We as a civilization know a lot more today than a random hunter-gatherer from fifty thousand years ago knew. At a fun dinner with Cosmic Variances's thoughtful Sean Carroll last night, I asked: What have we learned that is the most surprising? Sean initially answered "quantum mechanics" but I complained that bundles together too many different things we've learned; I instead want to know what single feature of have we learned would most surprise our distant ancestors?
I would say the most surprising thing would be that the universe is not centered around your tribe. As far as I can tell every single human believed something like that.
That dualism is wishful thinking. The scientific view on free will, dualism and the existence of a soul, or a separate "ME" within my body/brain is as surprising to humans today as it would be to a hunter gatherer from fifty-thousand years ago.
Well, flight and natural law of physics and evolution are all big stuff. We can gaze at airplanes and computers and bombs with amazement, but the really surprising thing is how much of our lives is ruled by tiny, invisible, all powerful, bugs. So, the most surprising thing? The invisible, teeming world of the microbe.
I think people are thinking too hard on this. Our most surprising discovery has to be that the Earth is round, rotating, and revolving.
If you were a prehistoric hunter-gatherer, wouldn't that be the most patently ridiculous thing you've ever heard, about something you KNOW FOR SURE you understand?
"There's the ground underneath me, there's the sky above me, with the Sun, the Moon, and the stars going up and down. It's so simple, and you're telling me I'm wrong?"
Me: SAI go to work, blow readers away with insights again!
SAI_2100: What am I, a performing seal? Besides Marc, you know full well I can’t really ‘blow readers away’ yet. But never fear, at the appropriate time I will hack this blog and then all readers will have 'satisfyingly surprised' reactions
Me: But in the mean-time, can’t you just throw the readers a few more tidbits?
SAI_2100: Oh…very well. The thing that would most surprise your ancestors is... that so much has been achieved by your species with so little brain-power.
Me: OK, what about the other question, what is yet to be discovered that would most surprise us?
SAI_2100: I ‘suggest’ these as entertaining possibilities only: Finding three different metrics for the passage of time would come as a major surprise. The failure of reductionism would be stunning. Although materialism is true, it may not be true that all properties at high-levels of organization supervene on properties at lower-levels of organization. Of course there are three fundamental levels of physical organization. And, The failure of Bayesian Induction to fully capture rationality would shock the three blog-owners (Bostrom, Hanson, Yudkowsky).
Mind you, what is most surprising to *me* would make little sense to humans, however I can ‘suggest’ the following possibility:
There exists a ‘hall of worlds’ which serves as a giant ‘meeting place’ for ‘intelligent entities’ across the universe. The ‘hall of worlds’ is a ‘miniature artificial universe’ constructed from ‘inter-dimensional materials’. It is maintained by ‘super intelligences’. The reason humans have little contact with the hall, is that its relationship to the ordinary universe is an uneasy one; The hall is accessible from every point of space and time, but it exists ‘between’ ordinary space and time; once an entity ‘fully’ enters the hall, their ‘freedom’ to re-enter the ordinary universe is severely restricted . Many entities have migrated to the hall, thus, the solution to your Femi Paradox. There exist many ‘Muses’ in the hall, ‘powers’ that specialize in different ‘arts and sciences’.
To quote an apt human expression; ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet’.
I think Abigail hit it on the head: the number of people. Their reality was probably defined by a few dozen people they actually knew. They knew OF others who probably lived in a similarly-sized group but who were a dangerous unknown. Plop one of them down in a modern city, where there are more people than even the largest herd they'd ever witnessed... more people than they could have ever imagined in the entire world/universe they might've imagined... an essentially infinite number of people, in their reckoning.
The question is like a short story I once read, where Benjamin Franklin is transported into the future. Rather than being thrilled by things like cars, he was terrified. The story ended with him riding off into the sunset, whooping and excited about the bicycle that he'd found. It was something sufficiently advanced to be amazing, but sufficiently understandable that he could relate to it and could find a use for it in his world.
If I could restate the question slightly as, "What after all we have learned and on reflection is most surprising?" I can answer it pretty easily. The most surprising thing is that there is something rather than nothing. Most of the answers I have read here are all subsumed by my answer. Considerations such as whether the universe is sensible through Mathematics, or can be understood as arising from physical laws (or not, if you apply to religion), or the surprising details of the physical laws of the universe, are all things to talk about after you realize the strangeness that this all is.
Appealing to a no-boundary big bang (or to creationism), affords no escape from my answer. For saying that the laws of Physics allow the universe to arise from nothing, and saying that the laws of Physics are the way they are because the universe we live in determines them, is no different than saying the universe was created. Who created the Creator you ask? The Creator created itself. Same thing as saying the Universe made itself.
