Am I the only one who thought this was referring to how people felt about the general zeitgeist? Like, how Romans viewed everyone outside Rome as barbarian, etc. Not in the literal sense like, mirrors. Nice HN switcheroo.
This is calling out for experimental archaeologists to make the best possible front surface reflections they can from polished copper, bronze, steel, obsidian, glass. The Romans had metallised glass. They knew how to roast glass. They may well have known how to vaporise metal onto glass.
The state of the reflecting surface with 2ky of corrosion does not match even looking at your reflections in water.
Agreed. I imagine that obsidian surface must have been as polished as my smartphone screen in its prime, and probably as useful as a mirror (screen turned off). I am not sure of the flatness they were able to achieve though, so the reflection might not have been perfect. In theory a perfectly flat surface is achievable if they used the same tool to polish multiple mirrors at the same time!
Now you've duped everyone with the wrong headline, let's discuss what we thought it was about.
I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now.
I'm sure Romans were sitting there with their cities and aqueducts and street vendors and Colosseum and huge empire thinking this is as good as society had ever been.
Nobody was sitting there saying "we don't even have electricity" or "of course light doesn't come out of our eyes to see, that easily fails the scientific method" because they didn't know those things existed.
ancient, and some current peoples, view themselves through the lense of truth, verrifiable, self evidentiary truth starting with physical existance and that this is shared, and a complete understanding of what it is to be human, which may or may not, be shared
It's weird to think that we need a mirror (or other means of imaging) to see our own face. We can see a large part of our own body directly, but we will never be able to directly see our own face like other people do (unless, I guess, you have an eye pop out in some kind of accident, but I guess at that point this is not the kind of thing you would consider).
And now we’ve built LLMs - the biggest mirror of them all.
The Internet and smartphones gave us countless ways to look at ourselves and see how others see us. And then LLMs helped us gaze at the sum of all that and even confront reflections of our own thoughts.
Yeah, TFA ended just before it got to the really interesting part of how self-reflection itself is fundamental to the development of concisousness. Mirror-like technologies don't just show us our own appearance. They help us understand how we relate to the world around us.
It reminds me of Kieślowski's movie Camera Buff (1979), where the main character in iconic scene points the camera at himself and realizes that the act of making movies reflects not only his subjects, but also on who he is in relation them.
This is a good piece to consider in light of some stuff I've been thinking about with LLMs - new technology, that is. I've been reflecting on how some tech changes our relationship with the world, and can do so with such thoroughness that we forget that other ways of thinking even existed.
Plato didn't like books. Trithemius stood up for the scriptorium against the onslaught of the printing press. Baudelaire lamented photography as a refuge for lazy painters. And on it goes.
Mirrors are so commoditized now that they are a mere utility, but there was a time when they were miraculous...mirror..aculous...never mind. Special. That's fun to think about. Especially thinking about something like Snow White, a story that people still understand but probably has a link or two to the past with the "mirror on the wall who's the fairest of them all" stuff.
One fun one is that people used counting boards for all of their complicated calculations (literally "calculi" = "pebbles", i.e. counters) for many thousands of years, starting we don't know precisely when but maybe sometime before 3000 BC in Mesopotamia, and at least in Europe continuing up until only a few centuries ago (in some places until the 18th century or after) and now almost no one has even heard of them, let alone has any idea how to use one.
(For what it's worth: I think a counting board is still the best way to get small kids doing some basic calculations and understanding a positional number system: moving buttons or pennies around on a piece of paper with some lines drawn on it takes much less manual dexterity than writing, and the representation is much more direct and concrete than written symbols.)
> In the myth of Narcissus, a beautiful young demigod who saw his own reflection in a pool of water became so enamored with it that he refused to move. He rejected the advances of beautiful young women and eventually wasted away, unable to break the spell of his own image.
> These mirrors were valuable — they’ve been found with other luxury grave goods — but only somewhat useful. They were reflective to an extent, but aren’t capable of reflecting much detail or color [image] Still, the people of ancient Anatolia thought it was worth hours of labor to see even a dim reflection of their own faces.
I can't help but wonder if there's something we've lost, some stropping material or process capable of making them significantly more reflective than we image.
> I have no idea how difficult it is to manufacture these items, or how it’s done; the work associated with their creation is purposefully obscured from view.
On the contrary, often these processes are easy to find via youtube or the ever reliable How It’s Made series. I’d argue that for most common items, folks just prefer to not know or at least not seek.
What _is_ obscured is the process of acquiring the resources.
According to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast, the Sumerians considered themselves to be on the forefront of humanity and technology (which was true). I believe the reason was a mythological-religious understanding of a more ancient people to whom the gods or a god had given gifts like reason and technology (which is not new theme any of the many times it has been told), thus becoming the then-contemporary Sumerians.
28 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 59.2 ms ] threadThe state of the reflecting surface with 2ky of corrosion does not match even looking at your reflections in water.
I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now.
I'm sure Romans were sitting there with their cities and aqueducts and street vendors and Colosseum and huge empire thinking this is as good as society had ever been.
Nobody was sitting there saying "we don't even have electricity" or "of course light doesn't come out of our eyes to see, that easily fails the scientific method" because they didn't know those things existed.
Yeah, TFA ended just before it got to the really interesting part of how self-reflection itself is fundamental to the development of concisousness. Mirror-like technologies don't just show us our own appearance. They help us understand how we relate to the world around us.
It reminds me of Kieślowski's movie Camera Buff (1979), where the main character in iconic scene points the camera at himself and realizes that the act of making movies reflects not only his subjects, but also on who he is in relation them.
Yeah, I'd would love to read article on all that.
well, those long hours must have been boring as hell. I don't think they felt it was a great sacrifice
Plato didn't like books. Trithemius stood up for the scriptorium against the onslaught of the printing press. Baudelaire lamented photography as a refuge for lazy painters. And on it goes.
Mirrors are so commoditized now that they are a mere utility, but there was a time when they were miraculous...mirror..aculous...never mind. Special. That's fun to think about. Especially thinking about something like Snow White, a story that people still understand but probably has a link or two to the past with the "mirror on the wall who's the fairest of them all" stuff.
(For what it's worth: I think a counting board is still the best way to get small kids doing some basic calculations and understanding a positional number system: moving buttons or pennies around on a piece of paper with some lines drawn on it takes much less manual dexterity than writing, and the representation is much more direct and concrete than written symbols.)
Alternative, deeper understanding — https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/10/the_story_of_narciss...
I can't help but wonder if there's something we've lost, some stropping material or process capable of making them significantly more reflective than we image.
Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/408204.Ideas
On the contrary, often these processes are easy to find via youtube or the ever reliable How It’s Made series. I’d argue that for most common items, folks just prefer to not know or at least not seek.
What _is_ obscured is the process of acquiring the resources.
https://www.penn.museum/sites/journal/8987/
https://archive.is/DkRLv