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Lost me at "Navigation is as much an art—and a spiritual practice—as it is a science." I'm a pilot and I've done coastal and ocean yacht navigation including c

Lost me at "Navigation is as much an art—and a spiritual practice—as it is a science." I'm a pilot and I've done coastal and ocean yacht navigation including coastal at night in a new country. No art or spiritual practice. Bearings for coastal nav, celestial angles if you want latitude at sea, accurate time source if you also want longitude and the option to automate it all with GPS. Next time you're boarding a commercial flight, go ask the pilot which deity he summoned to select his IFR route. He'll tell you the frequency.

jfk13 8y ago
Sure, that's one way of doing it. But as the article discusses at length, there have been people navigating long-distance ocean voyages long before such technologies existed. Understanding something of how they did this is (to some of us, at least) quite fascinating.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  Cooking is just chemistry--science, not mysticism--though it is taught and passed down in the form of culture and tradition, not as a science.
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    What about the choices that go into mixing flavors?
freehunter 8y ago
I'm sure Captain Cook in 1778 just plugged the coordinates for Hawaiian islands into his GPS and let autopilot navigate him there.
- mmaunder 8y ago
  Did you notice I mentioned celestial angles? That predates the invention of an accurate time piece as a nav technique. My point is that navigation is an analytical process. I'd go further and say that it is the ultimate in holding yourself accountable. If anyone here has ever done any kind of nav, you'll know this to he true because you're responsible for the lives of others. Whether you're navigating a Polynesian canoe using celestial angles or using a GPS on a cross country VFR flight. That's why I was startled at the quote from the writer I included above. No navigator would write that because they hold themselves more accountable than that. Curious that my post has been downvoted so heavily. At -4 right now.
  - mythrwy 8y ago
    Downvoting is a spiritual practice and not just a method of selecting a directional arrow?
    - mmaunder 8y ago
      Nailed it. LOL!
  - mmaunder 8y ago
    For some of the folks here that are interested in nav, its history, human factors and the development of accurate lat long navigation, the following two books are gems: Longitude by Dava Sobel And Fate is the Hunter by Ernest Gann.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - freehunter 8y ago
    Just guessing but perhaps your post is being downvoted because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the word "art", followed by "just plug the numbers into your GPS". "As much an art as a science" does not mean "there is no science and it's all made up", it means the science is so involved that a layman would struggle to understand it and even someone trained in the practice sometimes needs to rely on experience and muscle memory more than a hard rule book. "As much an art as a science" means you can't just be taught how to do it without practical examples. Everything you've mentioned in your experience (holding yourself accountable, analytical processes, etc) is the definition of "as much an art as a science". If it was just science with no art, you wouldn't need to hold yourself accountable. You'd just follow the rule book and be completely assured you'd make it to your destination. "Art" in this sentence means "technical problem solving", from an archaic definition of "art" which means "technics". [1] You seem to have interpreted the word "art" as something lesser than science, then went on to redefine science as meaning exactly the same thing as art in this situation. Maybe think of the phrase as "it's just as much practical knowledge as it is academic". That's how we would phrase the same thing in modern English. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_art
sorokod 8y ago
The article spends some time rationalising the navigation techniques used so it is not clear what the deal with "spiritual practice" is.
- mythrwy 8y ago
  They have to stick that in along with the ole racist European trope. The "noble savage with lost spiritual wisdom" thing speaks to certain crowds I guess. Other than that claptrap, the article is pretty good.
  - theothermkn 8y ago
    > They have to stick that in along with the ole racist European trope. Ostensibly, by "that," you are referring to the spiritual aspects of navigation noted in the article. But the "ole racist European trope" may better be classified as a plain acknowledgement of the facts on the ground. For example, the article states: "To show that Polynesians descended from Europeans, Abraham Fornander in Hawai‘i, and Edward Tregear and J. Macmillan Brown in New Zealand, built the case at the end of the 19th century using the emerging science of linguistics to trace Polynesian languages back to Sanskrit and to European languages." and: "Ethnologist S. Percy Smith was one of several scholars who praised the Polynesians’ “intelligence, their charming personalities, and—one likes to think—their common source with ourselves from the Caucasian branch of humanity." We could probably look up Fornander, Tregear, and Brown in the literature and gauge their relevance in their field. Ditto for Percy. Maybe it really is a liberal conspiracy to undermine the meritocracy. From the 1930s. Before we do that, though, maybe we should do a search on that tool of the left wing, Google, which turns up https://teara.govt.nz/en/ideas-of-maori-origins/page-2 https://teara.govt.nz/en/ideas-of-maori-origins/page-2 among the top results for "aryan polynesian theory." I think the quotes above more lend support to the idea that the article mentions in passing an accounting of the history of the (at least) sometimes racist scholarship in this area, rather than a trope. It's certainly possible that there are "factual tropes," I suppose. Nazis were, after all, pretty bad, no matter how many times we say it. (I have to say that I do think it's cowardly of people to hide behind the connotation of "fiction" in the word "trope." Like, they can't say "lie" or "propaganda" without revealing their racism, so they use "trope." Cheap.) However, calling something a "trope" in order to dismiss it as, I dunno, SJW tears or whatever, is a bit disingenuous. One might even call this common tactic an actual "trope," and a counterfactual one, of the alt-right.
