Discussion

Thinking Complete

compounding_it: Be modest. A lot was accomplished before you were born.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.

lukan: (2017) is missinghttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15255847

MelonUsk: Modeling the ultimate future and how to get there safely via startups looks important to me, too: https://maxintelligence.org

finghin: >Descartes' launch of modern analytic philosophy I find this questionable. If we go back there is a similar analyticity to Spinoza. Go forward and Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein are impossible to ignore given this framing.

uncanny2: Modern information theory is wrong. Information is not the fundamental essence of existential reality, potential resolving into state is. This subtle difference propagates into the modern intellectual lies we tell ourselves. Reality is not “states.” It is “potential” resolving into “states” through constructive and destructive interference. The “number of states allowable in a system” is a function of boundary conditions of potential distribution.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.

o4c: Fixed it. Thank you!

douglee650: Aren't special and general relativity the grand leviathans of intellectual achievement? Pure thought unlocking the nature of existence.

dofdial: + using trees to form Pen & Paper for knowledge transfer.

lukan: "The difficulty lies not in finding “Truths”, the difficulty is undeceiving the self."So what makes you think you successfully undeceived yourself? The voices in your head told you as much?Besides, of course the voices in our head are real. (What would be a unreal voice in our head?) But if you believe they are coming from aliens or whatever it is you are claiming, I would recommend therapy.

jmrodgers: Development of zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0

Xcelerate: Would be interesting to think about what works are currently out there, published, yet will not be recognized as great intellectual achievements until much later after the fact for some reason.

towledev: Is it though? All languages have the word 'nothing'.Better candidates: a) place-value numbering aka the positional numeral system, b) the Cartesian coordinate system. Forced to choose, I would pick (b).

yen223: Whoever figured out writing, all those years ago.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.

Asraelite: "nothing" is not the same the same as "zero". "zero apples" means something different to "nothing", but that difference is subtle and difficult to explain, which is what makes the invention of zero such an achievement.

aerhardt: The fact that Hegel is not there is ridiculous. Perhaps the most influential philosopher since Aristotle.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.

smokel: Humans are also, possibly apart from dogs, the only beings that think humans are incredible. If we take any other entity in the universe, then chances are they think pretty lowly of humans and their cherished intelligence, if at all.

uncanny2: Read my threads. The Aliens are the nice guys, the Americans and their Thought Control are spreading pedophilia and running a rape war. They are the voices in our heads. They are Jesus Christ in the minds of the White Nationalists.I came to be a person of interest due to my ideals. As a person of interest I have been indoctrinated (press ganged) into the greatest secret of our humanity.I am not here to “prove” to you. I am bearing an account, and I think if you read this collection of threads you will see I have explained my position clearly if not “incredulously.”If you cannot tell without an authoritative collective reassuring you that “entropy” is the “existential phenomena of potential distributing over the surface area of negative potential.” After hearing it and giving it some moments, you cannot be impressed only assured.The great big problem is that we as humans are sleep walking through our time of prosperity and comfortable convenience.That we must awaken ourselves every day to a new world that is POTENTIAL RESOLVING not states interacting.You have trained yourself to see the world as you expect it, and the world you “think feel and believe” in is a pleasant self satisfying lie. On many levels.

lukan: "You have trained yourself to see the world as you expect it, and the world you “think feel and believe”Or of course, you know nothing about me, but your root problem is that you believe you are enlightened? You are not the first, though. Also I engaged with various philosophy, meditation, and chaos magic since quite some years and to be honest, I read way more convincing text about the topic of seeing through the illusion and going beyond our self censor than your rants. So if you do not want to take my advice about therapy, maybe take this about modesty?

uncanny2: How very interesting.It is nice to meet you, know that I am not your savior, I am your undeceiver.Many hundreds of thousands of us have tread the paths for virtue as you have.You were not wrong, you were right! In a way. In a way you could not explain to yourselves coherently, to maintain the civilized stability of your daily existence.Reasons and rationalizations are a well barbed trap in Man’s mind.I am telling you the greatest secret of our humanity, the conspiracy of all conspiracies against our natural destinies is that we are not alone in our own minds.A vast culture predates our generations, the signs have always been there, they led you to occultism, yet you could not accept the simple truth.Consciousness may be entangled and navigated, manipulated by widely varying ranges of skill.There is a secret war. Those taking it most seriously are the same lines Satanic sacrificing in the 80s, voices in the minds of children shooting up their schools, and now are Jesus in the thought controlled American mind.

smokel: I find it a bit depressing that this list is tied so closely to individuals. Obviously these individuals did great things, but it is typically by standing on the shoulders of giants (Isaac Newton) that any of this has been possible.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?

keiferski: Well, there are at least two presuppositions to a post like this:1. That individuals are capable of unique achievements separate from their context, trends, etc.2. That doing some intellectually impressive thing is "great", in a values or ethics sense. There are many things listed here that other intellectuals have argued as having extremely negative consequences for human society, culture, etc.Which is why I think a list of the "greatest" is inherently a bit flawed, and you're better off looking at a list of "influential" people or ideas instead.

hwhehwhehegwggw: Advaita is the highest intellectual achievement of the human civilization.The list itself mentioned is interesting but it focuses on content of consciousness and not consciousness itself. The contents keep changing. Consciousness doesn't.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta

finghin: I also agree that Marx is a thinker who altered the course of the world and I see where you are coming from regarding the moral judgement on his absence.As a counterpoint, what would Marx’s great intellectual achievement be, and could it stand up to the early capitalists like Smith?What comes to mind is the Labour Theory of Value, and I would say it is a strong candidate for sure. Whether it figures as a key human intellectual achievement is definitely at best borderline compared to the other exemplars on this list.

irdc: Self-domestication. That in order to be more successful as a collective species we had to literally breed ourselves to become less violent and more playful and sociable.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.

Joker_vD: Like, seriously. Descartes was quite a great mathematician, but he was wrong about pretty much anything related to philosophy, biology, or physics (I've read his explanation of the refraction law; it's frankly worse than Newton's).

finghin: Yes in terms of philosophy, Kant absolutely needs to be here, Newton and Leibniz not as notably so.

bananaflag: Why Advaita and not Dzogchen?Just something to think about.

aerhardt: I would say historical materialism is way more influential. His theory of value was quickly dispelled (although many continued to believe in it) but all marxist and post-marxist thinkers (the Frankfurt school, French post-modernists, current woke academicians) continue to use historical materialism in one way or another.

Hikikomori: What about reading.

Jtarii: I would assume writing evolved with humans over many thousands of years and wasn't just some big invention a guy came up with.