During New Year holidays I’ve spent a week of vacations with my friends. One pair of them has a baby, just over one year old. So this post is going to be about him. And us as humanity.
The baby can talk some gibberish, no real words yet. He walks and can move objects around even if awkwardly.
One moment a thought came to me that in his own mind he may view himself as behaving exactly like us. We are too going here and there, move objects and make sounds with out mouths. Barring the question of whether he views himself as anything at all. We may view this one year old as cargo cult human. There are lots of appearances of cargo cult behaviour from grown up people too.
Could it be that as the baby is cargo cult human, so adults are mere cargo cult something-better? Probably not, adults are not imitating any “something-better”.
But I think our skills in problem solving and happiness optimization will look terribly pathetic to someone with much higher levels of intelligence. The same way we look at a baby and smile at his crude attempts at achieving his goals whatever they are. It took us thousands of years and hundreds of generations to notice that washing hands by doctors might have some positive effect in medicine. All the scientific advances that we had, did they have to take so much time? Not like there were no silicon in ancient Egypt to create computers.
I’m not saying it is easy to do science. I’m saying that if we were smarter we’d do it faster and better. The course of actions
- Observe light behaviour when it passes through air, water, and glass and invent optics
- Build telescope and make careful observation of celestial bodies
- Invent Newtonian mechanics
doesn’t seem so complicated. Imagine someone who could that in a year. Or a week. How would she look at us. And what would she do if she had a face and a palm.
Appendix: Digression on cargo cults
One might define cargo cult as a specific type of behaviour, where an actor replays or imitates actions which he saw or heard others doing in hope of getting the results of those others, without having a correct theory of how exactly the actions should bring the results.
For example, if I look at a married couple and see them happy and then decide that I need to find someone to marry myself, I’d call that a cargo cult behaviour. There are so many details I’d be overlooking, like whom to marry, how to treat people around me etc. that most likely I won’t get happiness if I do nothing else. Or if I read somewhere that Margaret Thatcher only slept 4 hours a day, and try to do the same to become celebrity.
Actually it took me some time to come up with these examples, other ideas that I had were not cargo cults. Alchemists were not cargo cult practitioners, they’ve seen no example of someone turning lead into gold. They were just unfortunate not to have proper theory of stuff interacting with other stuff. Same goes for astrologers. They base their work on wrong hypothesis, but they are not imitating anyone.
And in general, if someone does something stupid in hopes of some success, that doesn’t mean the behaviour is cargo cult. So no, probably adults are not cargo cult something-better. Unless they imitate other successful adults.
On the other hand I’d call not that stupid behaviour a cargo cult if an actor is imitating and lacks understanding. Like if I try to be on a specific diet to live longer. I’ve no idea which particular nutrients will suite me best so google what did long living people did and ate. It might in fact have a positive effect. But it will be a cargo cult nonetheless.