Literature is not just Data!

Humor me with this hypothetical.

If you were given the task of taking away one thing from early humans that would fundamentally alter where we are today, what would you change?

It's a fascinating question to me, as it not only asks about the core factor that made humans climb the hierarchy, but it also asks what we would've been without that factor.

(I'd like to hear your thoughts and answers, so feel free to mail me!)

Personally, if I were given such a task, I'd take away human narrative and abstraction.

Well, those are two things, (' - ') but they are intrinsically very related.

More interestingly, why choose that over something like having a smaller brain proportion compared to the body?

Because, well, I'm sure there isn't one correct answer, and changing brain proportions would not let me transition into the points I wanna make. >◡<

Nonetheless, human narrative and abstraction may not be the only available answer, but it is definitely a major contender. I say that because, as small as the ability to tell stories sounds, it's one of the things that acts as a proof for human intelligence.

So would we still be cavemen without it? Maybe not cavemen, but probably closer to it than where we are today. And it certainly does enable a lot of scenarios. We may have been able to calculate, accumulate knowledge, and possibly make use of tools by sheer trial and error.

But what makes us "us" is something far more mundane: the ability to imagine, create stories, derive abstractions, compress huge amounts of knowledge into tiny linguistic words and use those words to build arguments, be able to converse at that level, assign variables and hold values, abstract complexity and reason in multiple layers, and make that "jump" Einstein talks about as a fundamental part of innovation, arguing that true innovation is fundamentally driven by imagination and the courage to break existing mental assumptions.

"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination." - Albert Einstein

Animals like orcas and ravens are capable of abstraction. They form complex social pods and conspiracies (a group of ravens is called a conspiracy) and are able to pass down knowledge, rules, and dangers to the next generation.

But we humans do this on a whole other level. Creative abstraction comes naturally to us.

I believe those things may have played a bigger role in our modernization than we realize. Multiple factors were surely involved, but this particular tendency has come a long way with us to dismiss as natural.

And certainly, we wouldn't be where we are today without it. And among these sacks of hay, there is one particular thread that escapes the picture and gets understated: literature.

It is truly often understated how big of an impact literature has had on humanity. Being able to "encircle the world and beyond" with imagination still doesn't allow us to transfer that imagination past the current civilization and to the generations to come.

Literature was the technology that allowed us, and, during its widespread adoption in the shockingly recent terms of human civilization, the 19th century, allowed us to compound our knowledge exponentially. It finally gave us enough narrative threads and ideas to work with that, when digitized, it even enabled us to use that compounded knowledge to mimic human cognition artificially.

I, as a hobbyist writer and a student of AI/ML, see literature as far more than just "data", both in terms of subjective meaning and perceived value. Data is a general word we use for any collection of raw, unprocessed facts and figures, and literature can also be called data within the respective fields, as it's just a metric here.

My greater objection is to mentally equating literature to the broad concept of data. I believe that's a highly inaccurate mental model, and given the era, I see it as increasingly important to make that distinction explicit.