5 ms·

One shouldn't forget that some practices that appear pseudo-scientific from today's point of view made sense historically: "It made perfect sense for ancient m

• whatshisface 7y ago
  I disagree. You're not an ocean, so looking at the tides and assuming that the moon has a similar influence on you is an unjustified jump of logic. Then, when you start inventing specific effects for the moon to have, you're clearly in the realm of fiction because you know full well you didn't get the ideas you're writing down from observation. I have heard before the argument that "being rational wasn't invented until the 1930s, so you can't call anyone before then irrational," but everybody knows intuitively that the truth is something they see or something they infer from what they see, and a lie is something they make up in their own heads.
  • tralarpa 7y ago
    Jump of logic for us. Not for people in the past. This is called a "vertical" (or magic) world view where things with similar properties are believed to be connected. Examples: 1. The moon is influencing the ocean? -> It will also influence humans 2. Those berries are red? Blood is red, too -> Those berries are good for your blood. 3. This planet is moving fast (Mercure)? -> Mercure is connected to things moving/changing fast (mercury, travellers,...) (Example 2 is still practiced in traditional Chinese medicine today)
    • whatshisface 7y ago
      I like example 2, because it's also an example of my point. Why good? Even if you accept that it's related to blood, it could be bad for blood. There's no way to convert analogical reasoning into specific ideas about what is good or bad without making stuff up.
      • tralarpa 7y ago
        > Why good? Who knows? We would need a time machine to know that. I could imagine several reasons: - Because it works sometimes (coincidence or not) - Because believing to understand what is going on around you gives you an illusion of savety in a dangerous world - Because it gives you power over people (if you are the king/emperor/village doctor/priest) - Because it is embedded in a religious/philosophical context that might have advantages beyond that specific case > There's no way to convert analogical reasoning into specific ideas about what is good or bad without making stuff up I am pretty sure that traditional Chinese medicine has developed some complex theories that explain why some red berries are good for your blood and others not. Edit: Ah, I understand your comment better now. You say that this kind of reasoning does not help you to predict whether a red berry that you see for the first time is good or bad, right? Well, I think you are right :) We are talking here about world views, not scientific theories.
        • whatshisface 7y ago
          Ancient Chinese culture as well as 1600s European culture shared enough of our norms related to truth that they would have judged astrologists as violators, if they had realized what astrologers were doing. A civilization whose norms do not distinguish between false and true testimonies cannot have a functioning court system, but those cultures clearly did. Any system that has a concept of punishment must have along with it a norm against making up a story and telling it to people as if it were true (recall that horrible period after the French revolution for an example of what happens when you have punishment but nothing preventing false testimonies). Observations and inferences were just as important to them as they are to us. Now, there is an interesting possibility that I don't know of any examples of, but could have happened. Suppose a primitive tribe with no norms against lying developed a bunch of superstitions due to the wild stories people were telling. Later, the tribe develops those norms after they get tired of punishing clearly innocent people, but by then a bunch of true believers are spreading the superstition. In that case the false beliefs have been "smuggled past the norms boundary." But, again, I am not aware of any people group that doesn't have a norm against false testimonies.
  • simonh 7y ago
    They knew for a fact, without any shadow of a doubt that certain activities on earth are synchronised with activity in the heavens. This does include human, animals and plants. Human women have periods roughly synchronised with the movements of the moon, animals and plants have reproductive cycles synchronised with the seasons and movements of the sun and stars. These are facts. Priests and philosophers used astronomical knowledge to predict changes in the seasons, weather, the flooding of the Nile, to navigate at sea, so they had an extensive skills set in this area. Given that there are known synchronisations, it therefore follows there are likely to be unknown synchronisations, so the logical step is to start looking for them. Unfortunately we know that if you start looking for patterns in phenomena that aren't correlated, human beings have a proclivity to find them anyway. People back then did not know this, and did not have the conceptual tools to critically analyse evidence to the extent that we do.
    • whatshisface 7y ago
      One example of such an inference is, "heart = courage, courage = lion, lion = yellow, yellow = sun, sun = sunflower, therefore heart medicine = sunflower seeds." However, even by the standards of the day, that last link could just as well have been "heart-stopping poison = sunflower seeds." Alchemical tomes were not all consistent with each other, they disagreed which is what you would expect if there was a large fictional component to their makeup. People of all cultures knew better than to make up fiction and tell it to people as if it were true, however in those times it was not as easy to stop that from happening as it is today. (And it is not easy even today!)
      • dhimes 7y ago
        All it takes is plausibility to make the leap palatable to a large number of people. In the modern day, an equivalent would be economics.
    • cmonnow 7y ago
      There are pundits in remote villages in India, who can predict the exact timing of eclipses based just on a old almanac written thousands of years ago, with absolutely no modern scientific equipment (telescope) or knowledge (Galileo/Newton/Keppler). Indians have been doing astronomy and astrology (Yes, planetary positions do both indicate and affect your personality) for millenia. They still do it when matching horoscopes for marriage. What you hear about 'astrology' in Western world, is just a half-baked misunderstood version. It's like CSI doing a science episode saying 'enhance', and hoping things work out.
