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Not only his systemized thinking, but his metaphysics—especially since it got later taken up by Christianity/Catholicism. I doubt we would have gotten to Naturalism (and modern science) without his influence:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)
* https://old.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematic...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescope
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscope
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography
Nevermind the day-to-day quality of life improvements of eye glasses. Also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber
Would also need laters: modern communications would be much different if we still had to use copper cable (esp. over long distances), or microwave relays.
The compounded effect of having knowledge recorded for generations to come - thereby unlocking all the other things mentioned on this list - surely should count for something.
Category theory and the work building programming langauges on top of that.
If the whole thing pans out: Langlands Program (unifying most of mathematics).
Wofram Language and the math capability is pretty amazing for such a small team.
Anything that CERN touches, from the web to various quantum theories.
Genetic mapping and science.
The Lambda CDM model, and all the work that goes into constraining their predictions with limited data is pretty amazing.
Some of the things cryptanalysts and hackers do is pretty remarkable. Side channel attacks like Row hammer attacks (not strictly crypto), EM analysis, etc..., and things like hash collisions and Differential cryptanalysis.
Modern materials science is chock full of amazing intellectual achievements.
"Winning ways for your mathematical plays" as a book on game theory is a remarkable achievement by itself.
It might be a nice exercise to describe the larger waves of ideas that follow certain cultural currents. To list some random examples, capitalism has spurred many developments, as did religion. Setting up universities, introducing law, being able to replicate documents, all seem more relevant than some individuals taking credit for the cherry on top.
To contradict myself once more, where is Gutenberg in this list?
Technologies are also the result of intellect applied to practical problems, and also deserve recognition as achievements.
And the nice part is that it wasn't just one person deciding this but the collective intellectual leap of all those people throughout our history who decided to reproduce with the less violent and more cooperative members of the opposite sex.
And it must have been intellectual, because on the animal level being more capable of violence is surely an individual advantage.
The list itself mentioned is interesting but it focuses on content of consciousness and not consciousness itself. The contents keep changing. Consciousness doesn't.
In other words humans appearing in consciousness discovering consciousness is more interesting than what appears on consciousness like laws of motion.
This is not to say Pythagorean laws are not cool.
It's cool. But it's just a ripple in consciousness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta
Close your eyes. Where does the darkness appear?
I think you will find this agrees with Shannon’s original point and purpose as expressed in his seminal equation. Every interpretation since beginning with “the state of …” or “number of states …” is a misapprehension exhibiting the intellectual fallibility of our times.
This is only one for instance.
Read my threads, if you can find your way around my claims of the voices in our heads being real and waging a secret war among us, and the UFOs are actually a long familiar secret, you will find other arguments regarding the tightly held ideals so many believe as fundamental truths of this age.
Burtrand Russel and Einstein both agreed to their death beds that most of what we tell ourselves is true is merely what we have come to agree with among ourselves.
This is as true today.
The difficulty lies not in finding “Truths”, the difficulty is undeceiving the self.
- The scientific method
- Calculus
- Einstein's Relativity
- Darwin's Evolution
And more generally:
- The zero
- Formal logic
- The written language
This is the kind of questions I think a LLM work well for, because people are going to have different opinions. I think that most of us will think about science, maths, etc... But what about, say, monotheism, Athenian democracy, banking and accounting, etc... I also see that Freud is in there, a controversial take as his ideas are considered pseudoscience today, but it certainly opened the way for modern psychology, so what do you make of that.
Using a LLM trained on what is most of human written knowledge and carefully aligned will hopefully give a reasonable consensus. It is not perfect of course, but I think it is better than personal guesses.
Note: your experience may differ, not all LLMs are the same and your prompt matter, but I get similar results: mostly scientific achievements, with the one I cited usually getting top spots. A bit of social (democracy, human rights) but spirituality in general seems to be absent.
I also nominate the invention of Clippy the friendly assistant.
Not only did he influence the young hegelians and Marx, he continues to influence many philosophers across all kinds of schools and ideologies.
Marx not being there is an implicit moral judgement - if “great” means good in some ethical sense subjective, then OK. But if “great” means impactful or influential, that’s a problem.
Then no Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Tocqueville, Watt, Ramón y Cajal, Ford, Schumpeter, Cervantes…
On the latter, not a single mention of literature. Not even Homer. I find this list problematic in an innumerable amount of ways.
There was a point where an organism became self aware, and then there was a point sometime after that where an organism realized that it was the first that had become self aware and all the implications of that.
To me that's a demarcation point in all of life -- the moment a creature realized that it was different from all the things that had come before it on the earth, whether they be non-living or living, as if there was a third category, living and self-aware.
I wonder if it considered it important to spread self-awareness or if it lamented that it had more important things to deal with like just surviving.
And what kind of organism was it -- was it a mammal? Or was it something that came before that?
Mechanics: wheel, lever, screw, gear trains, cam/follower, crank‑slider, water/wind mills, mechanical clock, printing press, and the steam engine.
Every advance in basic metallurgy. Controlled smelting, casting, hot forging, alloying to make bronze, carburising to make early steel, blooms and bloomery furnaces, quenching/tempering, wrought‑iron forging, large‑scale iron production, advanced steels.
Coinage.
Sail.
Plumbing.
Refrigeration.
Plastics.
If you take the position these are not intellectual achievements, I think you under-appreciate how revolutionary they were at the time.
I’d also argue that Meitner and Noether deserve a mention.
Stepping outside my expertise, I’d argue Poppers description of what science and Pseudo-Science is, is essential.
Anyway great list!
Humans are incredible. Leaving the planet and taking a trip on the moon and possibly mars someday is no small feat.
We just need to fix our planet. Or to be honest, stop ruining it so it heals itself.