[MD] Babylonian intellectuals

[david buchanan]

Arlo said to Bo:
Would you say the mathematics of the Babylonians and Egyptians were "social patterns"? Do you think modern mathematics is a "social pattern"? Can you point to the differentiating features of these mathematics that would indicate one being "social" and the other being "intellectual"? Also, there is evidence that several ancient (pre-Greek) cultures were able to mathematically and astronomically predict and describe precession. Would you say these precessional calculations and modellings were "social patterns"?


dmb says:

Their calculations were impressive and remarkably accurate but I still think there is a difference between Egyptian mathematicians and what we'd call intellectual. Those mathematicians were priests, actually, and math was something like an elite form of spiritual knowledge. Their calculations were not about scientific accuracy but ritualistic precision and a good harvest. River and stars were gods back then. Also these calculations were based on observations and were relatively concrete. By our standards it was just geometry and some fancy counting. Not that we're any smarter, but we live with a much greater degree of abstraction. I can see how it could be tempting to project that onto them, especially when their mathematical achievements are taken out of their religious context, but their highest priest probably didn't know much more than a fifth grader. Well okay, let's say a really, really smart fifth grader. 

You can literally see how writing becomes increasingly abstract as it evolves through time. I mean, if you put the symbols in a row you can see, for example, how a picture of a cow gets simpler and simpler until it can no longer be called a representation but a symbol, an abstract symbol. Interestingly, in the West this is how letters were born, rather than words. Now each symbol stands for a sound rather than a thing and you learn to decode all this very quickly, as you're doing now. It's all pretty damn abstract and we just take it for granted. Looking back at school exams and such, we can even see that the level of abstraction has changed in the last one hundred years. Wonder what the literacy rate was in Babylon? Outside of accountant-priests, I'll bet it was nearly zero. 

I don't know how to draw the line, exactly, but the social level can USE symbols but intellect is more like the ability to manipulate the symbols themselves, to do skilled work with the symbols themselves. It seems to me that the level of abstraction is key to the difference between social and intellectual levels. That is in terms of the quality of intelligence or thinking itself. But historically speaking, it's also a matter of which values are in charge, which are the dominate values in any given culture. In the case of ancient Egypt, mathematical knowledge was a rare secret. It was woven into the context of their religious beliefs and was used to serve social level values. 

Fast forward to the time of Plato, and you start to see speculation about what was eternal in the world, in the affairs of men. You see questions like "what is justice?" and "what is beauty?" "Truth" and the "best way to live" was now something to wonder about rather than inherit. I think it happened because the ancient world got small. A single person could see and know the Gods and languages of several cultures. And compare them. Thought itself becomes an object of study, then abstract conceptual tools are developed for that task. The complaints about scientific objectivity in ZAMM seem to be about way too much abstraction, the kind where you kinda lose touch. 
  

Keep in touch,

dmb 		 	   		  
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