Are we more intelligent than Men thousands of years ago?

Are people of today wiser and/or more intelligent than Men millennia in the past?

We have access to more knowledge, built on the foundations laid down over the past, but are we wiser? Did the architects, astronomers, metallurgists, theologians or farmers possess more intelligence then than now?

Did the common man have a better education in terms of languages, trade skills, survival and healing than the average person living in the 21st Century?

We still read and refer to Plato, Archimedes, Galileo, da Vinci, Aristotle and Hippocrates in our learning of the sciences and philosophies. Is Man's intellect waning when an equal comparison can be measured?

 

We are not more intelligent, but more knowledgeable, for knowledge is accumulative. But at the core, our brains today are exactly the same as they were when we were hunter gatherers. Psychologically, we are also the same.

Yet in some ways we have had some of the earlier intelligence, pushed aside, it is still there, but is not used. For perhaps cultural reasons.

 

Did you mean physiologically the same, or psychologically? We seem to be a pretty messed up people physiologically.

But our physical brains should be a near 100% match to the ancient hunter/gatherer/farmer/philosophers of 2 - 6 thousand years ago. The question is do we use as much of our brains today, not so much for storage but processing information. Are we so overwhelmed with information that recall and analyzing information is stunted?

 

Wouldn't it be something if we were to actually be smarter than our predecessors.

But no, I just don't think it's possible and I don't think intellectual evolution is the purpose. We seem to spend 30 years of our life re-learning what our parents knew as truth and tried to teach us. By the time we grasp that, our mental capacity piques and quickly deteriorates.

Memories, that's all we achieve.

Some will say our IQ's are gaining, but what does that actually tell us? That we have better reading comprehension? What good is that if you can not sort out the unqualified from the qualified.

IMO, too much is made of the individual human achievement. In the grand scheme of things, our societal impacts are much more impactful than our individual achievements.

 

Yeah, I meant psychologically the same. We are still ego driven, self interested, selfish beings. Although in the hunter gatherer societies, which we spent more time in than in civilization, we were probably much less selfish, for man evolved as a group, and we had to set some of that selfishness aside, for the sake of survival. So those cultures created values that were not self interested, as we are today, with civilized values. You see these earlier values, in the 10 commandments, for if one follows them as a society, there is so much less conflict between people who must live together and work for the good of the tribe.

I think our brains were not evolved to handle as much information as we have today, and it perhaps makes us a bit incapable to deal with the important things in life. But perhaps this pressure will evolve the physical brain somewhat, but I am not sure about this.

I don't think we are a bit more intelligent though, as I see intelligence as different from the accumulation of knowledge. I think intelligence is the processor, and knowledge the memory, as in a pc. Every now and then we will have a superior processor, an Einstein, a Newton, and knowledge will grow, but the rest of us remain as the norm for intelligence.

The man who discovered how to chip sharp tools from flint, was the newton of his era. We seem to have exceptional intelligent men to appear, and then it benefits the tribe. But not sure if these exceptional men make the rest of humanity more intelligent. We just copy what they discover.

 

That's it. Memory is knowledge. At times in our history, we have imploded and memory was lost, the memory of technology, and we would go into sort of a dark age, where we had to relearn things. If we had a great catastrophe, and given that more and more knowledge is on electronic memory chips, with books going the way of the dodo bird, the set back to accumulative knowledge would be monumental. Think about what was lost in Alexandria, when we lost knowledge stored on various mediums in that library.

 

four thousand years ago, Egyptian astronomers had calculated the diameter of the earth to within a few kilometers of its value. 3500 years AFTER that, Europeans thought the world was flat.

 

At a point we will acquire more memory than we are physically able to process, we are probably already there to be quite honest. Imagine the incapability of man to ever know all there is to know, it's a very real concept. One of the most brilliant concepts passed on by ancient man, how could they know that?

You nailed it by describing our capabilities as being limited by our processors.

 

I think they were smarter than us. After all, they discovered fire, but I can't even get my charcoal grill lit.

 

Depends on your definition of intelligence. If you define intelligence as knowledge (how much somebody knows) than yes, we are more intelligent now than we were thousands of years ago. If you define intelligence as the capacity to learn and solve problems, then no, we are the same.

 

There are already scientists working on memory enhancing technology from several different approaches.

Everything from training techniques to cybernetic implants.

 

No. We just have better tools to work with.

 

More knowledge doesn't necessarily mean higher intelligence.

 

real breakthroughs in learning and knowledge have mostly come about via leisure or necessity. many of our greatest thinkers were women and men rich or privileged enough to have the time to sit down and nut something out. so the more leisure we have, the most we produce great thinkers. however, this exponential growth in genius is often held in check by the other 'boon' of leisure, lazineness.

having said that, I'm always impressed by how much more teenagers know that many people in their grandparents generation. it's actually astonishing, and seems sometimes as though the two groups were from different planets. I see this all the time in our young today. while they have yet to reach emotional and social maturity, they are incredibly smart, and manage to shame many an intellectually lazy adult. whether this is residual to the vast amount of information they process these days, or something else, I don't know. but I remember as a kid recognising that almost all adults were 'smarter' than us ..... because they actually were.

 

Surprisingly this group actually claims we are losing mental capacity...

http://www.livescience.com/37095-humans-smarter-or-dumber.html

 

As I understand, the IQ and the SAT testing have been dumbed down. I've never taken either test so I can't say for sure, but it seems to fit with the way our education system is going.

 

Those were christians who thought that. Although, 3500 yrs later? Egyptians calculated the earth diameter over 7500 yrs ago?
So if we improved on the original number, doesn't that mean we got smarter?
The use that knowledge to actually leave the physical earth?

 

Great example, and that is the first I have heard of this. Thanks.

So knowledge, stored as memory, is easily lost. But that isn't intelligence, intelligence is what discovered it, which was stored in memory and passed on, until at certain times, it was lost.

 

Where in the world are you coming up with this garbage? Are we talking about Eratosthenes? If so, that's about 2,000 years ago, and LOL at singling out Christians for being behind the curve by a couple hundred years for being stuck in the Middle Ages. Wow... Anti-Theism at it's finest. Are you a racist as well?

 

Probably got better tools to measure, compared to the ancients. Intelligence to me is like the processor in a pc, while knowledge is data stored in memory. But intelligence is more than just processing data, there is another element to it. For something totally new to be discovered, which is not already in memory, something else takes place. The unknown, is discovered. It is one thing to manipulate, to process knowledge in memory, but something else to discover what is not in memory. I once read something about this, when scientists who had discovered something new, were asked how they did it, most said it just came from nowhere. They stopped thinking about the problem for a nanosecond, and when thought stopped moving, the new just manifested as if from nothing. This is intelligence, which I think will be the limiting factor to AI. The brain can do this, the computer will never be able to do it. Probably because the brain is organic and not mechanical.

 

I don't believe we could do a better job today than our Founding Fathers did with our supreme law of the land; even with all of our technological advancement.

 

No Europe didn't think the world was flat. That is a myth

 

The dark ages, result of 'the chruch' and it quest for control. You do admit they were a couple hundred years behind. Why is that?

 

The Dark Ages? Seriously? That myth had to do mostly with Muslim conquest of the Western Asia and Europe and the destruction of written manuscripts, science, art and historical documents by the invading hoards. It was the time after the political fall of the Roman Empire. It had nothing to do with intelligence.

 

I "admit", no I typed it out on a whim actually. Hold on and I'll look it up for you...