10 ms·

A philosopher who believes in living things

72 points by lermontov 4y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Science is based on chasing the gods out of natures. We talk about cold and warm fronts and circulatory patterns instead of Thor being angry. Ascribing agency to inanimate things is a return to the pre-scientific past and an abandonment of science. I rather happen to like my antibiotics and weather prediction more than sacrifices to the gods.
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  I figure this would be the kind of response to this article here. please I highly recommend Facing Gaia by Bruno Latour, mentioned in the article. he's not by any stretch anti-science. it's about recognizing that's things as such have agency, even if they are "inanimate" and when we treat them that way we are actually better prepared to deal with the impact they impose. in fact, his probably most famous work, We Have Never Been Modern specifically addresses the concern you raise, with regard to exactly what science is supposed to be. but you have to read trying to understand that science ignores philosophy at its own peril.
  - ergonaught 4y ago
    Unless and until someone can identify how chemical reactions possess any degree of agency regarding their reaction, people making such assertions are divorced from fact, reality, and science. They are expressing wholly unsupported beliefs. That's fine, but beliefs aren't knowledge, and they aren't science, and they have nothing at all going for them anymore except that they make people feel warm fuzzies. Those aren't science either. Philosophers have a relevance problem, but as long as you can slap "quantum" on any jumble of nonsense and have a million people agree with it, they'll at least have an audience.
    - LesZedCB 4y ago
      unless you can demonstrate we humans are more than chemical reactions and physics, can can it be any other way than highly complex, emergent systems based in the laws of physics and chemistry are capable of exhibiting what we both call "human agency?" systems theory is the crux here. and Latour's Actor Network Model is basically just systems theory. if you refrain from reducing the scope of your systems to a single chemical reaction but looks at the complex interplay withing systems, you start to see what I'm actually talking about.
    - Errancer 4y ago
      But Latour is precisely doing what you demand in the first paragraph. The fact that he is claimed to be anti-scientific is extremely ironic. His counter-intuitive conclusions come from the attempt of defending science because the traditional accounts failed. You use "fact", "reality", "science", "beliefs", "knowledge" without any degree of irony but do you know how hard it is to defend them on the philosophical grounds? Most people are naive positivists and even positivists from Vienna circle quickly gave up on such positions because they were so hard to maintain. Latour was not a stupid opportunist and you can find this in his biography. If you think he was wrong then first make sure you understand what he was even trying to argue for. Without this understanding how can you square your claims about knowledge and your actions? Do you believe that your opinions have no metaphysical assumptions whatsoever? Or do you think that your opinions are true so you can a priori deny any contrary opinions as false?
      - idontpost 4y ago
        [dead]
    - undershirt 4y ago
      > identify how chemical reactions possess any degree of agency regarding their reaction They’re not, but some scientific terms might help demystify the actual point being made— 1. Emergence means that higher levels of matter can have behaviors that are not determinable from its constituents (e.g. chemistry). 2. In cybernetics, Downward Causation means that the constituents’ behaviors can actually be influenced by behaviors at higher levels. I’m not a physicist so I’m not sure how much of the “quantum” weirdness can be isolated to its domain, but complex systems appear to be mysterious across the entire hierarchy. > They are expressing wholly unsupported beliefs... beliefs aren’t knowledge and they aren’t science Science is an instrument for verifying beliefs about very specific things though. My favorite definition of science is that it is a system for drawing out the patterns (regularities) of nature that are the same across space and time. It can only focus on “common denominators” of reality (not the whole of it) in order to reduce it to the parts which can be predicted (material prophecy). But it’s not an instrument that you can use to verify beliefs about segments of reality that it’s designed to ignore. Like it can’t deal with its own foundational question (i.e. “can we truly deduce the unseen by only what is seen?”), and surely Truth is larger than we can know by any single tool for ascertaining it.
  - UncleOxidant 4y ago
    > it's about recognizing that's things as such have agency, even if they are "inanimate" From the article: "A piece of shiny plastic on the street pulls your eye toward it, turning your body in a different direction—which might make you trip over your own foot and then smash your head on the concrete, in a series of events that’s the very last thing you planned or intended. Who has “acted” in such a scenario? You have, of course. Human beings have agency. But, in her telling, the piece of plastic acted, too. It made something happen to you." No, your reaction to seeing the shiny plastic on the ground is what happened to you. Your brain recognized it as something potentially interesting and/or valuable. The shiny piece of plastic did not somehow will you to pick it up, it cannot and does not have agency. (I can't believe we're having this conversation on HN. WTF is going on in the culture that makes animism suddenly attractive?) EDIT: Thought experiement: If you were blind or it was night time and you were walking by the shiny plastic you would not even notice it to pick it up.
