I'm really thinking can we truly know put ourselves in shoes of an ancestor who existed before everything was measured/measurable?
Partially probably. But people back then had such different perspectives and ways of framing things. You can get a glimpse of it if you like spend some more time with your grandparents or other old people.
What's far more likely is that you'll put yourself into your romanticized idea of this different era.
Partially unrelated: Your grandchildren will have so much better idea of putting themselves into your era. Especially if there is video (and text, audio, pictures etc etc) from you now. But unfortunately we don't have 4k video of people from the napoleonic era.
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I hear what you mean, and the answer is no of course. It’s fun to try, and that’s all. We think we can, but there are a million cultural assumptions that you’d miss. Just watch all the Jane Austin films or westerns over the decades and you can see how directors from the 70s, 90s and 2010s insert their own blind biases. Can you even imagine thinking like someone from across the globe in the modern era? Probably not. You can’t even think like someone from the other side of your own town.
But there’s a lot to learn from trying
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I don't think so.
Once something is invented like the internet, mobile phone or Bitcoin, its hard to forget.
Even the language if you got back a few hundred years or so is fundamentally different. I was listening to an Andrew Carnegie audio book & I simply didn't have the patience.
Also its very easy for us to look back & judge. Remember, our grandkids will likely judge us in much the same way.
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Yes, you can to a certain extent. As long as it's not too long ago, you can read loads of popular books, magazines, and newspapers from the past century plus on various archive sites. Spend some hours or days reading old texts, and you'll have a lot more understanding of what people thought, what they worried about, what they strived for.
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history books can do a pretty good job of this, especially if they’re local books about the history of your region
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Completely agree. Novels, especially, can transport you somewhere. But it is only our imagining of what it might be like. But you're right, reading something like Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography can take us some of the way there.
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Not everything is measured these days.
There are things outside the internet that exist.
And we will be seeing more and more things in the digital realm that never existed in the real world. Like for example a photo enhanced or completely created by AI
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Its not possible to put yourself into anyones mind, no matter the time period.
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I'd say yes, simply because there are still some isolated tribes around the world who are basically living like it's the stone age.
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But are you able to really know in your own mind how that feels?
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It is impossible.
Even something as "simple" as color, you are not able to know that your "red" is exactly seen in the same way as another person sees it. And we know that some people actually see them differently, the ones with color blindness.
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