yborg 8y ago
The article is a summary, and doesn't go into the details, but navigation was also spiritual practice to the original Polynesian navigators. Skills at modern navigation, which if poor simply result in an emergency beacon to Inmarsat and a pickup by the next passing freighter cannot be compared to those needed by the navigator of a Polynesian ocean-going colonization canoe - whose passengers, most likely part of the same family group, would certainly all die along with the navigator if he failed.
jacobwilliamroy 8y ago
You're correct. It's not magic. Papa Mau had an encyclopedic knowledge of the sea. He knew the birds, the fish, the constellations, the currents. At high noon on an overcast day Papa Mau could tell where they were by the way the water moved the boat. This is a massive amount of information passed on through oral tradition. It takes a long time and if you ever visit, you'll often hear people call Papa Mau the last navigator, because he was the last human to be taught this kind of navigation from early childhood. Papa Mau passed before he could finish training the next generation. This tradition is very important to the nations of the pacific. I don't have time to properly explain why right now. I have a meeting I need to get to.
- weregiraffe 8y ago
  >At high noon on an overcast day Papa Mau could tell where they were by the way the water moved the boat. Sounds like a job for a neural network. Train it with video of the water as input and coordinates as output.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - snowwrestler 8y ago
    It was, in fact, the job of a neural network.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  > Papa Mau passed before he could finish training the next generation. However, a new school of navigation was recreated from what he did pass on by one of his students, who recreated his non-instrument trip from Hawaii to Tahiti and then spent decades performing elaborate non-instrument trips around the Pacific as well as teaching other new navigators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nainoa_Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nainoa_Thompson
  - narrator 8y ago
    Going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole and reading about Papa Mau's tiny home island of "Satawal": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satawal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satawal "On March 18, 1994, the freighter Oceanus ventured out of the main shipping channel when its captain attempted to peek at topless Satawalese women. The freighter ran aground on the nearby Wenimong Reef, the primary source of food for the islanders, and 13,000 square meters of the reef were ravaged. The freighter's insurer, the North of England P&I Association, ended up paying US$2 million in compensation to the Satawalese.[2]"
theothermkn 8y ago
> Lost me at "Navigation is as much an art—and a spiritual practice—as it is a science." > I'm a pilot and I've done coastal and ocean yacht navigation including coastal at night in a new country. No art or spiritual practice. ...celestial angles if you want latitude at sea, accurate time source if you also want longitude and the option to automate it all with GPS. Ahh, yes. The famed Maori clock coconuts, which enabled the Maori to determine longitude out of sight of land. As near as I can tell, what you've shown is that you're an unspiritual navigator and pilot. That's fine. You went to unspiritual flight schools, the staff of which presumably reminded you before each class that they were champions of western rationalism, having thrown off the shackles of something-or-other. But, none of this goes to show that Polynesian navigation, as practiced then and as continued now, was or is not a spiritual practice. You conducted your navigation education adorned with aviator glasses while smarting off in a classroom between homoerotic beach volleyball scenes, while Polynesians embedded their navigation education in a spiritual practice. Top-Gun flight school joking aside, we tend to create things like flight schools, the Merchant Marines, or various other institutions, on a more or less massive scale, to propagate the knowledge, application, and technology of navigation as we mostly practice it. That seems fine. However, I think we're here going to run up against a matter of context. I presume, for example, that as a responsible navigator, you had a radio, and perhaps an EPIRB? May I assume you have some passing familiarity with a weather-vane autopilot? You have modern charts, a product of centuries of applied cartography, updated on a regular basis? I presume also that your education is a product of centuries of European navigation? Itself able to tie its history back to the Greeks and further? The point here, I am becoming more aware the longer I type, manifold. In order to propagate the discipline of navigation within an island culture, limited in size and infrastructure by, you know, being on islands, it may make sense for the practiced to have evolved "spiritually." First, the specialization of the skill in, I suspect, a culture where specialization was less prominent, probably required a certain amount of "making an exception" for the practitioners. Second, that the skill was used episodically or sporadically, by which I mean "only when navigating," also means that the practice must be maintained between voyages, perhaps generationally. Spiritual practice, likely an extant institution in these cultures, probably provides a handy mechanism, if not by design, then at least by evolution. (Although, we should probably not assume Polynesians so oblivious as to not have members in power who were capable of thinking, "You know, if I tie this navigation thing to our priesthood, then my heirs will be able to trade and conquer, too. Hmmm....") Finally, the level of concentration required of navigators, who we can judge bear the ultimate responsibility for the fates of the other passengers, is probably suited to spiritualization as well. "Don't bother the navigator. He's like a priest, except for this life, and this boat." In summary, "Open-ocean sail navigation in a canoe 800 years ago is a spiritual thing; random westerner navigating today is a GPS thing," hardly seems worth mentioning, except to disparage the former. Relax. Even if some people's navigation comes from a spiritual practice, nobody is going to pry your GPS from your cold dead hands.
