Edward Gibson: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But that’s what I mean. That limit is also a limit on the society of what they’re able to build. That’s going to be true. Yeah. I mean, we don’t know. This is one of those problems with the snapshot of just current languages is that we don’t know what causes a culture to discover/ invent accounting system. But the hypothesis is, the guess out there is something to do with farming. So if you have a bunch of goats and you want to keep track of them, and you have saved 17 goats and you go to bed at night and you get up in the morning, boy, it’s easier to have a count system to do that. That’s an abstraction over a set. So don’t have, people often ask me when I tell them about this kind of work, and they say, well, don’t these people have… Don’t they have kids? They have a lot of children. I’m like, yeah, they have a lot of children. And they do. They often have families of three or four, five kids, and they go, well, they need the numbers to keep track of their kids. And I always ask this person who says this, do you have children? And the answer is always no, because that’s not how you keep track of your kids. You care about their identities. It’s very important to me when I go, I have five children, it doesn’t matter. You don’t think one, two, three, four?…

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