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If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention
- h2odragon 2y agoHumanity's greatest skill is ignoring the beauty that surrounds us.
- illuminant 2y agoAnd secondly self deception!
- Terr_ 2y ago"Our three greatest skills are ignoring the beauty that surrounds us, self-deception, and an almost fanatical dedication to the pope."
- drewcoo 2y ago. . . and the Spanish Inquisition. Our four greatest skills are . . .
- copperx 2y agoSelf deception is our #1 skill. That's why we couldn't progress before science. It's also what makes us see beauty when there's none.
- vhiremath4 2y agoI think it’s more appropriate to say that self-deception is a consequence of overfitting based on other primal instincts. Our #1 skill lies in pattern recognition and imitation. A lot of time, it’s faulty because it’s guided by fear/anxiety for perfectly valid reasons of survival.
- maxbond 2y agoWe "couldn't progress before science" but developed metallurgy, mining, sailing, astronomy, democracy, ... well before the enlightenment and the development of the scientific method? Heck, we domesticated plants and animals before recorded history. Perhaps you're talking about empiricism rather than science? Empiricism is old as the hills, presumably these discoveries were made from observation and experimentation. The scientific method builds on empiricism, but incorporates mechanisms to make it more difficult to fool ourselves (such as reproducibility and peer review), and so is distinct. As for "seeing beauty where there is none," that's nonsense. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you see it, it's real. You can critique someone else's ideas of beauty, you can disagree with them, but to say that they are somehow objectively wrong is just chauvinism. You may as well tell someone that when they're thinking, it's just the illusion of thinking. Or when they're enjoying a meal you dislike, they're only imagining that they're enjoying it. What would that even mean?
- akira2501 2y agoHumans are machines that are wired to be motivated by change. It doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to be beautiful or enchanted, it just has to _change_ and be _changeable_ by the person. When people feel down, it's not usually because they can't sense enchantment, it's because they're stuck on something they can't currently change. It's not a "skill," it's a devastating statement on the nature of the world we live in and how little power supposedly free people actually have in the face of a crushing government technocratic corporate welfare state.
- brudgers 2y agoEnchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention Modulo the attention that leads to enchantment is a privilege. When a person's world is full of actual danger, bending down to smell the flowers can be a fatal vulnerability. Or to put it another way, lack of enchantment is not a moral failing any more than disenchantment is a virtue. Other people's circumstances are not what bliss-ninnies project upon them any more than they are the projections of cynics, conspiracy theorists and paranoids.
- dalmo3 2y agoWhat does "modulo" mean in your first sentence?
- bubblyworld 2y agoIt's a maths people phrase - usually it means something like "this is true if you ignore these counterexamples". For instance: my code is perfect, modulo all the bugs everyone keeps finding. I guess the analogy is the modulo operation removing a whole bunch of stuff from a number? I don't know haha.
- maxbond 2y agoMy interpretation is that it's related to modulate. Like how you might modulate the volume to reduce it (without muting it), "X is true modulo Y" means that Y makes X less true (but not untrue). I didn't find any evidence for this etymology from casual searching however (other than that the roots are related).
- _yb2s 2y agoI’m not sure privilege is the right way to think about this- but chronic stress definitely shifts the world to being unenchanted. I remember living in an enchanted world as a kid, and it can return with something as simple as a breathing exercise, meditation, or sitting in a forest hot spring.
- 2y ago
- egypturnash 2y agoThe lady squatting in the abandoned house next to my place seems to be talking to, yelling at, and/or stalked by things I can't see on a pretty regular basis, and I'm pretty sure she lives in a much more enchanted world than I do, but it definitely doesn't sound like the fun kind of enchantment.
- DaoVeles 2y agoAs with anything, the middle way is probably a better option. Enchantment is good - to a point.
- selimthegrim 2y agoGod help me where in NOLA is this, Treme?
- defrost 2y agoTremé holds no copyright on batshit .. this is a tale as far flung as London, Sydney, Tokyo, Broome, Jo-berg and beyond.