gerbilly 8y ago
> Bearings for coastal nav, celestial angles if you want latitude at sea, accurate time source Right, that's the western way. But non instrument navigators could find tiny islands on purpose thousands of years ago without any of that. I'd call that an art. Maybe you don't practise it as an art, but others have and still do.
gerbilly 8y ago
I have another reply to this in this thread, and I stand by it, but I thought this might explain the use of the terms 'art' and 'spiritual' used in the article. Western navigation is typically learned explicitly, meaning that it consists of a set of techniques that can be explained and carried out by that rational part of the brain. This has many advantages, except that the rational part of the brain has less 'bandwidth' than the rest of the brain. The brain is a massively parallel machine that can respond to patterns in myriad ways, with the rational part being just one late addition, kind of like a calculator grafted on.[1] The tiny bandwidth of the rational part of the brain is why we need calculators, why we take notes, have books, devise theorems and notations. We do this because it reduces the bandwidth required to reason about a given problem. That integral you are trying to solve for homework in university, has just about as many 'parts' as the algebra problems you used to solve in grade 7.[2] Theres'a huge intellectual scaffolding underneath that integral sign, and many revisions of that scaffolding were developed, of course, but your brain in university does not have a bigger bandwidth than it did in grade 7. But there are other ways of learning and knowing. And it's not so woo woo: implicit learning. I bet you now how to catch a ball. How hard would it be for you to rationally[3] explain to me how ta catch a ball if I've never done it? But you could trivially teach me to catch a ball, you'd toss it to me and give me hints until I caught it, and then I'd practice that till it became automatic. Then I'd have trouble explaining that to someone, but I could teach them in the same experiential way and so the skill can be passed on.[4] This is why it's harder to teach a computer to catch a ball than it is to teach it to navigate. So this 'spiritual' word, is hinting that the Polynesian navigators learned their navigation skills implicitly. Relying much more on non rational (but not irrational) parts of the brain: recognizing patterns in nature, the position of stars yes, but tons of other clues that westerners have the luxury of ignoring because our charts and tables and GPS can just get us there already without all of that messy stuff. Once a skill is acquired in this manner, it can be very hard to explain to someone else making it look uncanny to outsiders perhaps. I think the word mystical might have been better than spiritual. But art fits pretty well for a skill learned in this way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory [3] I mean a list of instructions that can be carried out so that success is guaranteed when correctly executed. [4] A better example might be a sport like say surfing. It takes years to learn, and good surfers have a hard time explaining certain things. You just have observe nature (waves) and develop an intuition.
btilly 8y ago
You're a western pilot. Polynesians had none of that. Here is the essence of how Polynesians navigated. Lie on your back in the canoe. Pay attention to the main swell. During the day, use the swell to keep a straight direction. During the night use the points where specific stars rise and set to be sure you're still going in the right direction. When you get close to the target island, you know that by a variety of signals ranging from the movements of birds that nest on that island, to the waves bouncing back from the swell hitting the island. These make it OK to miss your target by a bit, you'll find it and still be able to steer towards it. Note what is missing. No latitude. No longitude. No time source. No GPS. No instruments. And yes, the whole thing is done lying on your back. For Polynesians, navigation was spiritual. Ranging from being able to keep yourself in a trance to keep from losing track, to the stories you told yourself to remember what each star told you about where you were going, to years of guild training. I learned about this back in university. Included was a comparison of the safety record for sea voyages in the South Pacific conducted by western ships with western navigation and Polynesians during the 1950s and 1960s. The Polynesians did better.
- sn41 8y ago
  Do you have some sources where I can read more on this stuff? I came across stick maps when I visited museums in New Zealand, and found the idea very fascinating. I have an amateur interest in navigation.
  - btilly 8y ago
    Sorry, I don't. This is all from my memory of a textbook for a course that I took in 1991 through the Open University of British Columbia, which has since become part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_Rivers_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_Rivers_University. I no longer remember what the textbook was.
  - 205guy 8y ago
    My 2 favorite books that explain it in depth, as well as the modern process of re-learning the lost art/skill: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18375122-hawaiki-rising https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18375122-hawaiki-rising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We,_the_Navigators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We,_the_Navigators (Edit: both mentioned in the article, now that I've read it)
sn41 8y ago
I think it is well-known that Polynesians, probably the greatest navigators in history, considered navigation to be a spiritual endeavour. I always thought that this is possibly where the whole "spice-eating space navigator" idea in "Dune" came from, but I have not been able to confirm this.