    - mxkopy 4y ago
      If that piece of plastic was made with the intent of being eye-catching than I think it's fair to say that "it's trying to catch the eye", even as just a shortcut. Your thought experiment doesn't hold; if someone were trying to dress attractively and a blind person doesn't see them, does that mean they're not trying?
      - UncleOxidant 4y ago
        > If that piece of plastic was made with the intent of being eye-catching than I think it's fair to say that "it's trying to catch the eye" Ok, but the intent does not reside in the plastic, the intent was in the person who designed the piece of plastic to catch the eye. > Your thought experiment doesn't hold; if someone were trying to dress attractively and a blind person doesn't see them, does that mean they're not trying? The article seems to imply that these inanimate objects exert some kind of influence on us (and possibly on other inanimate objects?). If they possess this kind of woo-woo influence why does it matter if we can see them? The philosopher in the article seems to be saying that they can draw her form a distance without her even seeing them.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  >Ascribing agency to inanimate things is a return to the pre-scientific past and an abandonment of science. This is just so wrong. That these things are inanimate is not a scientific view it is an interpretation, period. People are allowed to interpret the world in other ways and most of the greatest scientific minds did not have this atheistic view. If you look you’ll find this is a relatively modern condescension. >I rather happen to like my antibiotics and weather prediction more than sacrifices to the gods. This is hyperbole at best. Irrelevant to the discussion.
- mxkopy 4y ago
  > Science is based on chasing the gods out of natures. This is very poetic, but it's incorrect. The divide between religion and science is largely historical, not inherent. Latour was mentioned and is a great read, and I'd also recommend Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which characterizes knowledge and how we refine it. It doesn't really talk about gods all that much.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Indeed. Science "chasing the gods out" is merely a consequence of science not finding any evidence for the existence of god(s) so far. If we ever find evidence for the existence of god(s), science will happily accept it like any other provable theory. Science couldn't care less about religion one way or another.
- thweoiu42o3i43 4y ago
  [flagged]
causality0 4y ago
The modernity of the nonsense seems to matter more to the HN front page these days more than the degree to which something is nonsense. According to Bennett, hoarders are highly attuned to these truths, which many of us ignore. And here is where she completely loses the plot. Up until that point it's kind of a bass-ackward way of acknowledging that human beings are not special and not fundamentally different from the world around us. Her "everything is magic" conclusion is 180 degrees off correct, which is that nothing is magic, including human agency.
- apsurd 4y ago
  What's the meaningful difference though of your conclusion? "Everything is magic" vs "nothing is magic". Why do you care more to side with "nothing". Just curious, personally my vote is on "everything". Is it just a preference, or is there more?
  - causality0 4y ago
    Because magic isn't real and hoarders are people whose mental illness compels them to live in filth. We've finally grown out of applying the "noble savage" myth to aboriginal peoples only to turn around and apply it to anyone with a damaged mind. The five hundred boxes of dried-out ink pens are not reaching out to you through the luminiferous aether, you just need therapy.
- Avshalom 4y ago
  I dunno Bennett's work at all so I can't speak one way or the other but that quote is not a quote from Bennett, it doesn't even appear to be a paraphrase. The article as a whole feels more like a puff profile of Bennett rather than an real attempt at a popular audience explanation of her academic work.
- ilkke 4y ago
  How come anything exists at all? I'd say everything is magic is a much better description of reality than nothing is magic.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
https://archive.is/wbnKq https://archive.is/wbnKq
shaunxcode 4y ago
not even a mention of animism?
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  The word isn't used, but isn't that exactly what's being described?
  - krapp 4y ago
    Yes, it's weird. The article even claims the premise begins with French philosopher Bruno Latour, but this just seems like a modern interpretation of the oldest metaphysical framework in human history.
    - UncleOxidant 4y ago
      It always seems cooler when a French philosopher comes up with it.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  I think these two things are quite distinct. To assert that objects have a kind of fundamental agency because of the forces they can exert on our world, to put it simply, is totally distinct from speculating/having faith that there is a turnip spirit in the turnip. What she is talking about is more about questions of philosophical priority than metaphysical/spiritual assertions.
  - krapp 4y ago