- egypturnash 2y agoMid-City.
- selimthegrim 2y ago
- koollman 2y agoAre curses part of the enchantments ? I think I noticed those
- vundercind 2y agoSimilarly, I’d go with “if your world’s not Lovecraftian, you’re not paying attention.”
- 082349872349872 2y agoA shoggoth on the roof? That's tradition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2csnVNai-o#t=40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2csnVNai-o#t=40
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- jongjong 2y agoI think the right word in my case would be 'cursed'. There is mystery and magic behind the scenes but it's not positive. Everything positive in my world is stuff that I can see, explain and influence to some extent. Everything bad is the stuff I can't fully understand; the things that I have little visibility and no control over; yet those exert a very strong force over my reality. Things like government, monetary policy, globalization, the media, cultural changes. I don't have much visibility or control over those but they all have a huge negative impact on my world. Everything bad that happened so me, I cannot trace back to a specific thing I did. I consistently sacrificed the present for the future, optimized for career, yet the invisible hand keeps making things worse somehow. I can't help but wonder what happened to the people who always lived for the present. If my future is looking so bleak, what about most people who didn't sacrifice anything for the future? Victims of the opioid crisis? Or maybe everything has been flipped on its head? Maybe the future belongs to those who YOLO everything?
- vhiremath4 2y agoI am not going to try to change your outlook to be more positive, but you have to admit that it’s somewhat (tragically) amusing that we can find ourselves on a website full of people who are extremely technically capable (and highly intelligent), have access to devices that can connect to billions of others devices instantly, and can profit from said system allowing them to better their lives, yet this same community can only dwell on the negative of their situation instead of the positive. I think, when you’re very smart, you are just many steps ahead of the average person in pattern recognition. You can literally store more information and pattern match against it, so you’re going to pattern match up the power hierarchy and think about things that have a negative impact on you that you can never directly affect without traversing up the hierarchy. If most people here (not saying you specifically) would instead just focus on “what is the biggest problem in my life that I have complete control over?”, I think they’d find that focusing on the greater powers that be has little practical consequence since they’re just not at the level where they can exert influence over those powers. There is almost certainly a path to local maxima, and from there, a greater and greater maxima.
- 2y ago
- DaoVeles 2y agoI recommend the youtube channel Posy. He only uploads about once a month but every time it is an exploration of something that seems so simple but it sparks that child like wonder in the world. The good sense of humour helps as well. https://www.youtube.com/c/PosyMusic https://www.youtube.com/c/PosyMusic
- itishappy 2y agoSecond that. He's got some of the highest production quality YouTube has to offer. High effort content. Here's the one that got me hooked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSS6yAMZF78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSS6yAMZF78
- j_bum 2y agoThis is the same video that got me hooked! I love Posy. It always feels magical to know that there are so many other curious people in the world. HN feels like a natural gathering point for that crowd as well.
- kranner 2y agoI loved this one and tried a bunch of different techniques to replicate it. Finally settled on ffmpeg, with something similar to this: https://gist.github.com/chigozienri/0ac602c3bc7d6c5fab9f0c6839f4ad6f https://gist.github.com/chigozienri/0ac602c3bc7d6c5fab9f0c68...
- smusamashah 2y agoI made a chrome extension that does that on youtube videos (can do on any video). Could do basic motion extraction. Got clueless on how to do all the rest of the things he did in that video.
- kranner 2y agoCan you link to it please (if it's public)?
- PeterWhittaker 2y agoI’m not really sure what their point was. My world is (mostly) not enchanted (I am a Maritimer with Irish roots, after all, so the weird isn’t that far away), as I am a reductionist at heart. Is my sense of wonder diminished by understanding Rayleigh Scattering? Not only “no”, but I would say that it is doubled or more by being able to appreciate the blue of the sky and the reflected blue of the water while understanding the mechanisms... just like how my appreciation of both optics and E&M deepened tremendously when I realized that the former was just a simple expression of the latter... the same “latter” that led Einstein to the Lorentz transformation to solve the problems of additive velocities causing ridiculous magnetic fields, and thus gave us SR. I mean, wow, just wow. My world IS enchanted, but by math and its wondrous ilk.
