Are we more intelligent now than we were 2000 years ago?

after watching pasolini's 'Salo' in the cinema yesterday I don't know whether I can give a balanced, considered opinion to this question.

I don't think humanity has progressed intellectually.

if more accessible information equals intelligence then yes...but I don't think there have been incremental changes in computional power of our brain.

Intelligence ebbs and flows, or the way humanity uses it's intelligence ebbs and flows, is the way I see it.

i don't like this question

by its very nature intelligence is defined in relation to the paradigm we are in at the time - 2000 years ago the best warrior could be the most intelligent, 100 years ago the richest could be the most intelligent - now its anyone who understands I.T.

someone say incommensurability, quick

incommus damnit

incycosmic damnit

inncck[do damnit

cant

JADE MUST STAY!!

I don't understand this question.

I am more intelligent now than I was 2000 years ago

JOSH MUST STAY!!

I dont understand the question either or else I'd have thought of a better way to put it.

TOM MUST STAY!!

sorry.

I think collectively we are, but perhaps not individually (ie I don't think our brains are much better but the difference is we've linked them all up now)

Analogy: the processor hasn't been significantly upgraded, but the operating system and the available software have progressed exponentially.

Seems like it's more a distinction between the amount of knowledge available to us and how it chooses to be used. One look at, say, the 'joys' of Nazi Germany is salutory in terms thinking about how little can change over time, so I'm with Nicole.

TOM MUST GO!!!!

JULIO GO TOM!!!

GARBLEFABSQORD!!!

Ned, it's possible to be smarter than before but still be wronger.

Hm...wronger or in possession of more of a capacity to carry out past wrongs anew, in more frightening forms?

AMBASSADOR WITH THESE ROCHER YOU ARE REALLY SPOILING US!

Considering the lack of printed materials and/or electronic storage devices 2000 years ago, yer average human being probably had to REMEMBER a hell of a lot more information that we have to these days. I don't know if that makes them more intelligent, but it certainly makes them seem smarter.

Did the ancient Belgians or whoever was in charge then invent ILE? I think not.

but did DG invent waffles?

Ned: No, I mean actively wronger. A bit like "a little learning is a dangerous thing" -- understanding certain elements of the world around us can lead us to confident but in the end despicable conclusions about how that world is best dealt with. In some senses one might not have made the conclusions had one not developed just enough intelligence to process the available information in that direction.

Kate: Or else they just didn't know much of anything at all, which would appear to have been the case for 90% of historical populations up through even a decade or two ago. Masonic Boom of 2 C.E. might have a knowledge bank consisting of what: food preparation, garment- mending, herb poultices, a dozen square miles' geography, edible plants, 200 pages worth of regional lore and religious ritual, personal and hamlet-based relationships, and a pictographic symbol or two? (I am imagining the greatest Jeopardy board ever.)

Or Trivial Pursuit. I should note your imagined board is obviously contextual -- thus, a citizen in the Roman Empire might have knowledge of a lot more general geography, as might a citizen in China...

As for the other point...is it developing intelligence to process the information or using the capacity for intelligence possessed to process new amounts of information? I apologize if I am going in circles on this point, but I guess I'm just not seeing where the amount of information currently (if conditionally) available to Humanity as a Whole has a parallel rise in one's capacity to learn and change. Then again, perhaps this is all down to what we mean exactly by 'intelligence,' and we might be looking at the question through different lenses...

nabisco you forgot dirty stone rock boys

Yeah, Ned, that was Kate-in-England.

I guess I'm thinking less of "available information" than of basic not-entirely-informational understanding of the world, which is why I used the operating system metaphor. Maybe the word "paradigm" is in order, in its original Kuhnian sense: we've accumulated these root- level, very coherent, near-intuitive ways of approaching the world that are less "information" than tools for dealing with information. And they're not hard-wired, or genetic, but handed down by culture. But not in an information-collecting way -- it's strikes me as something more like Piaget's stages of child development, where suddenly these methods of conceptualizing the world just sort of click in and imprint.