  • empath75 7y ago
    > "being rational wasn't invented until the 1930s Rationality -- which is to say reason and logic, was already formalized over 2000 years ago, by Aristotle and other greek philosophers. It wasn't reason that the ancients lacked, but empiricism as embodied in the scientific method -- although even that was used to some degree by people such as Galen and Aristotle. Reason alone can take you down deep rabbit holes, because it's heavily dependent on what you take as postulates, and without empirical measurements, it's difficult to figure out where to start the chain of reasoning from. It took a long time to standardize measurements and record keeping to the point where people could do accurate experiments that could prove theories that people had developed through reason. For example -- the ancient greeks had already developed the idea of atoms! [0] But they had no chance of proving that atoms existed, so it was one theory among many. What ended up becoming the general accepted theory of matter was hylomorphism [1]. They lacked physical and intellectual tools that they would have needed to be able to distinguish the two theories through experiment, similar to the status of string theory today. Some religious ideas that seem absurd today -- for example the catholic belief that bread is literally transformed into the body of christ -- were justified by the belief in hylomorphism. In the case of transubstantiation, the church claimed that while the accidental properties of the bread, the form of the bread were unchanged, the underlying substance of the bread was completely different -- in the same way that for example a petrified tree was transubstianted from wood to stone, while many of the accidental properties and the form where unchanged. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism
  • SkyBelow 7y ago
    >You're not an ocean, so looking at the tides and assuming that the moon has a similar influence on you is an unjustified jump of logic. When you have nothing else, your options are to make assumptions or do nothing. In general those who made assumptions sometimes get them right and eventually lead to progress that gives way to science. Those who do nothing remain frozen in their development. These days, with the understanding the average kid has when they graduate high school, it is an unreasonable assumption. But we are talking a far far different sort of society when these assumptions were being made.
    • whatshisface 7y ago
      >When you have nothing else, your options are to make assumptions or do nothing. Even in ancient cultures, "do nothing" (as in, don't make stuff up just because you don't know the answer) was pretty clearly the right option. If your bread goes missing while you're away, do you randomly pick a person and then accost them with full confidence that they stole it?
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    You're making a classic blunder: assuming that ancient people were stupid. They knew less than we do, so it is easy to look back with 20/20 hindsight and say "but the answer is so obvious!" because you already know the answer. They were still deriving that answer. Put in the same time, with the same level of knowledge, it is likely you would think the same way they did.
  • BurningFrog 7y ago
    The 1930s were one of the most irrational times on record, with Stalin and Hitler being heroes for most of the world. Anyway, if rationality was ever invented, it was a few hundred years earlier with the scientific revolution.
• Dumblydorr 7y ago
  The concepts never made sense, they simply had far less good alternatives in the past.
  • normalnorm 7y ago
    Ok, but consider the following: do you feel that current scientific knowledge includes things that we know not to make sense, but we just accept them because we have no better alternatives? If the answer is no, this should give you pause. A thought experiment. Consider the alternatives: (a) that we finally removed all irrationality from our understanding of reality, and you happen to be living in this golden age, while the centuries and millennia extending before you were dominated by irrationality; (b) that it is very hard to spot irrational beliefs when you are immersed in the culture that produces them. Which one do you figure is more probable?
    • Sean1708 7y ago
      (c) we have a much better understanding of the world than we have ever had before (though we still have a long way to go, and may never reach a full understanding) IMO it's mostly (c) but with a hearty helping of (b) on the side.
    • MauranKilom 7y ago
      Define "not make sense". Does the first law of thermodynamics "make sense"? Should it ever be proven wrong, would you have considered us irrational for "believing" in it? Sorting beliefs into "rational" and "irrational" is a bit too black and white imo. We have (scientific) models. We can support (but not prove), question or disprove them by applying the scientific method. There are beliefs/theories/models of varying popularity in our current scientific knowledge that are wrong but that we haven't disproven yet. You might differentiate between "we're looking for ways to disprove them" (i.e. being scientific) versus "we apply confirmation bias" (i.e. being superstitious) to distinguish rational and irrational beliefs. But my point is that there is a third option that is missing in your list: (c) we are suspicious of them (because they don't make sense?) but haven't yet come up with a way to put them to the test.
• lazysheepherd 7y ago
  _"...appear pseudo-scientific from today's point of view..."_ implies, at the very least, that it is in any way scientific. And that is a HUGE problem, for it is distorting the definitions. It _is_ a big deal, because once you start skewing eroding definitions, the very foundation of human communication & coordination is compromised. Definition of word "scientific", according to meriam-webster[1] is : "of, relating to, or exhibiting the methods or principles of science" So, call it fun or interesting. Say it makes people feel better. Point out it makes life easier to live for some. But it is not, from any point of view, scientific. Because it fails to comply with the scientific principles. Mental mechanisms that produce and amplify superstition is well understood. There's but one reason why superstition/religion want to hide under, integrate or identify with the scientific framework, while science is sharply separating itself: science works, therefore is powerful, while other has no effect beyond placebo. 1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scientific https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scientific