    It's not entirely distinct. One could just as well describe the "spirit in the turnip" as the sum of the potential forces it can exert on the world, the effect of the cultural image of turnips, even its "essential turnipness" in a Platonic sense. We have no problem referring to the "personality" of an old house, the "menace" of a gun or gendering cars and ships as female because they "embody" certain gender archetypes. The philosophy and metaphysics are both approaching the same essential concept from different directions, with different assumptions.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
"If the Mississippi possesses anything at all, it is agency–such a powerful agency that it imposes itself on the agency of both regular people and the Army Corps of Engineers.” No, the Mississippi is a river: A collection of water acted upon by gravity and weather. It does not have agency - the Mississippi cannot decide to flood a town or breach a levy.
- animal_spirits 4y ago
  I don't see how that is any different than a human being. We are all just a collection of particles being acted upon by certain fundamental laws of the universe. Why do you think you're so different?
  - UncleOxidant 4y ago
    Computation and information.
    - animal_spirits 4y ago
      Can you elaborate?
      - stronglikedan 4y ago
        A river can't choose which side of the fork to take, like we can.
        katmannthree 4y ago
        Ahh, the ever-elusive ``free will.'' Do you happen to have a rigorous definition of it you'd like to bring up for discussion?
        didntreadarticl 4y ago
        Doesnt have to be free will, just has to be information processing. A robot could also choose which side of a fork to take, based on programming or machine learning etc.
avgcorrection 4y ago
HN: Ascribing agency to things is silly. It’s all just cause and effect. Also HN: This program is my new search engine and chat buddy. Shouldn’t we face the possibility that it might have a sort of sentience?
- throwanem 4y ago
  As far as I know, Jane Bennett and I have never met. But we've gotten lost in some of the same places, and found some of the same things there. People who haven't don't know what they're missing, and I mean that in the literal sense; I don't expect anyone so impoverished to understand all of what she's saying, or of what I'm saying when I talk about the marks this town has made on me in the near quarter century and counting it's been my home - some of them in, and by, Druid Hill Park itself. Such thinking is largely in bad odor among the sorts of people who tend to congregate here. Who cares? Who should? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.
- ketanmaheshwari 4y ago
  HN is not a single person. It is a diverse group of people.
skadamou 4y ago
I suppose every way of understanding (even a scientific law) is just a model for how things might work. Some of these models (Newton's laws of motion) are more useful than others but are obviously still fallible (Relativity being a correction to Newton's laws). I'm not sure how useful of a model animism is but maybe it's reasonable to keep it in mind for some edge cases? Even if it is just emotionally satisfying, I guess that's kind of an edge case.
hprotagonist 4y ago
In the heady days of post-Vatican II theological free for all, panentheism was humorously known as “beer-can theology”. As in, “well, even that beer can has a little bit of a soul “. As a motivator for care and stewardship of our world, you could do worse!
eternalban 4y ago
I'm going to get so much shit for this, but I looked up this philosopher and considering her philosophy was thinking 2000 years ago she would have been the tribe's shaman, respected and feared but ostracized and dressed for the part. Two thousands years later, she is a professor of "philosophy" at John Hopkins University. and p.s. before you get the urge to bang on that arrow consider this: under this philosophy we could easily support annual virgin sacrifices as a necessity to appease some unseen 'agency' in the natural world.
- ocimbote 4y ago
  Some aspect of philosophy considers what place and impact we, humans, have in the world. In that regard, from the second half of the century onwards (earlier as well, but less specifically), there's been a resurgence of these questions with the emergence of globalization and neoliberalism, and theor consequences on global systems. I noticed that anthropology seemed more and more cited as a source of diverse perspectives. See Descola specifically. As an example, I heard a recent quote from an environmental activist that I found striking: "We are jot defending the Nature. We are the Nature defending itself". I'm not advocating for or against the quote, but it deserves a thorough analysis, in 202x, and cannot be dismissed easily.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    Ecological responsibility, recognizing that humanity is a part of nature, etc. are not in anyway connected to assigning 'agency' to natural pheneomena. However there is a plain (with historic empirical data /g) showing that there is a direct connection between assigning agency to natural phenomena and someone in a robe (priest or priestess) saying "The river god is upset. We must sacrifice a virgin to appease the river god".
    - ocimbote 4y ago
      Maybe we agree in meaning but we don't understand each other in terms. Or not. But It's hard to tell as is. That will have to remain an open question for now, for I won't elaborate right now on that non-obvious question.
mbil 4y ago