Examples: loads of people on Earth now pick up, at a young age, basic mental models of things like gravity, wind resistance, simple machines like wheels and pulleys, a much wider idea of language and literacy, simple reactions between different substances, etc. These are all things that were surely understood 2000 years ago, only more vaguely and empirically -- whereas now we grow up with sort of fixed rule-based models of them. And we pick up so many things like this -- things like the roundness of the Earth, where it's not so much a fact that's collected but a basic reconfiguration of your mental model of the world -- that we wind up with a much greater array of tool-like concepts for conceptualizing new ideas and new information. Since so much of what we consider "intelligence" (and yeah, the malleability of that word is basically the issue here) consists of making effective mental associations and coherent conceptual models of things, having all of those idea-tools at one's disposal should in a lot of senses give someone a more coherent and more effective comprehension of the world. It won't make them any "righter" than before in moral terms or even in terms of outcome, but still. That's what I'm trying to get at, I think.

I meant to put "density" on that list of mental models, cause I thought that was a really good one.

No, I don't think we are more intelligent. Just the opposite in fact. I also don't equate material development with progress or "intelligence."

I know this all sounds crazy, but I actually believe that humanity was living in a different, and higher, spiritual reality a few thousand years ago than it is today. There are no remnants of this on any material level, and as we now rely solely on our external senses to determine empirial proof - and regard that as the only truth - our world culture has become dependent on this collective externalization of consciousness to experience life down here. Humanity descended into materialism, populations shifted, cataclysms ensued. Our astral connections were lost, human minds became weighed down in the gross renderings of intellect as intuition was overshadowed, and the tradition of telepathic communication our race relied upon was severed. This led to the cessation of the oral transmuting knowledge and the creation of the written word whihc altered lanuage forever - a creation decried in both the Egyptian and Indian traditions. I'm not making this up. The Hindu scriptures are very specific about the level on intelligence on Earth - it's all cyclical, with the same 4 ages of mankind also known to the Greeks: golden age, silver age, bronze age and iron age. (In the golden ae there is 100% intelligence and no war or suffering, etc. etc. - and so on, you can infer from this..) It's supposed to be determined byt the elliptical orbit of our solar system around the center of the galaxy (the "vishnuabhi" or navel of lord Vishnu) - the closer to the center we come, the higher the intelligence, and vice versa - and therefore it's a cycle, but an elliptical one. Supposedly, we were farthest away from the center on the declining half around the year 499, the moment of greatest darkness on earth, and entered the lowest age then, the iron age, which lasted 1200 years until about 1699, after which we've entered a transitional age (the "Enlihgtenment", all the scientific and technological advances) which is preparing us for the bronze age. Again, you can easily dimiss this as just a "religious belief" - and therefore it should have no greater validity than any other of the sort, but I follow it for now.

Ok urm, nevremind. Back to your regularly scheduled programming!

Can I stick my neck out hear and say yes. Cheers.

Nabisco -- your points about both the stock and density of knowledge increasing are discussed in an article here by economic historian Joel Mokyr. (It's easy to read, little jargon.)

I used that article extensively for my dissertation, and it's quite scary how you just offered a convincing précis.

Nabisco's talent for compact erudition is such that I wish to kill him and gain his powers, a la Highlander. If he doesn't mind.

V has certainly convinced me that people are not terribly clever these days. Possibly not in the way he intended, however.

ned did you say 'compact'?!?

JOSH STOP PICKING ON ME

(it's not like i claim to have a lick of sense in the first place)

"V has certainly convinced me that people are not terribly clever these days. Possibly not in the way he intended, however. "

what? i wasn't trying to be clever though. i really believe all that. um, i guess this would be embarassing if i was sensitive anymore, etc. that when i type things seriously people think i'm trying to be facetious or something!!

at least now i have new fodder for my own "when was the last time u cried" board. :( :P

maybe i shouldn't smile like a P when i'm trying to unsmile at the same tie or else i won't be taken seriously *shrugs*

do you think your posts ARE compact, nitsuh?

Have I not said thirty million times that I'm an ass for clogging threads and always posting

three times

in a row?

nitsuh man you know I love you

We contemporary folk have one hundred thousand times more verifiable and accurate knowledge at our disposal as folks did 2000 years ago. As for the intelligence of the 'average individual', it is probably about the same as ever. By that, I mean that, if you could magically transport a hundred infants from the past into the present, and raise them alongside a hundred modern infants, there would be no discernable differences in intelligence between the two groups.