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Swimmer963 comments on Complexity: inherent, created, and hidden - Less Wrong
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Interesting... I didn't realize that writing numbers down predated writing words down.
My understanding is that most writing systems began with immobile agricultural societies to tally objects for the sake of tax, storage, and trade: "5 apple, 2 wheat, 6 pig" where the nouns being numbered start out as ideograms with a visible connection to the thing they refer to. This is apparently a fairly "obvious" thing to do because it seems to have occurred independently to the Mayans, and Sumerians, and probably the Chinese and Egyptians, and probably some others I've never heard of. The Incas accidentally ended up with a relatively non-upgradeable notation system when they used specialized knotting systems for roughly this purpose, so its possible for humans starting from scratch as a group to completely miss this, but it seems rare to miss it.
The hard thing seems to be independently inventing a notation for speech sounds, rather than words, and tends to happen when adapting an existing system of ideograms to a new culture. From memory and Le Wik, the Egyptian symbol system was probably re-purposed for Semitic languages and that eventually inspired Phoenician (from whence we get "phonetics"), and the Japanese syllabary grew out of the use of Chinese symbols for the sounds they made.
Dictionaries don't back you up on that etymology. Both words come from Greek, but one word meant "purple" and the other meant "sound".
Wiktionary claims "Phonecian" was from a greek transliteration of Egyptian, and does not mention "purple".
But yes, "phonetics" clearly came from the word for "sound".
I think it took the human race much longer to develop speech than basic counting and drawing which even less evolved animals have been known to utilize.
I know that chimpanzees will draw or paint if given materials, but is there any sense in which a chimpanzee's drawings contain information about the way it understands the world?
My own internet searching turned up a few studies indicating that some chimpanzees were able to recognize images in human works of art. When chimpanzees tried to draw on their own, they drew "hooks" and "squiggles", but that was about the extent of chimpanzee drawing I found. One researcher (probably looking for something to say) commented that chimpanzee drawings tended to be clustered on the bottom part of the page. I don't think chimpanzees are doing anything that we would call representational.
I don't think they do, I think its safe to say that Homo Sapiens developed differing methods of communication based on local culture just like animals would have identified with each other due to territory markings.
However, we all eventually developed speech and chimpanzees were quickly overcame(and would probably not be able to perform as soon as we could share knowledge in a way that better utilized our brain.
This is one of the key reasons I support Eliezer's FOOM speed theory's over Robin. If we have an AI that can respond to basic speech and memory, then expand it over larger amounts of computing power all of our knowledge is their for it to build upon. Once you get those few architectural insights that separate our brains from our less evolved cousins growth accelerates exponentially and who knows what a seed AI could grow to in that amount of time.
Anyway, sorry for getting off the main point but this discussion ties really clearly into a lot of what they were discussing in the recent debate from my perspective.
Drawing? Which animals do that? (More specifically representational drawing - scribbling abstractly isn't quite the same deal as what humans were doing 50,000 years ago.)
I may have been unclear when I previously didn't defined drawing, Swimmers definition here is more representative of what I meant.