Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Arguably it's profoundly irrational for me to be posting shit on the internet when I should be asleep. But be that as it may...
Zhao's whole argument in the 'mystery' thread seems to hinge on the idea that there are two fundamentally different worldviews; two different ways of seeing things, of interacting with the world, of considering the subjective experience against objective phenomena. Now while Zhao has made it very clear that he values both kinds of worldview, as he sees them, and would like to see them somehow reconciled or synthesised into some new transcendental worldview with the best of both worlds, I think there's a fundamental cognitive mismatch going on here.
Namely, the idea that 'superstitious' or 'traditional' or 'spiritual' beliefs are somehow irrational. When you live in a pre-technological society (and I'm aware that this is an imperfect term, because all societies have technology, but it has to be better than the troublesome 'indigenous' or the essentially meaningless 'traditional') it is profoundly rational to attribute to spirits or unseen forces the ebb and flow of the seasons, weather and other natural phenomena, illness and other catastrophic events like plagues of locusts, (were)tigers and so on. Because everything happens for a reason, right? And if the reason for something happening cannot be seen, then it happens for an unseen reason, by definition.
From the point of view of someone raised in a technological society in which natural phenomena are for the most part accounted for by science (crop circles can just fuck off, OK? I mean proper old school weird crop circles, not some undergraduate dickheads high on X-Files and scrumpy and psytrance), it can seem 'irrational' to view the world in terms of weretigers. But that's just begging the question, because no-one here has any idea what it's like to live in (and make sense of) a weretigerish world on a full-time basis. I think it would be ridiculous to assume that people who live in that world all the time, because that's the world they know, have gone out of their way to think of things as irrationally, mysteriously (etc.) as possible - no-one does that, because from a survival point of view it's a total dead end. A belief that the world is amenable to understanding - which is to say, rational understanding - underpins all belief systems in their infancy, before they calcify into structures of tradition, ritual, social heirarchy and so on. So while it would be wholly rational to a villager in the Sumatran jungle to view the world in terms of weretigers, and for someone designing novel semiconductors to view the world in terms of quantum mechanics, it would be utterly irrational to try and explain weretigers in terms of quantum mechanics or quantum mechanics in terms of weretigers. At the same time, it would be irrational to try and explain semiconductors in terms of Newtonian mechanics, or weretigers in terms of Biblical creationism, and so on and so on.
So as Nomad has pointed out several times in the other thread, it's not that pre-technological or 'primitive' people (or however you want to put it) have privileged accesss to some inherently intuitive or irrational or pre-rational sixth sense. They're using the same rational faculties as anyone else, to make sense of the world - that's what humans do. As well as any every other species, as far as I can see. Elephants venerate their dead for the same reason we hold funeral ceremonies: it makes sense. Roger Penrose makes a great point that although it's seemingly by-the-by that humans have the ability to understand advanced mathematics, if they so choose to apply themselves, there must be some archaic complex of genes that encode for a brain with the capacity to understand, and that somehow the same circuits that enable the evasion of predators and the capture of prey animals and the cohesion of a basic social group somehow happen to suitable for grappling with integral calculus. It would be trite to assume that this is a coincidence, I think. So you have Stonehenge and Avebury and the Egyptian pyramids and the Mexican pyramids as the pre-modern Greenwich Observatories and Jodrell Bankses and Hubbles and VLAs; likewise alchemy as the forerunner of chemistry and haruspicy (the pre-science of prescience based on the shape of entrails) as the forerunner of anatomy. Newton was an alchemist as much as, if not more than, a physicist and mathematician not because he felt like being rational some days and irrational on others, but because he saw it all as aspects of natural philosophy: the pursuit of understanding the (physical, senisble) world by rational means. It's just that mechanics and optics have stood the test of time and emprical trial, and alchemy has not - even though its underlying philosophy survives in the modern science of chemistry.
Which brings me to a sort of denouement here: as much as some po-mo types would love us to think that science is just another kind of religion or superstition or belief system (and I'm aware no-one here is actually advocating that, of course), it's much closer to the truth to say that superstition and religion are kinds of science. Call it pre-science or proto-science or whatever, it's a response to the same implulse.
What is irrational, one level, is the insistence of many people who live in a technological society and for the most parts reap its benefits but who persist in an entrenched pre-modern worldview that is blatantly disproven by all available empirical evidence (yes, America, I'm looking at you). But then, on another level it's surely rational to stick to these outmoded but familiar and comforting beliefs when you feel your culture is under attack from outsiders who seemingly have few values in common with yours, right?
Murray Gell-mann has a lot to say about adaptive and maladaptive schemata - I could paraphrase but I've gone on too far already and those ideas deserve their own thread.
All this just makes me think of the inherent implausibility of the purely 'logical' Mr. Spock - surely he'd recognise the existential futility of the human/Vulcan condition and realise that the most rational thing to do is top himself in two seconds flat? Logic my arse, I've seen the episode where Spock gets the horn and all hell breaks loose. Then again, if you want to get laid you might as well go about it logically...