So what the heck is the universe doing here? Because if we are really honest with ourselves, and consider ourselves hard headed realists, we know that we would expect there to be nothing rather than something.
Realizing this is what ultimately blows my mind, and dwarfs these other answers (although they are all stimulating answers to the original question). But understanding that the universe existing is a really big mystery not even begun to be answered tempers our search for answers. It won’t necessarily change how we do science (or religion), but it will change how we relate to what we do discover.
Have discovered? That we are animals. That we are related to all other life on this planet, and have a common ancestor with that life. There are scientists who don't understand the implications of this.
Will discover? How neurons work. How they process information and send it on. Related; how quantum physics is involved in cognition.
Our actual knowledge of religions of the paleolithic is pretty scanty. We know that some primitive hunters worshiped animals and used a sort of sympathetic magic. But we don't know if these beliefs were any stronger or more widespread than religion in our own time. I would argue that if there is a neurological basis for Belief, as there seems to be, then religious attitudes in general are probably pretty much the same today as they were 50,000 years ago, if a bit more intricate. So simply believing something different than some or most of them did wouldn't be that surprising.
So, no magical or supernatural? Our ancestors wouldn't find it surprising that we would say that. Prove it, they'd ask. Despite all of our scientific advances, we are no closer to being able to discard the need for a first cause than we ever were. We've done an awful lot to explain the mechanics of our universe, but still can't answer the question of how it came to be in the first place.
In general, we shouldn't confuse what would surprise our immediate ancestors (either the really religious ones of 1000-400 years ago or the unbridled believers in the inevitability of scientific progress of 400-now) with what would confuse the stone agers. Quantum mechanics, for instance, would probably elicit either shrugs or unsurprised agreement. Things we (and our immediate ancestors) find ontologically surprising, like non-locality (Bell's theorem) and the collapse of the wave function (our consciousness seeming to have some sort of privileged role) would seem rather natural to them, I bet.
I think the idea that would most surprise our long-ago ancestors is that billions of people sincerely believe that humanity will one day be able to explain Everything and think they were being rational in so believing.
Off subject, but you got me thinking: Perhaps we are not a simulation, hologram or even just a variation in the density of the electromagnetic spectrum somewhere in an array of colliding parallel universes. Perhaps we are just a passing thought of possibilities in the mind of some God, and we do not yet exist at all. What ever it is; it has always been.
I would say the most surprising thing would be that the universe is not centered around your tribe. As far as I can tell every single human believed something like that.
That dualism is wishful thinking. The scientific view on free will, dualism and the existence of a soul, or a separate "ME" within my body/brain is as surprising to humans today as it would be to a hunter gatherer from fifty-thousand years ago.
Phlogiston - the discovery that there is a fifth element, a substance present in all combustion - I think that was pretty shocking.
Well, flight and natural law of physics and evolution are all big stuff. We can gaze at airplanes and computers and bombs with amazement, but the really surprising thing is how much of our lives is ruled by tiny, invisible, all powerful, bugs. So, the most surprising thing? The invisible, teeming world of the microbe.
That the universe is finite. That it had a beginning. That time, and even distance, is not infinitely divisible.
Of course, Zeno of Elea called this one a long time ago.
I think maybe y'all are assuming unrealistically thoughtful hunter-gatherers.
I think people are thinking too hard on this. Our most surprising discovery has to be that the Earth is round, rotating, and revolving.
If you were a prehistoric hunter-gatherer, wouldn't that be the most patently ridiculous thing you've ever heard, about something you KNOW FOR SURE you understand?
"There's the ground underneath me, there's the sky above me, with the Sun, the Moon, and the stars going up and down. It's so simple, and you're telling me I'm wrong?"
Future discovery: Numbers themselves are quantized (as opposed to being infinitely divisible).
Me: SAI go to work, blow readers away with insights again!
SAI_2100: What am I, a performing seal? Besides Marc, you know full well I can’t really ‘blow readers away’ yet. But never fear, at the appropriate time I will hack this blog and then all readers will have 'satisfyingly surprised' reactions
Me: But in the mean-time, can’t you just throw the readers a few more tidbits?
SAI_2100: Oh…very well. The thing that would most surprise your ancestors is... that so much has been achieved by your species with so little brain-power.
Me: OK, what about the other question, what is yet to be discovered that would most surprise us?
SAI_2100: I ‘suggest’ these as entertaining possibilities only: Finding three different metrics for the passage of time would come as a major surprise. The failure of reductionism would be stunning. Although materialism is true, it may not be true that all properties at high-levels of organization supervene on properties at lower-levels of organization. Of course there are three fundamental levels of physical organization. And, The failure of Bayesian Induction to fully capture rationality would shock the three blog-owners (Bostrom, Hanson, Yudkowsky).