- pdonis 2y ago> Is my sense of wonder diminished by understanding Rayleigh Scattering? Richard Feynman asked a similar question, IIRC about knowing how the color and smell of flowers is conveyed to your senses and processed by your brain. He said he had a friend who claimed that knowing the science behind such things diminished them, and Feynman said "I think he's kind of nutty."
- itishappy 2y agoI feel wonder and awe at the grand mathematical structure of the universe, and to me that's exactly what the point was. I hope the author would agree. > Bennett, a political philosopher interested in the ethical dimensions of enchantment, which she treats more like a state of wonder, believes that enchantment is something “that we encounter, that hits us, but it is also a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies.” > One of these strategies is “to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted. Disenchantment would be if knowing about Rayleigh scattering made rainbows less beautiful.
- BlueTemplar 2y agoA more radical definition that I have heard of, is about the disappearance of (the belief in) powerful but quite alien non-human beings. But then that's much older than the current atheism : something that monotheistic religions started a long time ago already with their "exclusivity".
- carabiner 2y agoThere are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see.
- vonnik 2y agoI think many adults re-enchant the world by believing conspiracy theories.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoOr drugs. Don't forget about drugs.
- drewcoo 2y agoOr gods. Which are both like conspiracy theories and like drugs.
- bamboozled 2y ago100% agree with this. I think this is why people love Trump, RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan etc, they're all conspiracy theorists who preach an interesting narrative, there is some "establishment" which is hiding all the ills and evil, and if they can break it, then we all benefit.
- jbandela1 2y agoI personally find software development to be enchanting and am often thankful to have a job like this. I get to make in the comfort of my home creations where I am only limited by my knowledge, imagination, and attention. I can experiment easily and explore completely different designs with an ease that any other discipline would be envious of. And then I can allow millions or billions to have access my creation with ease. That seems pretty enchanting and almost god-like and magical to me.
- vermilingua 2y agoSeems as good a place as any to ask: how do I get back to this state? I used to feel exactly this way, but after 3 years now slinging code for money I’ve become very disillusioned. Anyone have any tips for finding the magic again?
- Dban1 2y agostart with creating a smol indie game you yourself would want to play
- mensetmanusman 2y agoWrite a lecture about best practices to avoid burnout. Computer science is such a new human endeavor that there is so much uncharted territory about what the future of training the next generation looks like. Obviously, some pretty bad habits led to the massive amount of burnout I am seeing amongst computer scientists.
- walterbell 2y ago> after 3 years now slinging code for money I’ve become very disillusioned .. with hardware/software or the systems of humans which create them?
- vermilingua 2y agoBoth. It feels even now like we're just monkeys sitting on a tower of cards swinging around tools we don't understand. There are a lot of very smart people that have built the software and hardware we have today, and lots of smart people coming in to replace them; but the majority of engineers are not that, and (myself included) largely pretend at being wizards while in reality we are all the sorcerer's apprentice. The systems we've built for society are even worse. For every story about how tech is improving lives, you hear another two about yet another horrible dystopian usecase for the same technology, and it's never hard to imagine a dozen more.
- JohnMakin 2y agoComputers used to be absolutely magical to me until I studied and worked with embedded systems and compilers - much of it is well-defined and not magical at all. One of my biggest regrets is studying computer science, because the magic was stripped from me once I learned or intuited even a little bit of how the black box worked. I'm not sure I understand the premise at all - to me, the more I pay attention to the world and my senses, the less magical it becomes. Maybe that's why I'm miserable.
- jack_pp 2y agoYou should study ML/AI advanced mathematics. I was struggling to comprehend some math concept, read the theory on my own and tried hard to get it for like 5-6 hours until I went to a colleague that scribbled a drawing and made me understand it in 5 minutes. Felt like I was in a wizard story
- drewcoo 2y ago[flagged]
- umvi 2y agoSo you are essentially saying "ignorance is bliss"?