jfk13 8y ago

Sure, that's one way of doing it. But as the article discusses at length, there have been people navigating long-distance ocean voyages long before such technologies existed. Understanding something of how they did this is (to some of us, at least) quite fascinating.

wallace_f 8y ago
Cooking is just chemistry--science, not mysticism--though it is taught and passed down in the form of culture and tradition, not as a science.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  What about the choices that go into mixing flavors?

freehunter 8y ago

I'm sure Captain Cook in 1778 just plugged the coordinates for Hawaiian islands into his GPS and let autopilot navigate him there.

mmaunder 8y ago
Did you notice I mentioned celestial angles? That predates the invention of an accurate time piece as a nav technique. My point is that navigation is an analytical process. I'd go further and say that it is the ultimate in holding yourself accountable. If anyone here has ever done any kind of nav, you'll know this to he true because you're responsible for the lives of others. Whether you're navigating a Polynesian canoe using celestial angles or using a GPS on a cross country VFR flight. That's why I was startled at the quote from the writer I included above. No navigator would write that because they hold themselves more accountable than that. Curious that my post has been downvoted so heavily. At -4 right now.
- mythrwy 8y ago
  Downvoting is a spiritual practice and not just a method of selecting a directional arrow?
  - mmaunder 8y ago
    Nailed it. LOL!
- mmaunder 8y ago
  For some of the folks here that are interested in nav, its history, human factors and the development of accurate lat long navigation, the following two books are gems: Longitude by Dava Sobel And Fate is the Hunter by Ernest Gann.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- freehunter 8y ago
  Just guessing but perhaps your post is being downvoted because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the word "art", followed by "just plug the numbers into your GPS". "As much an art as a science" does not mean "there is no science and it's all made up", it means the science is so involved that a layman would struggle to understand it and even someone trained in the practice sometimes needs to rely on experience and muscle memory more than a hard rule book. "As much an art as a science" means you can't just be taught how to do it without practical examples. Everything you've mentioned in your experience (holding yourself accountable, analytical processes, etc) is the definition of "as much an art as a science". If it was just science with no art, you wouldn't need to hold yourself accountable. You'd just follow the rule book and be completely assured you'd make it to your destination. "Art" in this sentence means "technical problem solving", from an archaic definition of "art" which means "technics". [1] You seem to have interpreted the word "art" as something lesser than science, then went on to redefine science as meaning exactly the same thing as art in this situation. Maybe think of the phrase as "it's just as much practical knowledge as it is academic". That's how we would phrase the same thing in modern English. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_art

