", but that requires a lot of optimism in technological advancement that I don't have. I do think that with the technology and resources available to us today (or the near future) we could support 10 billion people working safe labor in air conditioning, full stomachs, free time, and on a planet that is still hospitable.
If you want to know how to actually get there: I have no idea, but I do know if we don't agree on the direction and make steps towards it continuously for many generations that we'll never get there. For now I'm voting with my feet and contributing my labor to a cause I think pushes us in the right direction.
Also, I'm setting aside the battle with natural death. Preserving brains and their contents indefinitely is not impossible, but transhumanism is as much philosophy as it is technology.
Good question, I guess progress to the betterment of society, people's lives, and human knowledge and power.
But no one really knows what future we are heading towards, or what would happen to us in 100,000 years. No one really cares to think that far ahead I guess.
We don’t think about it that much because every assumption we make is likely to turn out to be wildly inaccurate and the technology of the time will likely solve all of the problems we worry about now long before they ever reach that breaking point we are currently worrying about.
Take the example from another thread today. In the 60s we were worried about food shortages to support the exploding population, but it turned out that we solved that problem way before the population number was at that assumed “breaking point”.
We can theorize now about the problems we will face in 100k years, but what about the problems we can’t ever foresee? Aliens with hyperlight laser beams? Rogue asteroids? We have no answers for those types of problems, but they are probably more likely than anything we can dream up today.
> we know enough physics to say aliens can't attack
Don't be too optimistic... This isn't just a question of physics but also about the probability of the emergence of complex technological intelligence. Since we only know about a single case, we can't determine this probability. We can make various guesses but these all involve assumptions about things other than physics
Even if all travel is limited by lightspeed, without knowing the probability of emergence of intelligent life, we don't know how far away or how long ago such life is likely to have formed.
Even if we did have a better idea about this probability, we still couldn't rule out that intelligent life had by chance formed relatively nearby, relatively long ago, thereby allowing them to reach us by now. Nothing in physics forbids this as far as I know.
Personally I don't think an advanced alien civ would attack us anyway, because we'd be no threat. Since intelligence seems to imply curiosity, they might want to observe or experiment with us instead, but that's speculative
I didn't mean it in a moral sense, but in sheer production, population, the physical energy moved around the mass of materials moved around etc. It's a wholly orthogonal question whether this is better in a moral sense, whether people are happier, live more in harmony with their authentic selves or with God or whatever. The point is that even an alien would be able to see that this age is not simply like any other where people thought highly of themselves. There has been massive material-technological improvement in the last two centuries in a way that doesn't apply to every era at all. Seriously look at a chart of a world population. It's a hockey stick. Again I'm not claiming here and now that this is a moral improvement. Maybe you think it's for the worse and take the cautionary view, like the stories of Icarus, or the Tower of Babel and think it's bad that we took too much control of things. But that's an orthogonal question.
This is a very flat view - the Roman empire is born in a period of civil war, and after a relatively brief period of peace in the imperial core starts imploding and rebuilding itself in different configurations.
The art and culture was very often echoing an imagined past of yeoman landholders + citizens.(very similar to the invocation of 'Real America' today). And their foundation myth imagines that they are a continuation of the trojan civilization.
For everyone who was not at the top of the imperial hierarchy it's pretty easy to imagine that they thought civilization could be improved! Aristotle writes a defense of slavery - which implies that someone was attacking the institution. It's not a big leap to think that enslaved people could picture a world where they weren't enslaved, or that women could imagine having political/civil/property rights.
I think maybe something you are getting at is that those structures felt indestructible at the time, that in christianity associating the end of the roman empire with the apocalypse. Needless to say we aren't posting this in latin.
Since I'm assuming that Bret Devereaux [1] isn't here to raise the point, I'll do it instead: "ancient people" is a term that, as we colloquially understand it, tends to exclude most of the ancient people, namely, the peasants. Sure, a Roman would sit with their aqueducts, but for that one person in the city you need a couple orders of magnitude more people working the fields.