- Dalewyn 2y agoThere's an old saying that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If learning about technology makes it insufficiently advanced then it is distinguishable from magic. If magic is enchantment, the world (as concerns the technology) is no longer enchanted. So yes: Ignorance is bliss. Somewhat related, I've also noticed that people who don't go out of their way to inform themselves (eg: watch/read the news) in general seem happier. I also feel happier the less I give a damn about the stuff around me and the world. So yes: Ignorance is bliss.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
- Animats 2y agoThis has the vague feel of GPT writing. It makes sense, it seems somewhat profound, but doesn't really say much. Was it written by ChatGPT, or just by someone who writes that way?
- alisonatwork 2y agoSEO brought us bland, vapid content farms over a decade ago, and sadly I feel like that's what most of the LLMs got trained on, so here we are. Garbage in, garbage out.
- mlekoszek 2y agoNo, L.M. Sacasas is a longtime scholar of McLuhan and Ivan Illich. He most certainly writes these articles himself.
- JohnMakin 2y agoI wanted to come here to state this but didn't want to get downvoted into oblivion - it does read like that, particularly this sentence: > In other words, what if we experience the world as disenchanted because, in part, enchantment is an effect of a certain kind of attention we bring to bear on the world and we are now generally habituated against this requisite quality of attention? This is bad writing but it's hard to tell if it's human generated bad writing. My bias lately though is that all bad writing is likely AI generated or influenced.
- strogonoff 2y agoDense style can be found in a lot of pre-LLM writing. It is not necessarily bad, I have grown to treat it as a reflection of author’s ways of thinking. What makes or breaks it is whether it’s truly dense, whether it delivers the point precisely or words can be omitted (in which case it’s bad writing). McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is notable not only because it is often dense (in a good way), but also since it talks at length about different ways of attending to reality, among which there is no “correct” one, and where a particular way (even if seemingly objective) would bias our understanding of reality and inform further techniques we use to work with it, and how humanity has been lately drifting towards an extreme of one particular way of attending to the world. Similarities end quickly, though, the book offers a much deeper and more rigorous take. The difference with dense writing produced by LLMs is that it tends to contain inconsistencies and errors if you re-read closely. I personally regularly have to, since a long and dense sentence may not always click right away. In a densely written book I inevitably find that it is I who didn’t parse it right, but with LLM-generated writing it turns out I was fed garbage in the first place.
- steve_adams_86 2y agoI couldn’t agree more. A few weeks ago I was driving and saw a creek. I should check that out, I thought. I walked along the creek bed which had mostly dried, and in some puddles and pools, I noticed tiny figures flitting around in the water and ripples on the surface. Could they be fish? No, at first all I could see was little water striders congregating around the edges of the water. I decided to look closer. After waiting 30 seconds or so, I saw them: tiny little fish coming out of hiding from behind submerged roots and branches, rocks, and overhangs of the creek bank. Dozens in each puddle, thousands in close proximity along the creek bed. I decided to pull out my camera and start recording them. I discovered that they were mostly coho salmon, born maybe 4 months earlier, weathering the driest part of the summer yet in these rapidly vanishing pools. Many weren’t making it. Thankfully we’ve had heavy rains since then so they’re likely doing well now. My recordings picked up a vast, lively, diverse array of tiny creatures. Everything from water mites to daphnia to frogs. Water beetles would spontaneously sneak out and shoot around a pool, searching for what, I have no idea. Tiny prickly sculpins hid under the stones, occasionally coming out to find food or choose a new hiding spot. The geology of the creek was a beautiful blend of strange black volcanic rock, soft clay, and the hallmark sandstones of this part of the island I live on. Every bend of the creek revealed new and interesting features. The layers of the clay and sandstone sometimes revealed bizarre swirling patterns. I couldn’t guess the way in which they formed. I was surrounded by the echoes of at least a dozen ravens at any time, picking through the trees and creek bed for food. They were so fascinating to listen to and watch. I was transported to another world. It was so deeply enchanting in those woods. Millions of lives playing out in this ridiculously beautiful yet precarious creek bed. Dense woods filled with moss, ferns, and towering cedars. And the world is filled with these places. I will find another place to pull over soon, and my heart will be filled with wonder again. It’s all there if you look for it.
