Human Intelligence Shows Depth And Breadth

Part 4 - Part 3

Serious Thinking Skills

Human intelligence displays depth and breadth as Homo Sapiens, albeit tentatively, adopts Agriculture, Community, and a Thinking stance. This Thinking stance, in the guise of serious Thinking skills, will be the driving force of Humanities future.

The birth of Rigorous Thinking Skills may have it's genesis in the cool observation that Plants and Animals reproduce themselves automatically.

This observation may have led to the insightful realization that cultivating and farming these Natural resources could provide a reliable food supply.

How ever the phenomenon of serious Thinking skills was established, there can be no doubt that to do so, was the right move to make.

Our remarkable forebears endowed upon themselves the option to continue or abandon their nomadic lifestyle. Devoted, as it was, to the tedious search for sustenance.

In conjunction with the first seeds of Agriculture sprouting, we are witnessing the first seeds of constructive Thought being sown. We are witnessing, perhaps also tentatively, the genesis of the exercise of Free Will. In the form of purposeful Choice.

The existence of Free Will however, will be strenuously challenged from that day, to this.

Once Established Ideas Are Immortal

In conjunction with the exploitation of the congenial ambient physical Environment, which in all likelihood inspired them to action, these Material and Spiritual seeds will sprout, bloom, and reproduce. Bearing copious fruit throughout the ages.

Fruit in the form of Ideas. Thoughts that - For Good or evil - will be influenced by consecutive generations of Humans and their environment, meaning their Reality. Until these Ideas reach the present. Where we, and our environment, our Reality, are responsible for their future direction.

Thinking Skills In The Physical World

Whilst Human groups were no doubt inundated with seriously daunting problems, generated by settlement in large numbers, as difficult and arduous they must have been, the evidence suggests the visionary members of our species knuckled down and set their minds to work on solutions.

Although these solutions may seem primitive to us now, they were clever, and adequate, for the time, and would prove to be forerunners of Technology and Society as we know it today.

Keep in your Conscious Awareness that Adequate does not mean perfect or ideal. We return to this topic later.

Thinking Skills In The Spiritual World

Nevertheless, as intellectually difficult as Material challenges are to resolve effectively, they fade into insignificance when compared to Spiritual challenges such as relationships. Spiritual challenges have hampered Human progress from the first seed of innovation, and continue to hamper Human progress today.

Spiritual Workout

During the estimated eight thousand years since the advent of Farming and Agriculture, to the birth of Christ, a little over two thousand years ago, Homo Sapiens Mind was given a good old workout, putting Human intelligence through it's paces.

What ever the original stimulus that inspired we Human Beings to Think was, it unleashed a veritable flood of Thought. Good, bad, and indifferent, placing our Human intelligence center stage of Human existence. Permanently.

pdThinker.com is concerned primarily with Good thought. For reflective conclusions that will become apparent to a true Thinker at some stage of their Thinking. A True Thinker is is that relatively rare individual who is a Truth seeker.

Human Intelligence And Technical Progress

In common with accurately dating Human evolution, it is not yet possible to pin point times and dates of many early inventions and discoveries. Occasionally, intrepid researchers uncover new evidence that changes either the time of an invention, or the inventor.

 That said, a reasonably close approximation is adequate for our purposes here.

Inventions and discoveries are an indication of the power that is available to a cultivated mind to process Thought. A cultivated Mind is where it's owner takes an ongoing active interest in developing it's Power.

Every Human possesses the Potential of a cultivated mind. Nevertheless, it is an individual's responsibility to cultivate their own mind to the best of their ability. 

No one can do this for another. Yet if one possesses the Desire to construct a steel trap mind, there is more than adequate help to be had. pdThinker.com, amongst many reliable sources, is dedicated to documenting how the Human Mind functions.

Prodigious results were produced by our early ancestors who became aware of and exploited, the Latent Power residing in their Thoughts. 

Each Invention and Discovery offers it's own rich History by contributing to the advancement and consolidation of Intelligent Society. Impressive accomplishments all. Made all the more impressive by their achievers comparatively few resources to build upon.

True Thinking indeed

Following is a sampling of these prolific primeval Thinkers major achievements. Offered here, as best as can be determined, chronologically.

Prodigious Early Thinking Results

That all embracing, ubiquitous, essential constituent of our current lifestyles - and future progress - the Wheel, was one of the earliest inventions. And necessarily so. Where would we be, without the Wheel?

Water was directed via plumbing. Grain milled for flour. Money was circulating.