As I understand Bret's last post about the life of peasants[2] regarding how they saw life,
> the lives of these peasants work in a series of cycles. There’s a reason agrarian societies of these sort often do not think in terms of time as a linear progression, but instead as a set of ‘ages’ or ‘cycles,’ with the present, in a sense, endlessly repeating in a static sort of rhythm. For these societies technological and social progress, while real is often so slow as to be almost or entirely imperceptible on a normal human lifespan.
I think your (perhaps intentionally) missing the point as a pretext to pontificate about and link to things that are only tangentially related.
Even if these people aren't well recorded in history you can take a pretty ironclad estimate as to what they thought in aggregate by looking at the clergy, the administrators, etc, etc and what they were preaching, saying, etc.
How one sees their individual life doesn't have direct bearing on the society they live in.
Let's take for example a farmer on the outskirts of some village in southwest England. His bloodline may have been occupying the same land for Millenia. Their feelings about doing so may not even change over that time. But depending on the century you put him in he and everyone else in the society he lives in think of the way they fit into the larger world very differently.
IIRC the ancient Greeks did not view themselves as the "pinnacle of civilisation", but somewhat fallen from a time of heroes or a golden age in the past. This golden age is when many of their well known epics take place. Another point of interest here is that I have heard the estimated timing of the golden age to be right before the bronze age collapse, meaning that they were literally a kind of post apocalyptic society reminiscing about their past.
Or, if you were less charitable about the nature of Bronze Age social organization, you could say it's a society of former slaves hopelessly romanticizing their former masters.
On a related note, I think the whole mystery of the Bronze Age collapse becomes fairly obvious once you consider the nature of Bronze Age societies and the way they'd be affected by a technology [iron] that allows a village with a can-do attitude to resist the predations of the local god-king. (Or to become predators themselves, perhaps by taking to the sea.)
Athens too - the vast majority of the population were slaves or 'metics' - non-Athenian foreigners. Some slaves worked as partners with their citizen master and it wasn't unusual for such a slave to be adopted into a family and thus become a citizen. Such slaves had greater rights than women, who could never become citizens.
At the time, they were right; it was as good as society had ever been.
I think they were much like us in many ways. They probably imagined that things could get better (even if they didn't imagine electricity or computers).
I would argue (without any proof, just by feeling) that currently there are more people that think the past is better than the present. There is even a statement "every past time was better": is a subjective perception influenced by cognitive biases like rosy retrospection, which causes people to remember the past more fondly and forget its difficulties.
Many many people today tend towards ecologism, thinking we are now just ruining the planet, and should go back in time.
I'm not sure every era did think it was the apex of human progress, though, because sometimes they had physical or cultural evidence that previous generations could do things that they couldn't.
E.g. if you were a petty kingdom emerging in the centuries after the Romans left Britain, you'd be fairly sure that you no longer had the technology to build aqueducts, baths or villas. And for centuries after that, a large element of learning was trying to recreate / understand the classics - e.g. the influence of Galen and Aristotle.
Doesn't the modern idea of inevitable human progress really come in with the enlightenment?
Did they? For example, the Roman formula for waterproof concrete was lost and only rediscovered (in the 15th Century) when a manuscript came to light. I think it's more than just a lack of people or wealth (though that comes into it of course): people thought of the Romans as being 'superior', hence the effort they went to to preserve surviving classic manuscripts.
It's not to say that the early medieval period couldn't eventually built magnificent edifices or build on the knowledge, but for many centuries, Rome and Greece was seen as something to aspire to.
That isn't relevant as they didn't have the spare resources to dedicate people to the task. If they did a few smart researchers could figure something out. Just going through all their archives would have done the job if they had people to dedicate to the search (though of course they couldn't have known that and so a track to create it from scratch would also be needed).
Depending on where you are talking about there may not have been local resources to make waterproof concrete, which back to my point: they didn't have the resources if they wanted to. Though we have plenty of buildings (most obviously Cathedrals) dating to well before the rediscovery of roman concrete to prove that isn't needed. Those Cathedrals only exist because they had a few resources and so they could build them over time. Those cathedrals also were in use for church services - usually in the first year of construction - to fuel the dream.