this piece reminded me of the way i sometimes regarded the world, maybe specifically the natrual world, as a child; that is, i felt that every piece of it was just bursting with meaning for its uniqueness. e.g. a tiny sun-speckled piece of ground under a pine, covered in needles and maybe some bugs, was sacred merely for being singular in its configuration in space and time. and the world felt so, so huge then because every bit if of it was overflowing with information. it would be impossible even in a lifetime to make it from here to the edge of town and know everything about all of it. within the last couple years i've been occassionally trying to cultivate that sense again, but with only blips of success.
- dbtc 4y ago
  This sounds similar to what both psychedelic trippers and meditation practicers often describe.
- kerpotgh 4y ago
  [dead]
- ilkke 4y ago
  Wonderfully formulated! I have been making a similar effort and found that gradually these glimpses became easier to get into and I've even had some spontaneous ones. I do wonder how much this can be expanded alongside an urban 9 to 5 life.
  - fredrikholm 4y ago
    This is a central practice of Buddhism; consistently taking the time to deliberately stop and observe things gradually teaches you to appreciate things for what they are and helps to ween you off of your preconceived notions of what you think things are. For example, after my first few months of practice I increasingly got awe struck by everyday things. Even though the bricks of the church are identical in that they were made from the same mold, they are all unique after centuries of erosion and sun exposure. This might be intellectually obvious, but is a whole other thing to realize through subjective experience (as if looking at a masterpiece painting up close).
voldacar 4y ago
This is simply magical thinking in the guise of academic philosophy. Where is this generation's Carnap?
- vlz 4y ago
  I concur on the magical thinking. Calls for a new Carnap are a bit excessive though. The position displayed in the article is fringe. It does not in any way represent the academic mainstream.
  - lmpdev 4y ago
    I disagree. From reading the article, neither the author nor Bennett is arguing that these objects are actually the mechanism or cause to which these events occur. To rephrase their underlying worldview, Bennett seems to find intellectual and epistemic merit - or at least interest - in exploring the notion that some objects have properties which make them more or less likely to initiate or augment human, natural or other actions, on or around those objects. From my reading of the article, this isn't someone trying to explain causal relationships but rather someone highlighting the benefits of different modalities of thought, as they relate to the intellectual and cognitive experience of the reader.
- yesenadam 4y ago
  I think Peter Singer challenged a lot of deluded, 'magical' thinking in the 1970s when he wrote in Animal Liberation about realizing that animals are not mere tools for human use, to be exploited in any and every possible way, but fellow beings. We know this about dogs and cats, but ignore it in the case of cows, sheep, ocean life, and, for example, the billions of living baby chickens we grind in "macerators" every year.[0] He is a philosopher who believes in living things. This article is just embarrassing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
- sparsely 4y ago
  I don't think a logical positivist would have much a problem with the content (although perhaps they wouldn't like the language used). How would you go about verifying that the Mississippi does not have "agency" but a slow worm does? They'd perhaps dismiss it as a meaningless question in the context of scientific enquiry, but fine to discuss in another context (in another "language" as they might put it).
Barrin92 4y ago
It's honestly surprising to me how many commenters accuse the author of magical thinking. The genuinely magical thinking is in the dualism necessary to reject the argument, summarized well by the Latour quote in the article: “When we claim that there is, on one side, a natural world and, on the other, a human world, we are simply proposing to say, after the fact, that an arbitrary portion of the actors will be stripped of all action and that another portion, equally arbitrary, will be endowed with souls,” The interesting observation in the discussion is just how quickly people turn apprehensive when any notion of individual human supremacy is challenged, even when it rests on entirely arbitrary distinctions. Rather than just focussing on the natural world it seems even more obvious when it comes to institutions. Nation states, corporations, churches, all of them vastly outlive their individual members the same way a human outlives its individual cells. And just like we attribute agency to human beings rather than solely their cells, it makes perfect sense to think of non-human entities in the same way. A paragraph that stuck with me was Yuval Noah Harari's description of agriculture: "“Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. . . . The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”
- kupopuffs 4y ago
  Good point. but it's way easier to "impart your will" onto humans IMO. probably easier to understand sometimes
- sparsely 4y ago
  Indeed. How would you go about scientifically assigning something like "agency" or its lack to any particular entity? In ordinary language we are perfectly happy to use agency-adjacent words when talking about non-animal entities "I'm hiding from the rain", "That marble on the floor isn't going to get away from me" etc. Obviously in many cases we would also deny them agency, but I think it's hard to be too dogmatic about this unless you're playing some specific language game.

