Prehistoric cave artwork gives a window into the earliest days of humanity. It’s virtually a miracle that these inventive messages reached us, below the sheltered darkness of caves, after tens of hundreds of years.
Hand prints are widespread among the many most historical of those work. We could not know precisely what these prints imply, however we instantly really feel gripped by them, partly as a result of we perceive the truth that a prehistoric human knew this was a manner of speaking with the longer term and with humanity as an entire. They someway knew this might work—that we might really feel linked to them, regardless of our monumental communicative and cultural variations.
The miracle of “cave artwork” is each that they succeeded in making us really feel linked to them and that their lovely inventive creations really survived for thus lengthy. The primary miracle is explainable when it comes to our widespread cognitive and ethical wants—our shared humanity. The second was sheer luck.
Pigments on rocks wouldn’t be helpful, in any respect, until they constituted an act of joint consideration between prehistoric people and humanity as an entire. This timeless energy of joint consideration is constitutive of humanity. The worth and vitality of joint consideration rely essentially upon actual info, versus contraptions or simulations that might create a communicative farce. As an illustration, the farce could also be that the hand prints have been positioned there below pretend situations by an imposter, who’s simply messing with us. Then they’re neither historical nor actual acts of communication.
A pretend can manipulate the recipient of a message, making the recipient really feel linked, however solely the reality can set up a real and helpful connection between sender and recipient, one which even has a liberatory energy by way of communication, as these early creations of prehistoric people show. Fact is deeply associated to this notion of communicative care and permanence. The world has epistemic worth as a result of it has an actual historical past, and we perceive that we’re a part of its historical past. We’re not arbitrarily right here as the results of a whimsical choice of an impostor that locations us in an enslaved or subservient scenario, just like the characters that stay in a simulation, as within the film “the Matrix”.
Cueva de las Manos, Argentina
Supply: “By Mariano”/commons.wikimedia
People are keenly conscious of the imminence of their very own loss of life. This makes them notice how essential it’s to speak in truth and unequivocally. Cave artwork transcends the particular circumstances of our very restricted human lives, however it’s radically totally different from the escapism of residing in a pretend or simulated world.
The look after reality and real communication (the extra conventional human epistemic drives) stands in opposition to epistemic escapism, which is the concept that residing in a simulation could be of equal worth as residing in our actual and valuable planet. The outdated model of this concept is that every little thing is a dream, an phantasm. The brand new model is concerning the wonders of residing in a digital world, aided by know-how that’s smarter than us. Clearly, our new model is extra harmful as a result of it implies {that a} pretend world may very well be higher than actuality—this was by no means the purpose of the normal, skeptical model.
There’s little hope to attach reality with freedom if epistemic escapism is true. Our world is acquainted to us as a result of we’re a part of it, and this relies essentially on the factual historical past of the world. In a simulation, there could be no connection between reality and justice both. Genocides, pandemics, the slave commerce, and hunger might all be interpreted as a part of the fakery, simply occasions which are added to the simulation with no substantial significance apart from maybe leisure or shock (they don’t seem to be actual!). They’d be on a par with pretend soccer video games and horse races. When this sort of disconnection between reality, freedom, and justice is inspired by our fascination with know-how, just lately with synthetic intelligence, we’re opening the door to all types of communicational and societal dangers (Montemayor, 2023).
The answer is to not destroy machines or forestall the event of synthetic intelligence. What is required is the reinvigoration of our communicative capacities, which have suffered from the exploitation of communication for business functions. As a substitute of making extra danger and misunderstanding, we have to create extra belief. That is the following technological problem we’ve got to face, and extra voices are contributing to this dialogue.
However it’s value asking, why are we so fascinated by the brand new types of epistemic escapism? A believable reply is that it is because we face a transitional level in society, and our issues appear to be bigger than our collective knowledge. No marvel we wish to escape from the world—to Mars, to a simulation, or to the digital worlds that will probably be created by our technological overlords. What could be a neater method to escape than turning our world right into a mere simulation? If we’re to maintain our humanity and belief in one another, then we have to absolutely recognize the efforts of our ancestors to attach with us. Joint consideration wouldn’t be a factor if we weren’t pushed by the necessity to talk with one another and create an understanding that allowed us to evolve (regardless of the lack to be taught from our errors).
The superficial interpretation right here is that it’s good that the cave artists merely painted such lovely pictures for his or her ancestors. The deeper lesson is that they knew that the one manner of transcending the constraints and seemingly insurmountable issues of residing a restricted life is by interesting to our wants for representing and caring concerning the world and one another, thereby creating a powerful bond between reality, freedom, and justice. The drive to hunt reality and to share information is finest exemplified by the evolution of people, with various levels of challenges alongside the way in which. Now we should assess the problem that the seduction of an idealistic, but simulated, world will detract from the reality, enabling manipulative forces to take advantage of this unreality in favor of their very own motivations. We should step again and scrutinize the compelling simulations rising at present and the moral implications of our ingenuity.