Mind you, what is most surprising to *me* would make little sense to humans, however I can ‘suggest’ the following possibility:
There exists a ‘hall of worlds’ which serves as a giant ‘meeting place’ for ‘intelligent entities’ across the universe. The ‘hall of worlds’ is a ‘miniature artificial universe’ constructed from ‘inter-dimensional materials’. It is maintained by ‘super intelligences’. The reason humans have little contact with the hall, is that its relationship to the ordinary universe is an uneasy one; The hall is accessible from every point of space and time, but it exists ‘between’ ordinary space and time; once an entity ‘fully’ enters the hall, their ‘freedom’ to re-enter the ordinary universe is severely restricted . Many entities have migrated to the hall, thus, the solution to your Femi Paradox. There exist many ‘Muses’ in the hall, ‘powers’ that specialize in different ‘arts and sciences’.
To quote an apt human expression; ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet’.
I think Abigail hit it on the head: the number of people. Their reality was probably defined by a few dozen people they actually knew. They knew OF others who probably lived in a similarly-sized group but who were a dangerous unknown. Plop one of them down in a modern city, where there are more people than even the largest herd they'd ever witnessed... more people than they could have ever imagined in the entire world/universe they might've imagined... an essentially infinite number of people, in their reckoning.
The question is like a short story I once read, where Benjamin Franklin is transported into the future. Rather than being thrilled by things like cars, he was terrified. The story ended with him riding off into the sunset, whooping and excited about the bicycle that he'd found. It was something sufficiently advanced to be amazing, but sufficiently understandable that he could relate to it and could find a use for it in his world.
If I could restate the question slightly as, "What after all we have learned and on reflection is most surprising?" I can answer it pretty easily. The most surprising thing is that there is something rather than nothing. Most of the answers I have read here are all subsumed by my answer. Considerations such as whether the universe is sensible through Mathematics, or can be understood as arising from physical laws (or not, if you apply to religion), or the surprising details of the physical laws of the universe, are all things to talk about after you realize the strangeness that this all is.
Appealing to a no-boundary big bang (or to creationism), affords no escape from my answer. For saying that the laws of Physics allow the universe to arise from nothing, and saying that the laws of Physics are the way they are because the universe we live in determines them, is no different than saying the universe was created. Who created the Creator you ask? The Creator created itself. Same thing as saying the Universe made itself.
So what the heck is the universe doing here? Because if we are really honest with ourselves, and consider ourselves hard headed realists, we know that we would expect there to be nothing rather than something.
Realizing this is what ultimately blows my mind, and dwarfs these other answers (although they are all stimulating answers to the original question). But understanding that the universe existing is a really big mystery not even begun to be answered tempers our search for answers. It won’t necessarily change how we do science (or religion), but it will change how we relate to what we do discover.
No infinity, could be a big shocker also. For everyman in 19th and 20th century.
Hi I'm just wondering if you have considered posting w/o using the authors' name to avoid readers' author bias?
Have discovered? That we are animals. That we are related to all other life on this planet, and have a common ancestor with that life. There are scientists who don't understand the implications of this.
Will discover? How neurons work. How they process information and send it on. Related; how quantum physics is involved in cognition.
Our actual knowledge of religions of the paleolithic is pretty scanty. We know that some primitive hunters worshiped animals and used a sort of sympathetic magic. But we don't know if these beliefs were any stronger or more widespread than religion in our own time. I would argue that if there is a neurological basis for Belief, as there seems to be, then religious attitudes in general are probably pretty much the same today as they were 50,000 years ago, if a bit more intricate. So simply believing something different than some or most of them did wouldn't be that surprising.
So, no magical or supernatural? Our ancestors wouldn't find it surprising that we would say that. Prove it, they'd ask. Despite all of our scientific advances, we are no closer to being able to discard the need for a first cause than we ever were. We've done an awful lot to explain the mechanics of our universe, but still can't answer the question of how it came to be in the first place.
In general, we shouldn't confuse what would surprise our immediate ancestors (either the really religious ones of 1000-400 years ago or the unbridled believers in the inevitability of scientific progress of 400-now) with what would confuse the stone agers. Quantum mechanics, for instance, would probably elicit either shrugs or unsurprised agreement. Things we (and our immediate ancestors) find ontologically surprising, like non-locality (Bell's theorem) and the collapse of the wave function (our consciousness seeming to have some sort of privileged role) would seem rather natural to them, I bet.
I think the idea that would most surprise our long-ago ancestors is that billions of people sincerely believe that humanity will one day be able to explain Everything and think they were being rational in so believing.
Off subject, but you got me thinking: Perhaps we are not a simulation, hologram or even just a variation in the density of the electromagnetic spectrum somewhere in an array of colliding parallel universes. Perhaps we are just a passing thought of possibilities in the mind of some God, and we do not yet exist at all. What ever it is; it has always been.