> Those Cathedrals only exist because they had a few resources and so they could build them over time
They also only exist because they used architectural techniques that the Romans never developed, namely the flying buttress, which could support massive relatively thin wall without hundreds of columns and arches everywhere.
Why the down vote? This was a factual statement and not some judgement: The name implies that some previous "era" was greater than the current - and hence current cannot be the pinnacle.
You're needlessly dragging a contemporary controversial political movement into a discussion about a subject measured in much longer time periods, which by itself is fine and you can trick the useful idiots into mashing the rightthink button if you do it right, but you didn't do it right.
To use metaphor, you made a "haha 69" joke in a context where you needed at least a double entendre.
If this were a comment section for an article on a subject of modern political relevance (i.e. a poo flinging match) you probably would have gotten away with it.
You could/should have crafted the comment with more words and hit some other topics (maga isn't unique, there's other historical and contemporary movements that follow the same trend) to obfuscate it and appeal to the people who fancy themselves pseudo intellectual but that would have taken effort you didn't expend and so those people are offended by your low effort.
Thanks, I see your point. Was not trying to be snarky/funny, but rather come with counter example to parent. I was thinking about the (recent) "Era of globalization" - but perhaps that is too short of a time span to be called an era
Just tossing out more examples than just MAGA would likely have sufficed IMO. Current Russian expansionism, 1930s Italian ambition in Africa, etc, etc. There's a fair bit to to make interesting comparison to even if you restrict yourself to "modern" (i.e. industrial revolution and beyond) societies.
Roman elites were obsessed with Greek culture, in a way similar to many Americans' current fascination with the British class system (Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, Rivals, etc.)
> I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now.
I think the Romans were right to believe that, and so are we today.
But the ride wasn't sa clean, steady slope up. For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had.
Now we live in the first period in history where knowledge of history is accessible to almost any person. So as a regular guy you can have a good sense of where to place these times on the scale of civilization.
> For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had.
I am pretty sure you are wrong on multiple counts there.
1. The "dark ages" were called dark because of a lack of written records, after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its centralised systems and imperial bureaucracy.
2. A lot of people did know there had been a different age before. Even if not literate they would regard the literate as the source of knowledge and every village would have some literate people.
3. Life was better for many people. An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc.
> An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc.
Look at how a lot of those societies were structured. Were those people really doing "better" or are we just assuming that because of the biases our modern culture brings?
Being not a slave across the rome-middle ages boundary is like having a degree in liberal arts. It might've meant something at first but the back slide basically watered it down to nothing for a lot of people. That's why it went away. There was no point in maintaining it as an institution generally after Rome fell.
More broadly, there's a reason nobody really cared about slavery, rights, freedom, etc, etc, until the 1600s+ (i.e. the beginning of the off ramp toward industrialized societies). Prior to then so much of society was enslaved by the literal physics of the work that needed to be done to keep a roof over everyone's head and food in their stomachs that it didn't really matter. Almost nobody was in a place to exert more influence upon their life arc than the wind does upon the path of a stone thrown through the air (which is to say some but not much) so society didn't expend effort to hash out the details of something that wasn't relevant. Only once there were more surpluses the various shades of freedom become something that society could benefit from defining.
I think that's true (particularly about the Dark ages not being uncultured), but in some places, the signs that what came before was vastly superior technologically (and culturally) would have been all around them.
E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology.
And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period – in the service of religion in the monasteries, of course, but also in what we'd know call 'science'. E.g. wasn't Aristotle taken as the go to authority in scientific matters for the scholastics?
> E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology.
Yes, but
1. Britain was where there is the best case for a serious regression.
2. Building those systems was also a matter of imperial priorities and imperial centralisation. Smaller kingdoms did not need it.
> And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period
Much was, and Aristotle was taken as far too much of an authority. There were probably not many advances in science during the early middle ages, but there were in high and late medieval. Even in the early middle ages there were advances in architecture and agriculture and some amazing art produced.