sorokod 8y ago

The article spends some time rationalising the navigation techniques used so it is not clear what the deal with "spiritual practice" is.

mythrwy 8y ago
They have to stick that in along with the ole racist European trope. The "noble savage with lost spiritual wisdom" thing speaks to certain crowds I guess. Other than that claptrap, the article is pretty good.
- theothermkn 8y ago
  > They have to stick that in along with the ole racist European trope. Ostensibly, by "that," you are referring to the spiritual aspects of navigation noted in the article. But the "ole racist European trope" may better be classified as a plain acknowledgement of the facts on the ground. For example, the article states: "To show that Polynesians descended from Europeans, Abraham Fornander in Hawai‘i, and Edward Tregear and J. Macmillan Brown in New Zealand, built the case at the end of the 19th century using the emerging science of linguistics to trace Polynesian languages back to Sanskrit and to European languages." and: "Ethnologist S. Percy Smith was one of several scholars who praised the Polynesians’ “intelligence, their charming personalities, and—one likes to think—their common source with ourselves from the Caucasian branch of humanity." We could probably look up Fornander, Tregear, and Brown in the literature and gauge their relevance in their field. Ditto for Percy. Maybe it really is a liberal conspiracy to undermine the meritocracy. From the 1930s. Before we do that, though, maybe we should do a search on that tool of the left wing, Google, which turns up https://teara.govt.nz/en/ideas-of-maori-origins/page-2 https://teara.govt.nz/en/ideas-of-maori-origins/page-2 among the top results for "aryan polynesian theory." I think the quotes above more lend support to the idea that the article mentions in passing an accounting of the history of the (at least) sometimes racist scholarship in this area, rather than a trope. It's certainly possible that there are "factual tropes," I suppose. Nazis were, after all, pretty bad, no matter how many times we say it. (I have to say that I do think it's cowardly of people to hide behind the connotation of "fiction" in the word "trope." Like, they can't say "lie" or "propaganda" without revealing their racism, so they use "trope." Cheap.) However, calling something a "trope" in order to dismiss it as, I dunno, SJW tears or whatever, is a bit disingenuous. One might even call this common tactic an actual "trope," and a counterfactual one, of the alt-right.

yborg 8y ago

The article is a summary, and doesn't go into the details, but navigation was also spiritual practice to the original Polynesian navigators. Skills at modern navigation, which if poor simply result in an emergency beacon to Inmarsat and a pickup by the next passing freighter cannot be compared to those needed by the navigator of a Polynesian ocean-going colonization canoe - whose passengers, most likely part of the same family group, would certainly all die along with the navigator if he failed.

jacobwilliamroy 8y ago

You're correct. It's not magic. Papa Mau had an encyclopedic knowledge of the sea. He knew the birds, the fish, the constellations, the currents. At high noon on an overcast day Papa Mau could tell where they were by the way the water moved the boat. This is a massive amount of information passed on through oral tradition. It takes a long time and if you ever visit, you'll often hear people call Papa Mau the last navigator, because he was the last human to be taught this kind of navigation from early childhood. Papa Mau passed before he could finish training the next generation. This tradition is very important to the nations of the pacific. I don't have time to properly explain why right now. I have a meeting I need to get to.

