Prehistoric cave artwork offers a window into the earliest days of humanity. It’s virtually a miracle that these creative messages reached us, beneath the sheltered darkness of caves, after tens of 1000’s of years.

Hand prints are widespread among the many most historical of those work. We might not know precisely what these prints imply, however we instantly really feel gripped by them, partly as a result of we perceive the truth that a prehistoric human knew this was a method of speaking with the long run and with humanity as an entire. They by some means knew this might work—that we might really feel related to them, regardless of our monumental communicative and cultural variations.

The miracle of “cave artwork” is each that they succeeded in making us really feel related to them and that their lovely creative creations really survived for therefore lengthy. The primary miracle is explainable by way of our widespread cognitive and ethical wants—our shared humanity. The second was sheer luck.

Pigments on rocks wouldn’t be beneficial, in any respect, until they constituted an act of joint consideration between prehistoric people and humanity as an entire. This timeless energy of joint consideration is constitutive of humanity. The worth and vitality of joint consideration rely essentially upon actual details, versus contraptions or simulations that might create a communicative farce. As an example, the farce could also be that the hand prints had been positioned there beneath faux situations by an imposter, who’s simply messing with us. Then they’re neither historical nor actual acts of communication.

A faux can manipulate the recipient of a message, making the recipient really feel related, however solely the reality can set up a real and beneficial connection between sender and recipient, one which even has a liberatory energy via communication, as these early creations of prehistoric people exhibit. Fact is deeply associated to this notion of communicative care and permanence. The world has epistemic worth as a result of it has an actual historical past, and we perceive that we’re a part of its historical past. We’re not arbitrarily right here as the results of a whimsical choice of an impostor that locations us in an enslaved or subservient scenario, just like the characters that stay in a simulation, as within the film “the Matrix”.

Cueva de las Manos, Argentina

“By Mariano”/commons.wikimedia

People are keenly conscious of the imminence of their very own dying. This makes them understand how necessary it’s to speak honestly and unequivocally. Cave artwork transcends the precise circumstances of our very restricted human lives, however it’s radically completely different from the escapism of residing in a faux or simulated world.

The take care of fact and real communication (the extra conventional human epistemic drives) stands towards epistemic escapism, which is the concept residing in a simulation could be of equal worth as residing in our actual and treasured planet. The outdated model of this concept is that every part is a dream, an phantasm. The brand new model is concerning the wonders of residing in a digital world, aided by expertise that’s smarter than us. Clearly, our new model is extra harmful as a result of it implies {that a} faux world may very well be higher than actuality—this was by no means the purpose of the normal, skeptical model.

There’s little hope to attach fact with freedom if epistemic escapism is true. Our world is acquainted to us as a result of we’re a part of it, and this relies essentially on the factual historical past of the world. In a simulation, there could be no connection between fact and justice both. Genocides, pandemics, the slave commerce, and hunger might all be interpreted as a part of the fakery, simply occasions which are added to the simulation with no substantial significance apart from maybe leisure or shock (they aren’t actual!). They might be on a par with faux soccer video games and horse races. When this sort of disconnection between fact, freedom, and justice is inspired by our fascination with expertise, just lately with synthetic intelligence, we’re opening the door to all kinds of communicational and societal dangers (Montemayor, 2023).

The answer is to not destroy machines or stop the event of synthetic intelligence. What is required is the reinvigoration of our communicative capacities, which have suffered from the exploitation of communication for industrial functions. As an alternative of making extra threat and misunderstanding, we have to create extra belief. That is the following technological problem now we have to face, and extra voices are contributing to this dialogue.

However it’s price asking, why are we so fascinated by the brand new types of epistemic escapism? A believable reply is that it is because we face a transitional level in society, and our issues appear to be bigger than our collective knowledge. No marvel we wish to escape from the world—to Mars, to a simulation, or to the digital worlds that shall be created by our technological overlords. What could be a better technique to escape than turning our world right into a mere simulation? If we’re to maintain our humanity and belief in one another, then we have to absolutely respect the efforts of our ancestors to attach with us. Joint consideration wouldn’t be a factor if we weren’t pushed to speak with one another and create an understanding that allowed us to evolve (regardless of the lack to study from our errors).

The superficial interpretation right here is that it’s good that the cave artists merely painted such lovely photos for his or her ancestors. The deeper lesson is that they knew that the one method of transcending the constraints and seemingly insurmountable issues of residing a restricted life is by interesting to our wants for representing and caring concerning the world and one another, thereby creating a robust bond between fact, freedom, and justice. The drive to hunt fact and to share data is finest exemplified by the evolution of people, with various levels of challenges alongside the way in which. Now we should assess the problem that the seduction of an idealistic, but simulated, world will detract from the reality, enabling manipulative forces to use this unreality in favor of their very own motivations. We should step again and scrutinize the compelling simulations rising at present and the moral implications of our ingenuity.