I chose Roman Britain because I live in a city (Deva) which was once meant to be the capital of the whole province, where the evidence of lost glories would have been glaringly apparent to everybody for a long time, even though the settlement was still major in contemporary terms.
More generally, some technology was lost everywhere (well, in the Western world anyway): nobody knew how to make waterproof concrete again until a manuscript reappeared in the fifteenth century.
Roman Britain is just one example, but it does disprove the general thesis that people always think they are the pinnacle of civilisation – and it's by far from the only example, of course. For much of the next thousand years (and beyond) Classical Rome, and later, Ancient Greece were seen as a lost golden age, something to learn from and aspire to (and adapt to religious dogma in a fallen world which was going to end fairly shortly anyway…)
Of course they had their fair share of brilliant people and they made significant advances and it's facile to disparage them ("Dark ages") but it does seem like a very different mental view of the world.
>There were many medieval advances in technology, art, architecture and science.
My favorite is the gothic arch because it basically decomposes into the math of man hours, calories and the work of moving stone. They didn't have the surpluses the Romans did so they were forced to invent a more efficient arch.
Yes, I'm not denying that there were a lot of developments in that time period - more that there was a perception that things were declining, even if that wasn't actually true.
Well that was trigger happy and arguing for the sale of arguing. We have different definitions of what an advanced civilization is.
On #1, do you see the lack of written records as cutting down bureaucracy? Because historians see it as a period of civilization downturn and turmoil. No focus on things outside the necessities which were mostly about survival. The enlightenment or renaissance didn’t have these names for the return to documenting thoroughly. It was because of everything in between.
#2 “A lot of people” says nothing. The average person in the year 900 had no formal education so would probably know at best some stories or legends about what came 500 years before. But let’s not pretend this changes the meaning of what I said.
#3 Many people today are slaves so were the dark ages more civilized?
> In the myth of Narcissus, a beautiful young demigod who saw his own reflection in a pool of water became so enamored with it that he refused to move. He rejected the advances of beautiful young women and eventually wasted away, unable to break the spell of his own image.
This is calling out for experimental archaeologists to make the best possible front surface reflections they can from polished copper, bronze, steel, obsidian, glass. The Romans had metallised glass. They knew how to roast glass. They may well have known how to vaporise metal onto glass.
The state of the reflecting surface with 2ky of corrosion does not match even looking at your reflections in water.
British Museum actually does this with their Greek statues - shows how they were painted. The gap between "marble perfection" and "gaudy colors" is wild. Makes you realize how much our idea of classical taste is just patina.
One view is that the western idea of "good taste" was informed by people looking at greek and roman statues and buildings and incorrectly assuming they were always intended to be plain.
> These mirrors were valuable — they’ve been found with other luxury grave goods — but only somewhat useful. They were reflective to an extent, but aren’t capable of reflecting much detail or color [image] Still, the people of ancient Anatolia thought it was worth hours of labor to see even a dim reflection of their own faces.
I can't help but wonder if there's something we've lost, some stropping material or process capable of making them significantly more reflective than we image.
It's weird to think that we need a mirror (or other means of imaging) to see our own face. We can see a large part of our own body directly, but we will never be able to directly see our own face like other people do (unless, I guess, you have an eye pop out in some kind of accident, but I guess at that point this is not the kind of thing you would consider).
You also can't hear your own voice like other people do, because what you hear when you are speaking mostly come from the vibrations in your bones rather than from sound waves going through the air.
And unlike with mirrors, something we always had, be it just a pond of water, the ability to hear your own voice like others hear it came with recording devices, and is therefore very recent (19th century).
You can hear your own voice as an echo, though it is somewhat distorted in a similar way as one's reflection is warped in a pool of water. Amphitheaters are an ancient building technique which utilize acoustic properties to reflect sound toward distant listeners, but I'm not familiar with structures built to reflect sound back toward the speaker specifically, though I imagine that such a structure could be built. Naturally occurring echo chambers exist in the environment, as well.
