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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 conn

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.
- 8draco8 7y ago
  People have obvious tendency for apophenia, seeing patterns and cause of action, even when there is no scientific connection between two, I call it intuition. Many argue it's part of evolution. If our ancestor interpreted noise in jungle as a danger he was more likely to survive. This behavior evolved and thanks to it we are able to discover many things unfortunately it also leads us to false conclusions like thinking that red berries are good for blood and psychics exists.
LeifCarrotson 7y ago
There's a difference between assuming that similar properties are connected because they appear similar on the surface, and rationally connecting similar properties because they are caused by the same physics. Modern thinkers will ask "Why/how does the moon influence the ocean", and expect that "how" to apply to other things, not the "what". Modern science has convenient answers like "F = G x m1 x m2 / r^2", you apply that and expect the moon to exert 2.7 x 10^-3 Newtons of force on a person, not to generically lift and lower something about their mental or medical state. The critical question to me, though, is what a person does when presented with a question to which they don't have a "how" available to answer it. Presented with a piece of equipment that uses sensor technology or algorithms they don't understand, or a street performer that uses slight-of-hand tricks they can't catch, do they assume it is just 'magic' and extrapolate its effects to things that might not be achievable based on the actual mechanism behind the demonstration? For example, one might expect a voice recognition app that can detect someone saying "Hey Google" to also understand "Excuse me, Google" and natural language processing, or expect a street performer who knows what card is going to be flipped over to know other things that will happen in the future. Another might observe that "Hey Google" causes the device to respond, and either ask questions about how that works until they learn about microphones, digital signal processing, and hidden Markov models - and eventually about natural language processing, and might expect the street performer to simply have performed a card trick with a normal means of knowing what card would be turned up (looking at the card at some point in the past). I honestly don't know what you or I would do in the past. With so few effective concepts of basic physics, chemistry, or medicine, not knowing the mechanism and requiring hundreds of years of scientific observations to discover it leaves "assume it's magic and extrapolate" as the only viable world view.
- tralarpa 7y ago
  > it leaves "assume it's magic and extrapolate" as the only viable world view. Yeah, and, to be fair to people in the past, the assumption that similar things are connected often works well in practice. If you already know what a tiger is and you see a lion for the first time, your assumption that "things with large teeth are dangerous" will save your life. You are not starting to write a paper about the taxonomy of mammals in that situation :)

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.
8draco8 7y ago
People have obvious tendency for apophenia, seeing patterns and cause of action, even when there is no scientific connection between two, I call it intuition. Many argue it's part of evolution. If our ancestor interpreted noise in jungle as a danger he was more likely to survive. This behavior evolved and thanks to it we are able to discover many things unfortunately it also leads us to false conclusions like thinking that red berries are good for blood and psychics exists.

LeifCarrotson 7y ago

There's a difference between assuming that similar properties are connected because they appear similar on the surface, and rationally connecting similar properties because they are caused by the same physics. Modern thinkers will ask "Why/how does the moon influence the ocean", and expect that "how" to apply to other things, not the "what". Modern science has convenient answers like "F = G x m1 x m2 / r^2", you apply that and expect the moon to exert 2.7 x 10^-3 Newtons of force on a person, not to generically lift and lower something about their mental or medical state. The critical question to me, though, is what a person does when presented with a question to which they don't have a "how" available to answer it. Presented with a piece of equipment that uses sensor technology or algorithms they don't understand, or a street performer that uses slight-of-hand tricks they can't catch, do they assume it is just 'magic' and extrapolate its effects to things that might not be achievable based on the actual mechanism behind the demonstration? For example, one might expect a voice recognition app that can detect someone saying "Hey Google" to also understand "Excuse me, Google" and natural language processing, or expect a street performer who knows what card is going to be flipped over to know other things that will happen in the future. Another might observe that "Hey Google" causes the device to respond, and either ask questions about how that works until they learn about microphones, digital signal processing, and hidden Markov models - and eventually about natural language processing, and might expect the street performer to simply have performed a card trick with a normal means of knowing what card would be turned up (looking at the card at some point in the past). I honestly don't know what you or I would do in the past. With so few effective concepts of basic physics, chemistry, or medicine, not knowing the mechanism and requiring hundreds of years of scientific observations to discover it leaves "assume it's magic and extrapolate" as the only viable world view.

tralarpa 7y ago
> it leaves "assume it's magic and extrapolate" as the only viable world view. Yeah, and, to be fair to people in the past, the assumption that similar things are connected often works well in practice. If you already know what a tiger is and you see a lion for the first time, your assumption that "things with large teeth are dangerous" will save your life. You are not starting to write a paper about the taxonomy of mammals in that situation :)