Beer was brewed. Providing clean liquid for drinking in the face of rampant communal water pollution, this important beverage could claim to have been instrumental in the safe maintenance of public health.

Today, Beer continues to humbly and willingly deliver its thirst quenching properties. Long live beer!!

That vast potential intrinsic in Rivers and Seas was harnessed Initially with Man powered Boats, followed closely by Wind powered Sailing Ships.

Mastering of the Oceans came first with the Chinese - impressively so - but it was to be the Europeans who went on to explore, colonize the planet and dominate its Peoples and their Cultures. The methods they employed can only be described as abominable.

All the while witnessing this intense activity, Time was crudely measured using the Sundial.

Mathematics

Mathematics came into fertile play approximately four thousand years ago. Attaining the elevated status of a Discipline roughly fourteen hundred years later, around 600BC.

That ubiquitous symbol that can be availed upon to represent magnitudes from nought to infinity, the Zero, was discovered.

Credited to the Babylonians in Mesopotamia - part of modern day Iraq - in the third century BC. The Zero was discovered during the lifetime of Euclid, whose precise date of birth and death doesn't appear to be certain.
 
Euclid was flat chat at the time earning his title as the Father of Geometry. His mathematical treatise, Elements, consisting of thirteen books, has been influential in mathematics to the present day.

Euclid knew not of the zero, and the City of Alexandria, where he lived, along with the rest of Arabia, would not learn of it until towards the end of the tenth century AD.

Western Europe remained blithely unaware of this significant symbol until the twelfth century AD, almost fifteen hundred years after its inception.

Human Intelligence Keeps Expanding

The first agricultural Plow constructed with wood, preceding the Zero by one hundred years, compliments and aids farming. Writing was practiced on many types of material, such as Papyrus, pottery, bark, and probably anything else that would accept a mark.

Forerunners of Concrete were in use.

Heavy loads could be lifted by Crane and moved by Wheelbarrow.

Wootz Steel, the first known Tool Steel, given of a fine crystalline structure that is still much admired today, was put to use to make weapons. Humanities dark side was emerging.

Weapons are the obnoxious fruit of fear and ignorance. A to date extremely costly lesson we are species wide, as yet unwilling to acknowledge and learn.

When we learn enough, maybe we no longer have to kill - Cochise - Bonanza

In concert with the omnipresent Wheel, the Crank was lending its considerable practical applications to engineers. And even more so with the addition of a Connecting Rod to the crank several years after the crank's initial discovery.

The Screw Thread, Gearwheel, Tapered Wedge, Pulley, and the Lever were all discovered around this time.

No doubt many of these mechanical discoveries were made with appreciable help engendered by understanding Euclidean Geometry.
 
Tools were setting the scene, and stimulating minds for an exponential wave of technological growth. Some two and a half thousand years later, we have yet to reach the zenith of this growth. If indeed a technological zenith exists.

Human Intelligence And A Great Mind

Concluding this brief glimpse of our earliest demonstrations of Thinking ability, we take a glimpse at an early thinker.

Archimedes of Syracuse, (287BC - 212BC) a younger contemporary of Euclid, brilliant mathematician, mechanical genius, and author of The Sand Reckoner, is an excellent example of a Great Mind in action.

His exuberant intellectual efforts contributed much to our modern day understanding of Geometry.

Give me a firm place to stand, boasted Archimedes, with his lever in hand, And I will move the Earth.

With the expression of this bold, confident statement, Archimedes informs us just how well he understood the functioning and potential of the lever.

This great Mind proved beyond doubt his comprehensive understanding of leverage. Giving a vivid demonstration of its power by using compound pulleys to haul a ship out of the water single handed. Although he didn't invent this tool, Archimedes invented stuff every bit as practical.

Practical Thinking

Amongst his many discoveries, including Buoyancy, this practical Great Mind invented the Archimedes Screw.

When his Screw was installed in an open ended cylinder, then laid at an angle within a source of water and the screw rotated, it would raise the water to the cylinder top and beyond.

The Principle behind Archimedes Screw driven Pump still has practical applications today. You may even find it to be present in the lubrication system of your motor vehicle engine.

If screwed into the ground where the purpose is to serve as an Anchor, it holds with such tenacity a modern Bulldozer would be challenged pulling it out.

Akin to fellow genius, Leonardo da Vinci, Archimedes set his mind to designing many horrific war machines. He subsequently suffered a violent death.

Has the application of Human intelligence changed in the intervening time span?

Human Intelligence Rocks!

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