- candiddevmike 2y agoWhy record it? Why not just be present in the moment?
- mosen 2y agoUpon reading that comment, it sounds to me like they were present...
- ta988 2y agoReminds me of that recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41021951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41021951 "Don't forget the cavernous structures which people are forbidden to enter, buzzing with the activity of objects controlled by those enchanted crystals, like the magic brooms in Fantasia, performing myriad arcane rituals with rare and exotic materials to make more enchanted crystals." "And the high priests guarding the knowledge." "They perform elaborate cleansing rituals on any item brought into the crystal-writing room. When they enter, they wear special clothing, lest the impurities of the outside world taint the crystals." Whether we see the world as sad and dull or beautiful and magick is a question of perspective.
- Barrin92 2y agoI was surprised to not see American Beauty mentioned, if you're talking about attention and enchantment I think that's probably one of the most well known films tackling the topic. https://youtu.be/Qssvnjj5Moo https://youtu.be/Qssvnjj5Moo Also reminded me of Joyce who pretty much declared this to be the central job of the artist, comparing it to the Eucharist: ""the artist is a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life"
- nop_slide 2y ago“Superstition [is] cowardice in the face of the Divine,” wrote Theophrastus, who lived during the founding of the Library of Alexandria. We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times—a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universes and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor.” — Carl Sagan: Cosmos
- 2four2 2y agoReads like someone who is blissfully privileged and wants to spread their cultivated attitude as some kind of virtue that only requires a change in reference frame to achieve actualization. I'm sure an attitude adjustment is great and all, but things are more complex than that.
- ordu 2y agoI'm not sure I understand what the author is talking about, but I'd rephrase it in other way: if your world is not enchanted, you didn't look close enough. You can believe that you understand how the world around you works, but you don't, the understanding is an illusion. All this complexity is unbelievable, I would say it is impossible, if I was not immersed in it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Peteragain 2y agoTime-of-flight range sensors. Time photons traveling 80mm? You've got to be kidding! That was one of two surprising & wonderful recent discoveries for me.
- card_zero 2y ago"Very many years ago, when I was about as old as some of you are now, I went mountain climbing in Scotland with a friend of mine. And there was this mountain, you see, and we decided to climb it. So, very early one morning, we arose and began to climb. All day we climbed. Up and up and up — higher and higher and higher — until the valley lay very small below us, and the mists of the evening began to come down, and the sun to set. And when we reached the summit, we sat down to watch this magnificent sight of the sun going down behind the mountains. And as we watched, my friend, very suddenly, and violently, vomited. Some of us think life’s a bit like that, don’t we? But it isn’t. Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines. We are all of us looking for the key. And I wonder how many of you here tonight have wasted years of your lives looking behind the kitchen dressers of this life for that key. I know I have. Others think they’ve found the key, don’t they? They roll back the lid of the sardine tin of life. They reveal the sardines, the riches of life, therein, and they get them out, and they enjoy them. But, you know, there’s always a little bit in the corner you can’t get out. I wonder is there a little bit in the corner of your life? I know there is in mine!" — Alan Bennett, Sermon
- rbanffy 2y agoShortly after I moved to Ireland and had my first walk through the woods near my home, it became clearly obvious why people would believe in magic and fairies. You can’t walk for long before you stumble over a clearly artificial pile of rocks, some with inscriptions made by the hunter-gatherers that first occupied this place. It’s easy to fantasise those were made by fairies or other magical entities. One really doesn’t need to pay too much attention to see magic everywhere. You just need to allow the mind to wander a bit outside the beaten path.
- weare138 2y agoIn other words, the more ignorant you are of reality the happier you are about it.