Carl sagan’s thought about books:
“When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented them. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to
stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have
invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library. A book is made from a tree. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Carl sagan’s thought about books:
“When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented them. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to
stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have
invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse...
@triptych
Might have blown Carl’s mind to know about oral cultures, the widespread encoding and transmission of information, knowledge, and wisdom in story and song. Long before writing was invented.
@triptych@social.yesterweb.org Well put - writing might very well be the greatest technological invention of humankind, second only to language itself
@triptych
An interesting morphologic (if I use that term correctly) change that MAY be related to the storage of information outside our brains is that those brains have in the last ~3000 yrs become smaller. If so, I have begun to wonder what progress in development of AI might mean for our brains.
Contrary to much Sci-Fi where our brains become much larger in the future, is it more likely that we become literal pinheads. Perhaps like the Eloi, but with AI machines instead of Morlocks.