History- what do we really know?

stuh

You are wrong. I am not the latter.

But some people like to use Occam's razor to shave of their heads.

I see no contradiction between this principle and my capacity for faith, and I am pretty sure that friar William of Ockham felt the same way.


But consider for a moment these Baghdad batteries. If they were indeed devices to store electrical energy, then can we not assume that these ancient people had some sort of means to generate electricity? And they'd have to have some insight into chemistry.

And if they had electricity I am pretty sure they had some uses for it.

The development of modern batteries started with the voltaic pile, announced by Alessandro Volta in 1800. I am pretty sure that he knew of sir Isaac Newton, and wasn't he the one who said something about standing on the shoulders of giants?

My point is that there were centuries of scientific discovery that came before the invention of the modern battery. Is it not likely that something of the kind could have happened before, with these Baghdad batteries?

So it seems that your statement that "in prehistoric times humans were not able to build upon the knowledge of their priors like we do now", is a statement based on belief more than anything else. As far back as we can see humans have had this ability. What makes you say that this started with the greeks or around the time of their civilization?

Not at all. Prehistoric times are, by definition, the time before history was able to be recorded in writing. Without writing, information could not adequately be saved and distributed, and so human knowledge grew at an extremely slow non-monotonic rate.

But isn't that an assumption?

No, it is not an assumption that writing information down allows it to be shared and saved with greater integrity and breadth than the spoken word. That is just obvious.

Of course.

But it is an assumption that this is something the pre-historic human could not do.

The fact that we haven't found any 50.000 year old writings doesn't conclusively prove that there were no one capable of writing 50.000 years ago.

The fact is that we cannot say anything for sure about it.

Well I already agreed with you on that, that we cannot be absolutely sure. But historians have made their best guesses based on all the evidence available, and their conclusions are made based on what is deemed to be most likely. It may be more correct to believe in nothing at all, but certainly not very helpful...if you believe that which is most likely, like most people, then most of it will be correct and you will benefit more from the information, in general. So I guess it is really a philosophical decision to believe.

Yes, their conclusions are made based on what is deemed to be most likely.

Based on what? Based on our modern views and beliefs and our way of life.

We assume that a civilization more advanced than ours would have greater material wealth, and therefore there should be an abundance of findings to confirm this.

But that isn't neccesarily so. There migh have been civilisations that didn't emphasize material wealth. They may have lived more in harmony with nature than we have ever done, and thus left little or no traces of their existence.

So "most likely" is in my opinion a biased estimation, one that cannot be trusted.

If one constructs a "wet" battery with the metal plates and the acid, that generates electricity--it is not necessary to have an electrical generating capacity to begin with. I know of no one who suggests that the batteries to which you refer were "rechargable." That they had a sophisticated interest in experimentation, and discovered the chemical means to generate electricity, i have no doubt--that this is evidence that they had a sophisticated understanding of electricity or chemistry is not supported by the mere existence of the battery.

set

In our time, what came first. The discovery of electricity or the invention of batteries?

I think you are being a little bit too "sensible" now. But that's just my opinion.

I don't think writing would have been needed for a craft skill. Knowledge would (and did) pass from generation to generation by word of mouth and watching a craftsman working. In fact stone, wood, shipbuilding and metal work was in the main done workers who could not read or write. The ancients had days, weeks, months years, decades to develop phyiscal skills and undertake experiments. No pressure to met a target or deadline, just try something different if it occurred to you.
The structure of most communities was the passing of skills within families. Father to son over generations. The communities were static and lasted for centuries.
Around 3000 years ago I think there were enough of such communities for the exchange of skills to begin in an unstoppable way across hundreds of miles and along the coastlines of the seas and continents.

This seems to me to be a complete non-sequitur. Just what do you allege does that have to do with the creation of a wet-cell battery? Creating a wet-cell battery would be one way to discover electricity. I really can't follow your thinking on this.

Why would you want to create a battery if you didn't know about electricity? That's just backwards.

And in "modern" history, hasn't all inventions come about because there was a need or demand to meet?

Any advanced civilization is going to be manufacturing things out of metals and plastics etc that will be around for a long time after they are gone. We have found no such artifacts. We didn't find ancient computers, cars, lasers, helicopters, microwaves...we can find things like flint arrowheads, the clothing they wore, all kinds of biodegradable things can be found but none of the advanced technology that would be utilizeable by electricity.

Now here's another assumption. Just because it's what we do, it doesn't mean that it's the only way to go.

We're consumption junkies. Considering what is a good and healthy way for a human to live out it's life, this could be called a dysfunction. No need to assume it has happened before. After all, as you say, there's no evidence for it.