This post brought to you by nomadologist, Jonathan Meades and insomnia.
Zhao's whole argument in the 'mystery' thread seems to hinge on the idea that there are two fundamentally different worldviews; two different ways of seeing things, of interacting with the world, of considering the subjective experience against objective phenomena. Now while Zhao has made it very clear that he values both kinds of worldview, as he sees them, and would like to see them somehow reconciled or synthesised into some new transcendental worldview with the best of both worlds, I think there's a fundamental cognitive mismatch going on here.
Namely, the idea that 'superstitious' or 'traditional' or 'spiritual' beliefs are somehow irrational. When you live in a pre-technological society (and I'm aware that this is an imperfect term, because all societies have technology, but it has to be better than the troublesome 'indigenous' or the essentially meaningless 'traditional') it is profoundly rational to attribute to spirits or unseen forces the ebb and flow of the seasons, weather and other natural phenomena, illness and other catastrophic events like plagues of locusts, (were)tigers and so on. Because everything happens for a reason, right? And if the reason for something happening cannot be seen, then it happens for an unseen reason, by definition.
From the point of view of someone raised in a technological society in which natural phenomena are for the most part accounted for by science (crop circles can just fuck off, OK? I mean proper old school weird crop circles, not some undergraduate dickheads high on X-Files and scrumpy and psytrance), it can seem 'irrational' to view the world in terms of weretigers. But that's just begging the question, because no-one here has any idea what it's like to live in (and make sense of) a weretigerish world on a full-time basis. I think it would be ridiculous to assume that people who live in that world all the time, because that's the world they know, have gone out of their way to think of things as irrationally, mysteriously (etc.) as possible - no-one does that, because from a survival point of view it's a total dead end. A belief that the world is amenable to understanding - which is to say, rational understanding - underpins all belief systems in their infancy, before they calcify into structures of tradition, ritual, social heirarchy and so on. So while it would be wholly rational to a villager in the Sumatran jungle to view the world in terms of weretigers, and for someone designing novel semiconductors to view the world in terms of quantum mechanics, it would be utterly irrational to try and explain weretigers in terms of quantum mechanics or quantum mechanics in terms of weretigers. At the same time, it would be irrational to try and explain semiconductors in terms of Newtonian mechanics, or weretigers in terms of Biblical creationism, and so on and so on.
So as Nomad has pointed out several times in the other thread, it's not that pre-technological or 'primitive' people (or however you want to put it) have privileged accesss to some inherently intuitive or irrational or pre-rational sixth sense. They're using the same rational faculties as anyone else, to make sense of the world - that's what humans do. As well as any every other species, as far as I can see. Elephants venerate their dead for the same reason we hold funeral ceremonies: it makes sense. Roger Penrose makes a great point that although it's seemingly by-the-by that humans have the ability to understand advanced mathematics, if they so choose to apply themselves, there must be some archaic complex of genes that encode for a brain with the capacity to understand, and that somehow the same circuits that enable the evasion of predators and the capture of prey animals and the cohesion of a basic social group somehow happen to suitable for grappling with integral calculus. It would be trite to assume that this is a coincidence, I think. So you have Stonehenge and Avebury and the Egyptian pyramids and the Mexican pyramids as the pre-modern Greenwich Observatories and Jodrell Bankses and Hubbles and VLAs; likewise alchemy as the forerunner of chemistry and haruspicy (the pre-science of prescience based on the shape of entrails) as the forerunner of anatomy. Newton was an alchemist as much as, if not more than, a physicist and mathematician not because he felt like being rational some days and irrational on others, but because he saw it all as aspects of natural philosophy: the pursuit of understanding the (physical, senisble) world by rational means. It's just that mechanics and optics have stood the test of time and emprical trial, and alchemy has not - even though its underlying philosophy survives in the modern science of chemistry.
Which brings me to a sort of denouement here: as much as some po-mo types would love us to think that science is just another kind of religion or superstition or belief system (and I'm aware no-one here is actually advocating that, of course), it's much closer to the truth to say that superstition and religion are kinds of science. Call it pre-science or proto-science or whatever, it's a response to the same implulse.
What is irrational, one level, is the insistence of many people who live in a technological society and for the most parts reap its benefits but who persist in an entrenched pre-modern worldview that is blatantly disproven by all available empirical evidence (yes, America, I'm looking at you). But then, on another level it's surely rational to stick to these outmoded but familiar and comforting beliefs when you feel your culture is under attack from outsiders who seemingly have few values in common with yours, right?
Murray Gell-mann has a lot to say about adaptive and maladaptive schemata - I could paraphrase but I've gone on too far already and those ideas deserve their own thread.
All this just makes me think of the inherent implausibility of the purely 'logical' Mr. Spock - surely he'd recognise the existential futility of the human/Vulcan condition and realise that the most rational thing to do is top himself in two seconds flat? Logic my arse, I've seen the episode where Spock gets the horn and all hell breaks loose. Then again, if you want to get laid you might as well go about it logically...
This post brought to you by nomadologist, Jonathan Meades and insomnia.
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