Am I the only one who thought this was referring to how people felt about the general zeitgeist? Like, how Romans viewed everyone outside Rome as barbarian, etc. Not in the literal sense like, mirrors. Nice HN switcheroo.
Yeah that was my original interpretation of the title too! Perhaps something like:
How did early humans understand their situation and what did they think the 'world' was like, and what did they think they should do with their lives?! I find it fascinating to think how that longing to know what it's all about has changed so much for humans over time.
Mirrors are still heaps interesting though, as is reflection/refraction/light-transport in general I'd say! But it wasn't about what I expected when I read it.
And now we’ve built LLMs - the biggest mirror of them all.
The Internet and smartphones gave us countless ways to look at ourselves and see how others see us. And then LLMs helped us gaze at the sum of all that and even confront reflections of our own thoughts.
Yeah, TFA ended just before it got to the really interesting part of how self-reflection itself is fundamental to the development of concisousness. Mirror-like technologies don't just show us our own appearance. They help us understand how we relate to the world around us.
It reminds me of Kieślowski's movie Camera Buff (1979), where the main character in iconic scene points the camera at himself and realizes that the act of making movies reflects not only his subjects, but also on who he is in relation them.
ancient, and some current peoples, view themselves through the lense of truth, verrifiable, self evidentiary truth starting with physical existance and that this is shared, and a complete understanding of what it is to be human, which may or may not, be shared
Plato didn't like books. Trithemius stood up for the scriptorium against the onslaught of the printing press. Baudelaire lamented photography as a refuge for lazy painters. And on it goes.
Mirrors are so commoditized now that they are a mere utility, but there was a time when they were miraculous...mirror..aculous...never mind. Special. That's fun to think about. Especially thinking about something like Snow White, a story that people still understand but probably has a link or two to the past with the "mirror on the wall who's the fairest of them all" stuff.
There is a debate between Chomsky and Foucault [1] where they discuss exactly that at some point (I don't remember the timestamp, sorry). There is an argument about how most of the knowledge of a specific era is "lost" when there is a big discovery. It was a random recommendation from YouTube, and I was quite pleased when I decided to give it a watch.
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=eF9BtrX0YEE&pp=ygUVQ2hvbXNreSBhb...
Edit: on a separate note, this got me thinking - why does the story make it a mirror? I don't recall it ever being used for its reflective property. Is there supposed to be some deeper meaning to the mirror being a reflection of the queen? Because otherwise, it could have just been a magic talking picture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richilde_(fairy_tale)
However these are both just published versions of oral folktales. The basic outline of the story might go back hundreds of years earlier, and nobody will ever be able to say when the mirror first showed up.
> By the time Richilde is fifteen, she is an orphan and the new Countess. Her dying mother warned her to be virtuous and never use the mirror for frivolity
This is something that would be a lot harder to synthesize in a world where mirrors are abundant, and the link between self-reflection and vanity is strong here.
It's some very ancient meme (in the true sense of the word) that follows humans around without them even recognizing that it's there.
It's an interesting idea: that a piece of tech can represent one thing and have certain moral sensibilities that form around it, and then some innovation or something changes our relationship with it (in this case, puts it on a wall in every bathroom).
Maybe it changed us in ways we can't fully know! Maybe commoditizing the mirror largely robbed it of its power. Or maybe we're all a bunch of narcissists in ways we can't comprehend because we don't have the anti-mirror people out there scolding us.
I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now.
I'm sure Romans were sitting there with their cities and aqueducts and street vendors and Colosseum and huge empire thinking this is as good as society had ever been.
Nobody was sitting there saying "we don't even have electricity" or "of course light doesn't come out of our eyes to see, that easily fails the scientific method" because they didn't know those things existed.
