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Moderns tend to focus on mechanics and abstractions, leading to a focus on the heart and the head/brain. We denigrate emotions and try to ignore them, but if we

Moderns tend to focus on mechanics and abstractions, leading to a focus on the heart and the head/brain. We denigrate emotions and try to ignore them, but if we attend to them we notice that they primarily arise, or are felt, in the gut. Ancients, without all the distractions and knowledge we have now, might have been much more attuned to their emotions. They’d likely need to be in order to survive by following intuitions and responding to low-level feelings of fear. This alone would be reason enough for hepatocentrism. That reasoning would only be bolstered by knowledge of the liver’s regenerative abilities, its high-desirability to meat-eating predators, its size and weight, its mysterious structural homogeneity (at a macroscopic level), and its visible response (upon inspection) to a life of health or sickness and abuse.

bluesky19 3y ago
Yeah. "fundamental discoveries irrefutably demonstrated the central role of the heart in human physiology" seems like an awfully narrow perspective.
jdietrich 3y ago
>if we attend to them we notice that they primarily arise, or are felt, in the gut Some emotions are experienced in the gut, for reasons we now understand quite well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut%E2%80%93brain_axis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut%E2%80%93brain_axis
- simmerup 3y ago
  When I think of this I wonder how absolutely incredible an octopuses experience of life must be. We have neurons in our guts that act as a second brain, and that leads to all sorts of funny feelings and conflicts; the octopus has neurons embedded through all its limbs. Truly otherworldly
swatcoder 3y ago
You're right that we have a different web of concepts and emphasize different abstractions than other cultures did, but this bit paints a really misleading picture of who we're talking about and how sophisticated their ideas were: > Ancients, without all the distractions and knowledge we have now, might have been much more attuned to their emotions. They’d likely need to be in order to survive by following intuitions and responding to low-level feelings of fear. There's very little difference in the amount of "knowledge" between any two cultures, or really even between any two people. One culture's collective knowledge may be more reliable or more demonstrated or more productive (by some measure), but everybody's always walking around with a head 100% full of knowledge. It's a mistake to think that Mesopotamians, Babylonians, and Greeks were "surviving by intuition" under "some low-level feeling of fear". Like us, they were building huge cities with complex trade networks and economies, with obscene bureaucratic processes and people so specialized in craft and work that their whole lives were committed to studying or teaching or keeping account balances in order. They had rich, interwoven systems of knowledge, and the ancient Greeks in particular fancied mechanics and abstractions much the way we do -- a similarity that exists largely because we openly modeled much of modernity on their culture. When hepatocentrism prevailed among the Greeks, it wasn't in the context of some scared, emotionally volatile people making do in caves beset by tigers and lions or something. It was in the context of highly educated urbanized people drawing sensible conclusions based on what their culture happened to emphasize in its own web of thoroughly mechanical and abstract concepts. Some of your suggestions about what facts they were integrating are probably right and many of them are fun to speculate about, but whatever they were, they were being fit into a much more elaborate and abstract schema than you're giving credit to. These were not inbred bumpkins or wild primates making cute guesses and enshrining them in mysterious lore. They were scientists and physicians living and studying in ways not all that differently than our own, and their discoveries were being encoded into myth by the esteemed, committed poets among their aristocracy in much the same way that screenwriters and novelists work modern knowledge into their stories.
- chimpanzee 3y ago
  Edit/tldr: my original comment concerned the foundation of or the seed of the historic belief of hepatocentrism rather than the reasoning or knowledge held by those whose writings were influenced by or regarding hepatocentrism once it was already established. ——— I don’t particularly disagree with your response, but I think you’ve really read into what I was saying and so misrepresent my points. That’s probably my fault since I wrote it quickly. To hopefully help clarify (but again quickly, since I’m only here to procrastinate and my low-level feelings of fear are growing unpleasant.): In regard to their distractions and knowledge, I’m simply pointing out that they did not have today’s specific knowledge of human physiology and functioning. This would allow them to speculate further in other directions beyond the interests and areas of focus we have today that have been deemed logical and correct. And they did not have as many ready sources of information to distract them or to assure them that there was nothing more to learn. Sure, perhaps they were blind to this as we are, and so the relative effect would be much the same. But, there was still a quantitative difference in information and sources. And there were certainly branches of the knowledge or paths of specualtion that had not yet been cut off as some are today. By “ancients”, I include prehistoric man, whose feeling and thoughts would serve as the foundation for historical man’s own ideas and writings. I don’t mean to suggest that they were dumb or anything like that; only that they, without written word, would be more sense-oriented rather than concept-oriented. And in regard to “low-level feelings of fear”, I do not mean this to be inferior to overt conscious thought and reasoning. In fact, I think we fail all too often to attend to these feelings today and it harms us. These low-level feelings, fear or otherwise, still guide us today. We just don’t notice it as much and prefer to believe we move forward with logical plans rather than intuitive drives.