weregiraffe 8y ago
>At high noon on an overcast day Papa Mau could tell where they were by the way the water moved the boat. Sounds like a job for a neural network. Train it with video of the water as input and coordinates as output.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  It was, in fact, the job of a neural network.
crooked-v 8y ago
> Papa Mau passed before he could finish training the next generation. However, a new school of navigation was recreated from what he did pass on by one of his students, who recreated his non-instrument trip from Hawaii to Tahiti and then spent decades performing elaborate non-instrument trips around the Pacific as well as teaching other new navigators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nainoa_Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nainoa_Thompson
- narrator 8y ago
  Going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole and reading about Papa Mau's tiny home island of "Satawal": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satawal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satawal "On March 18, 1994, the freighter Oceanus ventured out of the main shipping channel when its captain attempted to peek at topless Satawalese women. The freighter ran aground on the nearby Wenimong Reef, the primary source of food for the islanders, and 13,000 square meters of the reef were ravaged. The freighter's insurer, the North of England P&I Association, ended up paying US$2 million in compensation to the Satawalese.[2]"

theothermkn 8y ago

> Lost me at "Navigation is as much an art—and a spiritual practice—as it is a science." > I'm a pilot and I've done coastal and ocean yacht navigation including coastal at night in a new country. No art or spiritual practice. ...celestial angles if you want latitude at sea, accurate time source if you also want longitude and the option to automate it all with GPS. Ahh, yes. The famed Maori clock coconuts, which enabled the Maori to determine longitude out of sight of land. As near as I can tell, what you've shown is that you're an unspiritual navigator and pilot. That's fine. You went to unspiritual flight schools, the staff of which presumably reminded you before each class that they were champions of western rationalism, having thrown off the shackles of something-or-other. But, none of this goes to show that Polynesian navigation, as practiced then and as continued now, was or is not a spiritual practice. You conducted your navigation education adorned with aviator glasses while smarting off in a classroom between homoerotic beach volleyball scenes, while Polynesians embedded their navigation education in a spiritual practice. Top-Gun flight school joking aside, we tend to create things like flight schools, the Merchant Marines, or various other institutions, on a more or less massive scale, to propagate the knowledge, application, and technology of navigation as we mostly practice it. That seems fine. However, I think we're here going to run up against a matter of context. I presume, for example, that as a responsible navigator, you had a radio, and perhaps an EPIRB? May I assume you have some passing familiarity with a weather-vane autopilot? You have modern charts, a product of centuries of applied cartography, updated on a regular basis? I presume also that your education is a product of centuries of European navigation? Itself able to tie its history back to the Greeks and further? The point here, I am becoming more aware the longer I type, manifold. In order to propagate the discipline of navigation within an island culture, limited in size and infrastructure by, you know, being on islands, it may make sense for the practiced to have evolved "spiritually." First, the specialization of the skill in, I suspect, a culture where specialization was less prominent, probably required a certain amount of "making an exception" for the practitioners. Second, that the skill was used episodically or sporadically, by which I mean "only when navigating," also means that the practice must be maintained between voyages, perhaps generationally. Spiritual practice, likely an extant institution in these cultures, probably provides a handy mechanism, if not by design, then at least by evolution. (Although, we should probably not assume Polynesians so oblivious as to not have members in power who were capable of thinking, "You know, if I tie this navigation thing to our priesthood, then my heirs will be able to trade and conquer, too. Hmmm....") Finally, the level of concentration required of navigators, who we can judge bear the ultimate responsibility for the fates of the other passengers, is probably suited to spiritualization as well. "Don't bother the navigator. He's like a priest, except for this life, and this boat." In summary, "Open-ocean sail navigation in a canoe 800 years ago is a spiritual thing; random westerner navigating today is a GPS thing," hardly seems worth mentioning, except to disparage the former. Relax. Even if some people's navigation comes from a spiritual practice, nobody is going to pry your GPS from your cold dead hands.

gerbilly 8y ago

> Bearings for coastal nav, celestial angles if you want latitude at sea, accurate time source Right, that's the western way. But non instrument navigators could find tiny islands on purpose thousands of years ago without any of that. I'd call that an art. Maybe you don't practise it as an art, but others have and still do.