72 points by lermontov 4y ago

Science is based on chasing the gods out of natures. We talk about cold and warm fronts and circulatory patterns instead of Thor being angry. Ascribing agency to inanimate things is a return to the pre-scientific past and an abandonment of science. I rather happen to like my antibiotics and weather prediction more than sacrifices to the gods.

LesZedCB 4y ago
I figure this would be the kind of response to this article here. please I highly recommend Facing Gaia by Bruno Latour, mentioned in the article. he's not by any stretch anti-science. it's about recognizing that's things as such have agency, even if they are "inanimate" and when we treat them that way we are actually better prepared to deal with the impact they impose. in fact, his probably most famous work, We Have Never Been Modern specifically addresses the concern you raise, with regard to exactly what science is supposed to be. but you have to read trying to understand that science ignores philosophy at its own peril.
- ergonaught 4y ago
  Unless and until someone can identify how chemical reactions possess any degree of agency regarding their reaction, people making such assertions are divorced from fact, reality, and science. They are expressing wholly unsupported beliefs. That's fine, but beliefs aren't knowledge, and they aren't science, and they have nothing at all going for them anymore except that they make people feel warm fuzzies. Those aren't science either. Philosophers have a relevance problem, but as long as you can slap "quantum" on any jumble of nonsense and have a million people agree with it, they'll at least have an audience.
  - LesZedCB 4y ago
    unless you can demonstrate we humans are more than chemical reactions and physics, can can it be any other way than highly complex, emergent systems based in the laws of physics and chemistry are capable of exhibiting what we both call "human agency?" systems theory is the crux here. and Latour's Actor Network Model is basically just systems theory. if you refrain from reducing the scope of your systems to a single chemical reaction but looks at the complex interplay withing systems, you start to see what I'm actually talking about.
  - Errancer 4y ago
    But Latour is precisely doing what you demand in the first paragraph. The fact that he is claimed to be anti-scientific is extremely ironic. His counter-intuitive conclusions come from the attempt of defending science because the traditional accounts failed. You use "fact", "reality", "science", "beliefs", "knowledge" without any degree of irony but do you know how hard it is to defend them on the philosophical grounds? Most people are naive positivists and even positivists from Vienna circle quickly gave up on such positions because they were so hard to maintain. Latour was not a stupid opportunist and you can find this in his biography. If you think he was wrong then first make sure you understand what he was even trying to argue for. Without this understanding how can you square your claims about knowledge and your actions? Do you believe that your opinions have no metaphysical assumptions whatsoever? Or do you think that your opinions are true so you can a priori deny any contrary opinions as false?
    - idontpost 4y ago
      [dead]
  - undershirt 4y ago
    > identify how chemical reactions possess any degree of agency regarding their reaction They’re not, but some scientific terms might help demystify the actual point being made— 1. Emergence means that higher levels of matter can have behaviors that are not determinable from its constituents (e.g. chemistry). 2. In cybernetics, Downward Causation means that the constituents’ behaviors can actually be influenced by behaviors at higher levels. I’m not a physicist so I’m not sure how much of the “quantum” weirdness can be isolated to its domain, but complex systems appear to be mysterious across the entire hierarchy. > They are expressing wholly unsupported beliefs... beliefs aren’t knowledge and they aren’t science Science is an instrument for verifying beliefs about very specific things though. My favorite definition of science is that it is a system for drawing out the patterns (regularities) of nature that are the same across space and time. It can only focus on “common denominators” of reality (not the whole of it) in order to reduce it to the parts which can be predicted (material prophecy). But it’s not an instrument that you can use to verify beliefs about segments of reality that it’s designed to ignore. Like it can’t deal with its own foundational question (i.e. “can we truly deduce the unseen by only what is seen?”), and surely Truth is larger than we can know by any single tool for ascertaining it.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  > it's about recognizing that's things as such have agency, even if they are "inanimate" From the article: "A piece of shiny plastic on the street pulls your eye toward it, turning your body in a different direction—which might make you trip over your own foot and then smash your head on the concrete, in a series of events that’s the very last thing you planned or intended. Who has “acted” in such a scenario? You have, of course. Human beings have agency. But, in her telling, the piece of plastic acted, too. It made something happen to you." No, your reaction to seeing the shiny plastic on the ground is what happened to you. Your brain recognized it as something potentially interesting and/or valuable. The shiny piece of plastic did not somehow will you to pick it up, it cannot and does not have agency. (I can't believe we're having this conversation on HN. WTF is going on in the culture that makes animism suddenly attractive?) EDIT: Thought experiement: If you were blind or it was night time and you were walking by the shiny plastic you would not even notice it to pick it up.
  - mxkopy 4y ago
    If that piece of plastic was made with the intent of being eye-catching than I think it's fair to say that "it's trying to catch the eye", even as just a shortcut. Your thought experiment doesn't hold; if someone were trying to dress attractively and a blind person doesn't see them, does that mean they're not trying?
    - UncleOxidant 4y ago
      > If that piece of plastic was made with the intent of being eye-catching than I think it's fair to say that "it's trying to catch the eye" Ok, but the intent does not reside in the plastic, the intent was in the person who designed the piece of plastic to catch the eye. > Your thought experiment doesn't hold; if someone were trying to dress attractively and a blind person doesn't see them, does that mean they're not trying? The article seems to imply that these inanimate objects exert some kind of influence on us (and possibly on other inanimate objects?). If they possess this kind of woo-woo influence why does it matter if we can see them? The philosopher in the article seems to be saying that they can draw her form a distance without her even seeing them.
edgyquant 4y ago
>Ascribing agency to inanimate things is a return to the pre-scientific past and an abandonment of science. This is just so wrong. That these things are inanimate is not a scientific view it is an interpretation, period. People are allowed to interpret the world in other ways and most of the greatest scientific minds did not have this atheistic view. If you look you’ll find this is a relatively modern condescension. >I rather happen to like my antibiotics and weather prediction more than sacrifices to the gods. This is hyperbole at best. Irrelevant to the discussion.
mxkopy 4y ago
> Science is based on chasing the gods out of natures. This is very poetic, but it's incorrect. The divide between religion and science is largely historical, not inherent. Latour was mentioned and is a great read, and I'd also recommend Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which characterizes knowledge and how we refine it. It doesn't really talk about gods all that much.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Indeed. Science "chasing the gods out" is merely a consequence of science not finding any evidence for the existence of god(s) so far. If we ever find evidence for the existence of god(s), science will happily accept it like any other provable theory. Science couldn't care less about religion one way or another.
thweoiu42o3i43 4y ago
[flagged]