Also just because others thought similar things doesn't mean it isn't true now. The progress since sometime in the 1800s has been insane. If in 100,000 years a super smart civilization, unimaginably advanced, looks at an estimated world population time series, they will be objectively impressed that those guys figured out / stumbled upon some impressive things to manage that. It's really interesting to think about just how desolate the world was even a few hundred years ago. Almost all our big cities today were little towns, except for like 1 or 2 globally. The change is undeniable. It's not all subjective and "they said X, we say X, nobody can decide if X is true, what is truth anyway, etc"
I wonder if there is academic study comparing past-focused, future-focused, and cyclical views of human progress in literature.
North America, for example.
Progress towards what, exactly?
"For most of human history, around 1 in 2 newborns died before reaching the age of 15. By 1950, that figure had declined to around one-quarter globally. By 2020, it had fallen to 4%."
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
The question of course is 'how'. For the last few centuries, the answer has been technology.
I don't know if it's a laudable goal, but I think it'll eventually be possible.
If you asked me several years ago I would have said "yes, the star trek future is at least partially attainable", but that requires a lot of optimism in technological advancement that I don't have. I do think that with the technology and resources available to us today (or the near future) we could support 10 billion people working safe labor in air conditioning, full stomachs, free time, and on a planet that is still hospitable.
If you want to know how to actually get there: I have no idea, but I do know if we don't agree on the direction and make steps towards it continuously for many generations that we'll never get there. For now I'm voting with my feet and contributing my labor to a cause I think pushes us in the right direction.
Also, I'm setting aside the battle with natural death. Preserving brains and their contents indefinitely is not impossible, but transhumanism is as much philosophy as it is technology.
But no one really knows what future we are heading towards, or what would happen to us in 100,000 years. No one really cares to think that far ahead I guess.
Take the example from another thread today. In the 60s we were worried about food shortages to support the exploding population, but it turned out that we solved that problem way before the population number was at that assumed “breaking point”.
We can theorize now about the problems we will face in 100k years, but what about the problems we can’t ever foresee? Aliens with hyperlight laser beams? Rogue asteroids? We have no answers for those types of problems, but they are probably more likely than anything we can dream up today.
Don't be too optimistic... This isn't just a question of physics but also about the probability of the emergence of complex technological intelligence. Since we only know about a single case, we can't determine this probability. We can make various guesses but these all involve assumptions about things other than physics
unless you are appealing to 'God can do anything' - but since God wouldn't do that we can ignore that he could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Traversable_wormholes
Even if all travel is limited by lightspeed, without knowing the probability of emergence of intelligent life, we don't know how far away or how long ago such life is likely to have formed.
Even if we did have a better idea about this probability, we still couldn't rule out that intelligent life had by chance formed relatively nearby, relatively long ago, thereby allowing them to reach us by now. Nothing in physics forbids this as far as I know.
Personally I don't think an advanced alien civ would attack us anyway, because we'd be no threat. Since intelligence seems to imply curiosity, they might want to observe or experiment with us instead, but that's speculative
The art and culture was very often echoing an imagined past of yeoman landholders + citizens.(very similar to the invocation of 'Real America' today). And their foundation myth imagines that they are a continuation of the trojan civilization.
For everyone who was not at the top of the imperial hierarchy it's pretty easy to imagine that they thought civilization could be improved! Aristotle writes a defense of slavery - which implies that someone was attacking the institution. It's not a big leap to think that enslaved people could picture a world where they weren't enslaved, or that women could imagine having political/civil/property rights.
I think maybe something you are getting at is that those structures felt indestructible at the time, that in christianity associating the end of the roman empire with the apocalypse. Needless to say we aren't posting this in latin.
As I understand Bret's last post about the life of peasants[2] regarding how they saw life,
> the lives of these peasants work in a series of cycles. There’s a reason agrarian societies of these sort often do not think in terms of time as a linear progression, but instead as a set of ‘ages’ or ‘cycles,’ with the present, in a sense, endlessly repeating in a static sort of rhythm. For these societies technological and social progress, while real is often so slow as to be almost or entirely imperceptible on a normal human lifespan.
[1] https://acoup.blog
[2] https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an...