gerbilly 8y ago

I have another reply to this in this thread, and I stand by it, but I thought this might explain the use of the terms 'art' and 'spiritual' used in the article. Western navigation is typically learned explicitly, meaning that it consists of a set of techniques that can be explained and carried out by that rational part of the brain. This has many advantages, except that the rational part of the brain has less 'bandwidth' than the rest of the brain. The brain is a massively parallel machine that can respond to patterns in myriad ways, with the rational part being just one late addition, kind of like a calculator grafted on.[1] The tiny bandwidth of the rational part of the brain is why we need calculators, why we take notes, have books, devise theorems and notations. We do this because it reduces the bandwidth required to reason about a given problem. That integral you are trying to solve for homework in university, has just about as many 'parts' as the algebra problems you used to solve in grade 7.[2] Theres'a huge intellectual scaffolding underneath that integral sign, and many revisions of that scaffolding were developed, of course, but your brain in university does not have a bigger bandwidth than it did in grade 7. But there are other ways of learning and knowing. And it's not so woo woo: implicit learning. I bet you now how to catch a ball. How hard would it be for you to rationally[3] explain to me how ta catch a ball if I've never done it? But you could trivially teach me to catch a ball, you'd toss it to me and give me hints until I caught it, and then I'd practice that till it became automatic. Then I'd have trouble explaining that to someone, but I could teach them in the same experiential way and so the skill can be passed on.[4] This is why it's harder to teach a computer to catch a ball than it is to teach it to navigate. So this 'spiritual' word, is hinting that the Polynesian navigators learned their navigation skills implicitly. Relying much more on non rational (but not irrational) parts of the brain: recognizing patterns in nature, the position of stars yes, but tons of other clues that westerners have the luxury of ignoring because our charts and tables and GPS can just get us there already without all of that messy stuff. Once a skill is acquired in this manner, it can be very hard to explain to someone else making it look uncanny to outsiders perhaps. I think the word mystical might have been better than spiritual. But art fits pretty well for a skill learned in this way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory [3] I mean a list of instructions that can be carried out so that success is guaranteed when correctly executed. [4] A better example might be a sport like say surfing. It takes years to learn, and good surfers have a hard time explaining certain things. You just have observe nature (waves) and develop an intuition.

btilly 8y ago

You're a western pilot. Polynesians had none of that. Here is the essence of how Polynesians navigated. Lie on your back in the canoe. Pay attention to the main swell. During the day, use the swell to keep a straight direction. During the night use the points where specific stars rise and set to be sure you're still going in the right direction. When you get close to the target island, you know that by a variety of signals ranging from the movements of birds that nest on that island, to the waves bouncing back from the swell hitting the island. These make it OK to miss your target by a bit, you'll find it and still be able to steer towards it. Note what is missing. No latitude. No longitude. No time source. No GPS. No instruments. And yes, the whole thing is done lying on your back. For Polynesians, navigation was spiritual. Ranging from being able to keep yourself in a trance to keep from losing track, to the stories you told yourself to remember what each star told you about where you were going, to years of guild training. I learned about this back in university. Included was a comparison of the safety record for sea voyages in the South Pacific conducted by western ships with western navigation and Polynesians during the 1950s and 1960s. The Polynesians did better.

sn41 8y ago
Do you have some sources where I can read more on this stuff? I came across stick maps when I visited museums in New Zealand, and found the idea very fascinating. I have an amateur interest in navigation.
- btilly 8y ago
  Sorry, I don't. This is all from my memory of a textbook for a course that I took in 1991 through the Open University of British Columbia, which has since become part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_Rivers_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_Rivers_University. I no longer remember what the textbook was.
- 205guy 8y ago
  My 2 favorite books that explain it in depth, as well as the modern process of re-learning the lost art/skill: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18375122-hawaiki-rising https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18375122-hawaiki-rising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We,_the_Navigators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We,_the_Navigators (Edit: both mentioned in the article, now that I've read it)

sn41 8y ago

I think it is well-known that Polynesians, probably the greatest navigators in history, considered navigation to be a spiritual endeavour. I always thought that this is possibly where the whole "spice-eating space navigator" idea in "Dune" came from, but I have not been able to confirm this.