causality0 4y ago

The modernity of the nonsense seems to matter more to the HN front page these days more than the degree to which something is nonsense. According to Bennett, hoarders are highly attuned to these truths, which many of us ignore. And here is where she completely loses the plot. Up until that point it's kind of a bass-ackward way of acknowledging that human beings are not special and not fundamentally different from the world around us. Her "everything is magic" conclusion is 180 degrees off correct, which is that nothing is magic, including human agency.

apsurd 4y ago
What's the meaningful difference though of your conclusion? "Everything is magic" vs "nothing is magic". Why do you care more to side with "nothing". Just curious, personally my vote is on "everything". Is it just a preference, or is there more?
- causality0 4y ago
  Because magic isn't real and hoarders are people whose mental illness compels them to live in filth. We've finally grown out of applying the "noble savage" myth to aboriginal peoples only to turn around and apply it to anyone with a damaged mind. The five hundred boxes of dried-out ink pens are not reaching out to you through the luminiferous aether, you just need therapy.
Avshalom 4y ago
I dunno Bennett's work at all so I can't speak one way or the other but that quote is not a quote from Bennett, it doesn't even appear to be a paraphrase. The article as a whole feels more like a puff profile of Bennett rather than an real attempt at a popular audience explanation of her academic work.
ilkke 4y ago
How come anything exists at all? I'd say everything is magic is a much better description of reality than nothing is magic.

UncleOxidant 4y ago

https://archive.is/wbnKq https://archive.is/wbnKq

shaunxcode 4y ago

not even a mention of animism?

UncleOxidant 4y ago
The word isn't used, but isn't that exactly what's being described?
- krapp 4y ago
  Yes, it's weird. The article even claims the premise begins with French philosopher Bruno Latour, but this just seems like a modern interpretation of the oldest metaphysical framework in human history.
  - UncleOxidant 4y ago
    It always seems cooler when a French philosopher comes up with it.
beepbooptheory 4y ago
I think these two things are quite distinct. To assert that objects have a kind of fundamental agency because of the forces they can exert on our world, to put it simply, is totally distinct from speculating/having faith that there is a turnip spirit in the turnip. What she is talking about is more about questions of philosophical priority than metaphysical/spiritual assertions.
- krapp 4y ago
  It's not entirely distinct. One could just as well describe the "spirit in the turnip" as the sum of the potential forces it can exert on the world, the effect of the cultural image of turnips, even its "essential turnipness" in a Platonic sense. We have no problem referring to the "personality" of an old house, the "menace" of a gun or gendering cars and ships as female because they "embody" certain gender archetypes. The philosophy and metaphysics are both approaching the same essential concept from different directions, with different assumptions.