Even if these people aren't well recorded in history you can take a pretty ironclad estimate as to what they thought in aggregate by looking at the clergy, the administrators, etc, etc and what they were preaching, saying, etc.
How one sees their individual life doesn't have direct bearing on the society they live in.
Let's take for example a farmer on the outskirts of some village in southwest England. His bloodline may have been occupying the same land for Millenia. Their feelings about doing so may not even change over that time. But depending on the century you put him in he and everyone else in the society he lives in think of the way they fit into the larger world very differently.
On a related note, I think the whole mystery of the Bronze Age collapse becomes fairly obvious once you consider the nature of Bronze Age societies and the way they'd be affected by a technology [iron] that allows a village with a can-do attitude to resist the predations of the local god-king. (Or to become predators themselves, perhaps by taking to the sea.)
I think they were much like us in many ways. They probably imagined that things could get better (even if they didn't imagine electricity or computers).
Many many people today tend towards ecologism, thinking we are now just ruining the planet, and should go back in time.
E.g. if you were a petty kingdom emerging in the centuries after the Romans left Britain, you'd be fairly sure that you no longer had the technology to build aqueducts, baths or villas. And for centuries after that, a large element of learning was trying to recreate / understand the classics - e.g. the influence of Galen and Aristotle.
Doesn't the modern idea of inevitable human progress really come in with the enlightenment?
It's not to say that the early medieval period couldn't eventually built magnificent edifices or build on the knowledge, but for many centuries, Rome and Greece was seen as something to aspire to.
Depending on where you are talking about there may not have been local resources to make waterproof concrete, which back to my point: they didn't have the resources if they wanted to. Though we have plenty of buildings (most obviously Cathedrals) dating to well before the rediscovery of roman concrete to prove that isn't needed. Those Cathedrals only exist because they had a few resources and so they could build them over time. Those cathedrals also were in use for church services - usually in the first year of construction - to fuel the dream.
They also only exist because they used architectural techniques that the Romans never developed, namely the flying buttress, which could support massive relatively thin wall without hundreds of columns and arches everywhere.
To use metaphor, you made a "haha 69" joke in a context where you needed at least a double entendre.
If this were a comment section for an article on a subject of modern political relevance (i.e. a poo flinging match) you probably would have gotten away with it.
You could/should have crafted the comment with more words and hit some other topics (maga isn't unique, there's other historical and contemporary movements that follow the same trend) to obfuscate it and appeal to the people who fancy themselves pseudo intellectual but that would have taken effort you didn't expend and so those people are offended by your low effort.
Tell that to 600s Western Europe. They were fully aware that there was a society before them that had the capacity to do things they could not.
I think the Romans were right to believe that, and so are we today.
But the ride wasn't sa clean, steady slope up. For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had.
Now we live in the first period in history where knowledge of history is accessible to almost any person. So as a regular guy you can have a good sense of where to place these times on the scale of civilization.
I am pretty sure you are wrong on multiple counts there.
1. The "dark ages" were called dark because of a lack of written records, after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its centralised systems and imperial bureaucracy.
2. A lot of people did know there had been a different age before. Even if not literate they would regard the literate as the source of knowledge and every village would have some literate people.
3. Life was better for many people. An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc.
https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/middle-ages-dark-ages/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
Look at how a lot of those societies were structured. Were those people really doing "better" or are we just assuming that because of the biases our modern culture brings?
Being not a slave across the rome-middle ages boundary is like having a degree in liberal arts. It might've meant something at first but the back slide basically watered it down to nothing for a lot of people. That's why it went away. There was no point in maintaining it as an institution generally after Rome fell.
More broadly, there's a reason nobody really cared about slavery, rights, freedom, etc, etc, until the 1600s+ (i.e. the beginning of the off ramp toward industrialized societies). Prior to then so much of society was enslaved by the literal physics of the work that needed to be done to keep a roof over everyone's head and food in their stomachs that it didn't really matter. Almost nobody was in a place to exert more influence upon their life arc than the wind does upon the path of a stone thrown through the air (which is to say some but not much) so society didn't expend effort to hash out the details of something that wasn't relevant. Only once there were more surpluses the various shades of freedom become something that society could benefit from defining.
