Potential signal detection at SETI??

[peter12]

Originally Posted by troutman

Harari argues in Sapiens, that the cognitive revolution for Homo Sapiens was only 70,000 years ago. Any reliance on the stars for useful information is likely a very recent discovery.

It's an interesting question, obviously, and it was a revolution in every sense of the word. Human cognition is an incredibly startling evolutionary development - massive progress in only a short period of time.

[troutman]

http://www.campbellrivermirror.com/o...331670231.html

As Harari notes from modern sociological studies, “Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 people.”

This limitation ended with the Cognitive Revolution which began about 70,000 years ago, perhaps when stories started to suggest concepts that were beyond the physical and immediate.

“The kind of things people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions’, ‘social constructs’ or ‘imagined realities,’” Harari says.

But, as Harari explains, “An imaged reality is not a lie.” It is “something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief system persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.”

Significantly, a shared “imagined reality” allowed people to bond together in groups of thousands or even billions. It’s a device Sapiens has used for organizing itself into everything from complex belief, political and economic systems to hockey teams and chess clubs. Everyone sharing the same “imagined reality” belongs.

This, then, is the place where “historical narratives replace biological theories” in understanding human behaviour. “Imagined reality” allows cultures to supersede genetics, enabling us to become entirely different from other animal species.

And so, concludes Harari, “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as gods, nations and corporations.”

[peter12]

Walker Percy wrote about this in "The Message in the Bottle" all the way back in the 1950s. The first truly human experience was probably a fictionalized sharing of a hunting expedition or something similar around a campfire. Very cool and a highly recommended book on language, symbolism, and what truly makes human beings unique as a species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Message_in_the_Bottle

[nik-]

Originally Posted by peter12

It's an interesting question, obviously, and it was a revolution in every sense of the word. Human cognition is an incredibly startling evolutionary development - massive progress in only a short period of time.

Thank fire.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by nik-

Thank fire.

Yeah, cooked protein, blah blah. It's still a mystery.