Le 05-févr.-06, à 03:07, Russell Standish a écrit :
> On Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 04:30:11PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> I agree. I guess in our local and sharable past, humans reached
>> loebianity 200,000 years ago.
>
> I'm not sure why you say 200Kya, other than it being the origin of our
> species.
That's the point.
> There is a fair bit of evidence that something significant
> happened to human brain function around 40,000 years ago (see Steven
> Mithen's "Prehistory of the Mind").
Once a universal machine appears relatively to another one, we can
expect recurring surprises, actually in some spiral way once they get
the memory of their experiences.
> There was an explosion of
> representational art that occurred around that time.
Like that! And it is nothing compared to what written language will
add, and that is nothing compared to what silicon universal machine
will add, etc.
> On the other
> hand, there is also evidence that other apes (Chimpanzees, a Gorilla,
> the Gibbon and so on) are capable of self awareness so maybe Loebianity
> arose 7-8 Mya.
I am very open to that idea. But it is hard to test. Elephants could be
good candidate too for loebianity in the sense that it seems there are
evidences that they can distinguish third person death and first
person death, which is a key symptom of loebianity. I am not really a
zoologist and find hard to have precise opinions on that.
Note that loebianity is a little more than self-awareness. It is more
like self-awareness awareness. Interesting degrees of self-awareness
are described modal logically in the recreative book by Smullyan:
Forever Undecided.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Mon Feb 06 2006 - 10:24:32 PST