E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology.
And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period – in the service of religion in the monasteries, of course, but also in what we'd know call 'science'. E.g. wasn't Aristotle taken as the go to authority in scientific matters for the scholastics?
Yes, but
1. Britain was where there is the best case for a serious regression. 2. Building those systems was also a matter of imperial priorities and imperial centralisation. Smaller kingdoms did not need it.
> And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period
Much was, and Aristotle was taken as far too much of an authority. There were probably not many advances in science during the early middle ages, but there were in high and late medieval. Even in the early middle ages there were advances in architecture and agriculture and some amazing art produced.
More generally, some technology was lost everywhere (well, in the Western world anyway): nobody knew how to make waterproof concrete again until a manuscript reappeared in the fifteenth century.
Roman Britain is just one example, but it does disprove the general thesis that people always think they are the pinnacle of civilisation – and it's by far from the only example, of course. For much of the next thousand years (and beyond) Classical Rome, and later, Ancient Greece were seen as a lost golden age, something to learn from and aspire to (and adapt to religious dogma in a fallen world which was going to end fairly shortly anyway…)
Of course they had their fair share of brilliant people and they made significant advances and it's facile to disparage them ("Dark ages") but it does seem like a very different mental view of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology
There were serious scientific advances including the beginnings of the scientific method which goes back about 500 yeas earlier than the renaissance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_science_in_the_Middle...
My favorite is the gothic arch because it basically decomposes into the math of man hours, calories and the work of moving stone. They didn't have the surpluses the Romans did so they were forced to invent a more efficient arch.
On #1, do you see the lack of written records as cutting down bureaucracy? Because historians see it as a period of civilization downturn and turmoil. No focus on things outside the necessities which were mostly about survival. The enlightenment or renaissance didn’t have these names for the return to documenting thoroughly. It was because of everything in between.
#2 “A lot of people” says nothing. The average person in the year 900 had no formal education so would probably know at best some stories or legends about what came 500 years before. But let’s not pretend this changes the meaning of what I said.
#3 Many people today are slaves so were the dark ages more civilized?
Alternative, deeper understanding — https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/10/the_story_of_narciss...
The state of the reflecting surface with 2ky of corrosion does not match even looking at your reflections in water.
Ended up being about mirrors.
[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2232/fresco-of-a-statue-o...
Do we?
Restoring them would also cause repeated wear and tear, and potentially erasing clues we haven't recognised as important yet.
Making replicas is more suitable: the public can also touch and use them as well.
https://www.japanpowered.com/folklore-and-urban-legends/mirr...
Technology tends to influence cultures in subtle ways few remember a generation later. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Animal_In_T...
I can't help but wonder if there's something we've lost, some stropping material or process capable of making them significantly more reflective than we image.
And unlike with mirrors, something we always had, be it just a pond of water, the ability to hear your own voice like others hear it came with recording devices, and is therefore very recent (19th century).
well, those long hours must have been boring as hell. I don't think they felt it was a great sacrifice
How did early humans understand their situation and what did they think the 'world' was like, and what did they think they should do with their lives?! I find it fascinating to think how that longing to know what it's all about has changed so much for humans over time.
Mirrors are still heaps interesting though, as is reflection/refraction/light-transport in general I'd say! But it wasn't about what I expected when I read it.
It turns out the title has a literal meaning."
Other times I'm just removing a bit of spinach from my teeth.
I assume that it was the same for ancient mirror users.
Yeah, TFA ended just before it got to the really interesting part of how self-reflection itself is fundamental to the development of concisousness. Mirror-like technologies don't just show us our own appearance. They help us understand how we relate to the world around us.
It reminds me of Kieślowski's movie Camera Buff (1979), where the main character in iconic scene points the camera at himself and realizes that the act of making movies reflects not only his subjects, but also on who he is in relation them.
Yeah, I'd would love to read article on all that.