UncleOxidant 4y ago

"If the Mississippi possesses anything at all, it is agency–such a powerful agency that it imposes itself on the agency of both regular people and the Army Corps of Engineers.” No, the Mississippi is a river: A collection of water acted upon by gravity and weather. It does not have agency - the Mississippi cannot decide to flood a town or breach a levy.

animal_spirits 4y ago
I don't see how that is any different than a human being. We are all just a collection of particles being acted upon by certain fundamental laws of the universe. Why do you think you're so different?
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  Computation and information.
  - animal_spirits 4y ago
    Can you elaborate?
    - stronglikedan 4y ago
      A river can't choose which side of the fork to take, like we can.
      - katmannthree 4y ago
        Ahh, the ever-elusive ``free will.'' Do you happen to have a rigorous definition of it you'd like to bring up for discussion?
        didntreadarticl 4y ago
        Doesnt have to be free will, just has to be information processing. A robot could also choose which side of a fork to take, based on programming or machine learning etc.

avgcorrection 4y ago

HN: Ascribing agency to things is silly. It’s all just cause and effect. Also HN: This program is my new search engine and chat buddy. Shouldn’t we face the possibility that it might have a sort of sentience?

throwanem 4y ago
As far as I know, Jane Bennett and I have never met. But we've gotten lost in some of the same places, and found some of the same things there. People who haven't don't know what they're missing, and I mean that in the literal sense; I don't expect anyone so impoverished to understand all of what she's saying, or of what I'm saying when I talk about the marks this town has made on me in the near quarter century and counting it's been my home - some of them in, and by, Druid Hill Park itself. Such thinking is largely in bad odor among the sorts of people who tend to congregate here. Who cares? Who should? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.
ketanmaheshwari 4y ago
HN is not a single person. It is a diverse group of people.

skadamou 4y ago

I suppose every way of understanding (even a scientific law) is just a model for how things might work. Some of these models (Newton's laws of motion) are more useful than others but are obviously still fallible (Relativity being a correction to Newton's laws). I'm not sure how useful of a model animism is but maybe it's reasonable to keep it in mind for some edge cases? Even if it is just emotionally satisfying, I guess that's kind of an edge case.

hprotagonist 4y ago

In the heady days of post-Vatican II theological free for all, panentheism was humorously known as “beer-can theology”. As in, “well, even that beer can has a little bit of a soul “. As a motivator for care and stewardship of our world, you could do worse!

eternalban 4y ago

I'm going to get so much shit for this, but I looked up this philosopher and considering her philosophy was thinking 2000 years ago she would have been the tribe's shaman, respected and feared but ostracized and dressed for the part. Two thousands years later, she is a professor of "philosophy" at John Hopkins University. and p.s. before you get the urge to bang on that arrow consider this: under this philosophy we could easily support annual virgin sacrifices as a necessity to appease some unseen 'agency' in the natural world.

ocimbote 4y ago
Some aspect of philosophy considers what place and impact we, humans, have in the world. In that regard, from the second half of the century onwards (earlier as well, but less specifically), there's been a resurgence of these questions with the emergence of globalization and neoliberalism, and theor consequences on global systems. I noticed that anthropology seemed more and more cited as a source of diverse perspectives. See Descola specifically. As an example, I heard a recent quote from an environmental activist that I found striking: "We are jot defending the Nature. We are the Nature defending itself". I'm not advocating for or against the quote, but it deserves a thorough analysis, in 202x, and cannot be dismissed easily.
- eternalban 4y ago
  Ecological responsibility, recognizing that humanity is a part of nature, etc. are not in anyway connected to assigning 'agency' to natural pheneomena. However there is a plain (with historic empirical data /g) showing that there is a direct connection between assigning agency to natural phenomena and someone in a robe (priest or priestess) saying "The river god is upset. We must sacrifice a virgin to appease the river god".
  - ocimbote 4y ago
    Maybe we agree in meaning but we don't understand each other in terms. Or not. But It's hard to tell as is. That will have to remain an open question for now, for I won't elaborate right now on that non-obvious question.