bluesky19 3y ago

Yeah. "fundamental discoveries irrefutably demonstrated the central role of the heart in human physiology" seems like an awfully narrow perspective.

jdietrich 3y ago

>if we attend to them we notice that they primarily arise, or are felt, in the gut Some emotions are experienced in the gut, for reasons we now understand quite well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut%E2%80%93brain_axis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut%E2%80%93brain_axis

simmerup 3y ago
When I think of this I wonder how absolutely incredible an octopuses experience of life must be. We have neurons in our guts that act as a second brain, and that leads to all sorts of funny feelings and conflicts; the octopus has neurons embedded through all its limbs. Truly otherworldly

swatcoder 3y ago

You're right that we have a different web of concepts and emphasize different abstractions than other cultures did, but this bit paints a really misleading picture of who we're talking about and how sophisticated their ideas were: > Ancients, without all the distractions and knowledge we have now, might have been much more attuned to their emotions. They’d likely need to be in order to survive by following intuitions and responding to low-level feelings of fear. There's very little difference in the amount of "knowledge" between any two cultures, or really even between any two people. One culture's collective knowledge may be more reliable or more demonstrated or more productive (by some measure), but everybody's always walking around with a head 100% full of knowledge. It's a mistake to think that Mesopotamians, Babylonians, and Greeks were "surviving by intuition" under "some low-level feeling of fear". Like us, they were building huge cities with complex trade networks and economies, with obscene bureaucratic processes and people so specialized in craft and work that their whole lives were committed to studying or teaching or keeping account balances in order. They had rich, interwoven systems of knowledge, and the ancient Greeks in particular fancied mechanics and abstractions much the way we do -- a similarity that exists largely because we openly modeled much of modernity on their culture. When hepatocentrism prevailed among the Greeks, it wasn't in the context of some scared, emotionally volatile people making do in caves beset by tigers and lions or something. It was in the context of highly educated urbanized people drawing sensible conclusions based on what their culture happened to emphasize in its own web of thoroughly mechanical and abstract concepts. Some of your suggestions about what facts they were integrating are probably right and many of them are fun to speculate about, but whatever they were, they were being fit into a much more elaborate and abstract schema than you're giving credit to. These were not inbred bumpkins or wild primates making cute guesses and enshrining them in mysterious lore. They were scientists and physicians living and studying in ways not all that differently than our own, and their discoveries were being encoded into myth by the esteemed, committed poets among their aristocracy in much the same way that screenwriters and novelists work modern knowledge into their stories.

chimpanzee 3y ago
Edit/tldr: my original comment concerned the foundation of or the seed of the historic belief of hepatocentrism rather than the reasoning or knowledge held by those whose writings were influenced by or regarding hepatocentrism once it was already established. ——— I don’t particularly disagree with your response, but I think you’ve really read into what I was saying and so misrepresent my points. That’s probably my fault since I wrote it quickly. To hopefully help clarify (but again quickly, since I’m only here to procrastinate and my low-level feelings of fear are growing unpleasant.): In regard to their distractions and knowledge, I’m simply pointing out that they did not have today’s specific knowledge of human physiology and functioning. This would allow them to speculate further in other directions beyond the interests and areas of focus we have today that have been deemed logical and correct. And they did not have as many ready sources of information to distract them or to assure them that there was nothing more to learn. Sure, perhaps they were blind to this as we are, and so the relative effect would be much the same. But, there was still a quantitative difference in information and sources. And there were certainly branches of the knowledge or paths of specualtion that had not yet been cut off as some are today. By “ancients”, I include prehistoric man, whose feeling and thoughts would serve as the foundation for historical man’s own ideas and writings. I don’t mean to suggest that they were dumb or anything like that; only that they, without written word, would be more sense-oriented rather than concept-oriented. And in regard to “low-level feelings of fear”, I do not mean this to be inferior to overt conscious thought and reasoning. In fact, I think we fail all too often to attend to these feelings today and it harms us. These low-level feelings, fear or otherwise, still guide us today. We just don’t notice it as much and prefer to believe we move forward with logical plans rather than intuitive drives.