7: Memory Overload
From Harari — Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
In this chapter, the author starts talking about humankind’s memory capability, a largely biological mechanism. He then goes on to say how there is a limitation inherent in this, namely that you cannot easily sustain information in successful generations. DNA codes biology. But you cannot pass down laws and rituals with each generation. So instead, the author explains how documenting information down onto some type of medium was a shift in civilization. In the beginning, it was done by oral tradition. But that was limited still. So he talks about “writing things down”, and gives many different examples throughout human history.
The author, in particular, talks about mathematical information, as being something new and unique. As hunter gatherers, humans did not need to know numbers. This type of information and knowledge was new. But with the Agricultural Revolution and more modern systems of civilization, this type of accounting information was required.
To me, this is interesting, since most other species do not need or use basic concepts like counting or arithmetic. But for humans, this is something we teach our children very early on in their lives. We of course start with very physical analogs, like counting apples or oranges. Even when we do multiplication, we say things like “4 rows of 5 oranges each. How many oranges in total?” Only later on, do we abstract away from physical items, and just use pure numbers. And as any student knows, eventually there aren’t actually numbers. There are just symbols that represent numbers. (The symbols being from the Greek alphabet as you get into college.) And even beyond there, you get into more abstract mathematical concepts. Again, the theme of humankind’s development outside of biological DNA is striking here. In only a few short hundred years, humans have developed such abstract concepts. Today, we talk about things like “digital information age”. We are so removed from the real physical world. It’s a little beyond the scope of this book. But how will this impact our DNA in a few thousands of years going forward?
The author also spends some time in this chapter talking about language development in different parts of the world. This isn’t a linguistics text. So the author doesn’t get too deep into the many theories in this vast subject. But he does couch the need for writing down information as part of the broad stroke of human civilization and development. As we develop more complex structures in our society, we can’t keep everything in our brains and through oral methods. We can’t operate merely through that. We need to have things written down. The author even cites the Hammurabi code. (I’ve noticed lots of scholars of antiquity love to use this.) So as our societies needed things like laws, we needed to write them down, in order to execute law (would be my assumption).
These four chapters in the book are under the section of “Part Two The Agricultural Revolution”. It is interesting since it shows the different ways that human society developed, as a consequence, necessitated other technologies along the way, such as mathematics and writing.