mbil 4y ago

this piece reminded me of the way i sometimes regarded the world, maybe specifically the natrual world, as a child; that is, i felt that every piece of it was just bursting with meaning for its uniqueness. e.g. a tiny sun-speckled piece of ground under a pine, covered in needles and maybe some bugs, was sacred merely for being singular in its configuration in space and time. and the world felt so, so huge then because every bit if of it was overflowing with information. it would be impossible even in a lifetime to make it from here to the edge of town and know everything about all of it. within the last couple years i've been occassionally trying to cultivate that sense again, but with only blips of success.

dbtc 4y ago
This sounds similar to what both psychedelic trippers and meditation practicers often describe.
kerpotgh 4y ago
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ilkke 4y ago
Wonderfully formulated! I have been making a similar effort and found that gradually these glimpses became easier to get into and I've even had some spontaneous ones. I do wonder how much this can be expanded alongside an urban 9 to 5 life.
- fredrikholm 4y ago
  This is a central practice of Buddhism; consistently taking the time to deliberately stop and observe things gradually teaches you to appreciate things for what they are and helps to ween you off of your preconceived notions of what you think things are. For example, after my first few months of practice I increasingly got awe struck by everyday things. Even though the bricks of the church are identical in that they were made from the same mold, they are all unique after centuries of erosion and sun exposure. This might be intellectually obvious, but is a whole other thing to realize through subjective experience (as if looking at a masterpiece painting up close).

voldacar 4y ago

This is simply magical thinking in the guise of academic philosophy. Where is this generation's Carnap?

vlz 4y ago
I concur on the magical thinking. Calls for a new Carnap are a bit excessive though. The position displayed in the article is fringe. It does not in any way represent the academic mainstream.
- lmpdev 4y ago
  I disagree. From reading the article, neither the author nor Bennett is arguing that these objects are actually the mechanism or cause to which these events occur. To rephrase their underlying worldview, Bennett seems to find intellectual and epistemic merit - or at least interest - in exploring the notion that some objects have properties which make them more or less likely to initiate or augment human, natural or other actions, on or around those objects. From my reading of the article, this isn't someone trying to explain causal relationships but rather someone highlighting the benefits of different modalities of thought, as they relate to the intellectual and cognitive experience of the reader.
yesenadam 4y ago
I think Peter Singer challenged a lot of deluded, 'magical' thinking in the 1970s when he wrote in Animal Liberation about realizing that animals are not mere tools for human use, to be exploited in any and every possible way, but fellow beings. We know this about dogs and cats, but ignore it in the case of cows, sheep, ocean life, and, for example, the billions of living baby chickens we grind in "macerators" every year.[0] He is a philosopher who believes in living things. This article is just embarrassing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
sparsely 4y ago
I don't think a logical positivist would have much a problem with the content (although perhaps they wouldn't like the language used). How would you go about verifying that the Mississippi does not have "agency" but a slow worm does? They'd perhaps dismiss it as a meaningless question in the context of scientific enquiry, but fine to discuss in another context (in another "language" as they might put it).

Barrin92 4y ago

It's honestly surprising to me how many commenters accuse the author of magical thinking. The genuinely magical thinking is in the dualism necessary to reject the argument, summarized well by the Latour quote in the article: “When we claim that there is, on one side, a natural world and, on the other, a human world, we are simply proposing to say, after the fact, that an arbitrary portion of the actors will be stripped of all action and that another portion, equally arbitrary, will be endowed with souls,” The interesting observation in the discussion is just how quickly people turn apprehensive when any notion of individual human supremacy is challenged, even when it rests on entirely arbitrary distinctions. Rather than just focussing on the natural world it seems even more obvious when it comes to institutions. Nation states, corporations, churches, all of them vastly outlive their individual members the same way a human outlives its individual cells. And just like we attribute agency to human beings rather than solely their cells, it makes perfect sense to think of non-human entities in the same way. A paragraph that stuck with me was Yuval Noah Harari's description of agriculture: "“Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching sun. . . . The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”

kupopuffs 4y ago
Good point. but it's way easier to "impart your will" onto humans IMO. probably easier to understand sometimes
sparsely 4y ago
Indeed. How would you go about scientifically assigning something like "agency" or its lack to any particular entity? In ordinary language we are perfectly happy to use agency-adjacent words when talking about non-animal entities "I'm hiding from the rain", "That marble on the floor isn't going to get away from me" etc. Obviously in many cases we would also deny them agency, but I think it's hard to be too dogmatic about this unless you're playing some specific language game.