I am typing on a keyboard. This keyboard was made with the assistance of tools. (“Tools” includes very complex tools like machinery and robotics.) The tools that made my keyboard were themselves made by people using slightly older tools. And those tools were made by people using slightly older tools. And those tools were made by people using older tools. And those tools were made by people using older tools.
And so on, and so on.
And eventually, what we have is a human-like ape squatting on a stone, who figures out that a rock made sharp by banging it against other rocks can be used to fashion useful items out of wood.
Of course, I’m sure there was more than one Moment of Tool Inception (MTI), because various cavedwellers reached the same realizations. But, with omniscience, we could trace all our manufactured items back to one MTI or another. Right? The chain could be broken only by an act of manufacture completely unaided by tools – someone who decided to play caveman and make a hammer, and then use that hammer to make other things, creating a new MTI and thus a new branch on the Tool Family Tree. That doesn’t seem very likely though.
I’ve found myself thinking more or less the same thing. If you take the laptop computer as the summum of human creation, it basically implies the mastery of all the crafts – crafts that seem to have nothing whatever to do with computers, like woodworking or leathercraft. More specifically, I find myself wondering if any part of a computer – or a part of a machine that made the computer – was created by an old-fashioned patternmaker, modeling a machine part out of wood.
>Of course, I’m sure there was more than one Moment of Tool Inception (MTI), because various cavedwellers reached the same realizations. But, with omniscience, we could trace all our manufactured items back to one MTI or another. Right?
What? This sounds contradictory. I suppose there were multiple, independent inventions of tool use, and omniscient or not we could not chain them together. One must have been first, but that doesn’t connect them.
Also, many animals use tools, and chimpanzees and bonobos will sharpen sticks as spears and shape rocks as hand tools. So I don’t think your origins will be very humanlike.
I’m not saying that all the MTIs can be linked. Nor am I saying that a human was present at every MTI. Rather, I am simply saying that as to every object you pick up today, you could trace its roots to an MTI.
This is like the argument of the First Cause, which has always bothered me. Nothing about the argument prevents the existence of multiple independent (but not necessarily simultaneous inventions. I don’t think it likely that there was one ur-tool in the world. I strongly suspect that the idea of tools was independently created by a great many proto-human individuals many times in the past, and forgotten or not passed down many times as well.
As somebody once said, every now and then Man stumbles across an idea, but he usually picks himself, dusts himself off, and proceeds without noticing it.
(Similarly, I don;t see in the Argument of First Cause, used to argue for the existence of God, that there’s anything requireing a Unique First Creation. The same arguments and evidence lets you posit a posse of Godlike beings creating and recreting things, and perhaps letting them decay and die without progeny before possibly creating more. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that all items must proceed from one moment of creation, even if one of these was chronologically “first” (in some sense – the notion of “Time” for these omnipotent beings might not be the same as ours).
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