Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2024-06-18T18:20:36Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com June 18. http://ranprieur.com/#a468942aa5f16515fbd8c532418fb0ea1b73da66 2024-06-18T18:20:36Z June 18. Continuing from a week ago: If you were an indigenous animist, why would you convert to Christianity? I'm completely speculating here, but I can think of four reasons, and they could all work in parallel. First, you seek favor with the conquering people. It's like that bit from The Simpsons: "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."

Second, you seek favor with the God of the conquering people. If you already believe that everything we have comes from the gods, it's not a stretch to switch to a god who gives his people so much stuff.

Third, Christianity tells a good story. Jerah comments, "People like having a framework and a reason for suffering." The framework of paganism is complicated and morally ambiguous. In comparison, I imagine Christianity is like Star Wars: a simple epic tale of good and evil, sacrifice and redemption.

Fourth, it offers a good deal. Indigenous spirituality is not like Animal Crossing. There are ghosts and witches and demons, and even the gods who are on your side make a lot of demands. Christianity makes few demands, especially Protestantism. All you have to do is believe certain things, and you're in.

So, going back to the original question: How did physicalism defeat psychism? It didn't. Psychism defeated psychism. The cacophony of animist polytheism was out-competed by an optimized variety of mind-based metaphysics, in which the mind who created everything is monolithic and remote, but is also the same person as a human who preached compassion.

This formula, in early Medieval Europe, led to better administration, higher literacy, and eventually a wide zone of cultural and philosophical agreement. This zone of agreement made modern science possible. Now I'm tempted to say that science factored out God -- but it didn't. My dad was a serious scientist and also a serious Catholic. Atheists have always been a minority, and you can even see polytheism creeping back in, when Christians say that God will defeat Allah.

Related: I haven't read this book yet but it looks promising, We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour.

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June 14. http://ranprieur.com/#fab46e9e2988fecd8fd6f5705176bbe2aba165f7 2024-06-14T14:40:23Z June 14. Stray links, ordered from worst to best, starting with a Reddit thread, What's the worst country to vacation to right now?

A good rant about technology making things worse, An appliance used to be a machine. Now it's a bureaucracy

Water is bursting from another abandoned West Texas oil well, and no one knows why, but it's probably from all the fracking wastewater pumped into the ground.

An interesting analysis of the uncanny valley, and why exactly some aberrations look creepy and some don't.

Wild elephants may have names that other elephants use to call them

Wild horses return to Kazakhstan steppes after absence of two centuries

And great news for the far future, Fungus breaks down ocean plastic

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June 11. http://ranprieur.com/#10fb91d78d828722c6c0dadd747246ba25a407cf 2024-06-11T23:10:12Z June 11. Continuing on philosophy, I'm going to start using the words "physicalism" and "psychism" instead of "materialism" and "idealism", because the latter words have other meanings that make them confusing.

Physicalists talk about "the hard problem of consciousness", but for psychism, it's not a problem at all. The hard problem for psychism is this: Why has physicalism had so much practical success? Thousands of cultures, all over the world, once believed that humans are minor players in a conscious universe full of powerful beings. Now all of them have been defeated by one culture that believes in a mindless clockwork universe.

I have an inkling of an answer, and I think it's related to another puzzling question:

Why do Christian missionaries have any success at all? I grew up in a Christian culture, going to Catholic church and Sunday school, and I found that belief system completely uncompelling. The idea that I do find compelling is a universe saturated with perspective and personhood. Why would anyone, who grew up thinking that way, convert to Christianity?

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June 7. http://ranprieur.com/#1db49c0deeef3011e640d7a0a23fd21609deaec6 2024-06-07T19:30:55Z June 7. I'm in Pullman for the next twelve days. June is the most beautiful time to be here, and I'm excited about walking up the river under the spell of certain substances. I finally bought a portable vaporizer, the Xlux Roffu, and it's better than my old Silver Surfer in almost every way. The SSV has a large chamber and a raw blast of hot air. The Roffu has a much smaller chamber, perfect for small doses, and the heat goes through it evenly. It's like the difference between a firehose and a shower. With the SSV, the vapor comes out so hot that I put water in my mouth to serve as a bubbler. The Roffu has a compact cooling apparatus, so I don't have to bubble it, and I can actually taste the different strains. It also feels like a smoother high. The SSV is still better in two ways. Because of the simple design, it's easy to clean, and very robust.

Four links from PsyPost. Individuals with ADHD may be better at foraging, hinting at an adaptive function

Whole-body hyperthermia shows promising antidepressant effects through anti-inflammatory pathways

Playing video games linked to enhanced wayfinding abilities. I've noticed, after playing Fallout, I'm more interested in what buildings are where, and which way north is, when I'm walking around the city.

And the technology of the future, Six surprising things about placebos everyone should know

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June 4. http://ranprieur.com/#1a6ddbb1e1574ce8dee3e4e251bd03652f91aa9e 2024-06-04T16:00:43Z June 4. Continuing on indigenous metaphysics, I've been reminded of this important anthropology article that I keep in the readings section of this site, Preconquest Consciousness by E. Richard Sorenson. From the conclusion:

As fascinating as we may find the impact of conquering cultures on preconquest groups, it pales before the challenge to epistemology posed by the existence of a system of cognition not based on symbolic logic. We of Western training may find it virtually impossible to see how truth can be demonstrated without recourse to symbols that are logically controlled. When I first came face-to-face with these experientially-based modes of cognition wherein logic was irrelevant, they slid right past me. I did not even see them. Even when I did begin to catch on, I tended to doubt such perceptions once I was again within the confines of Western culture. It took years of repeated, even dramatic exposure before these initially fragmentary mental graspings were able to survive re-immersion in Western culture. Experiences repeated, however, eventually make their mark and I began to question whether symbolic logic was actually the only means to get at truth. Now I rather think that alternative routes to truth may exist within the immediacy of a type of experiential awareness that perhaps moves in extra-sentient directions not yet brought into the realm of our modern sense-of-truth. My slowness in this matter leads me to believe it may take modern humankind some time to identify and make use of these perhaps more rarefied mental capabilities.

Related, posted to the subreddit, Quatism is an ambitious page trying to use science to get beyond science. More precisely, it's using concepts developed by science to try to explain phenomena normally excluded by science. The strategy I prefer is to simply abandon the core assumption on which science is based: an "out there" objective physical universe that is internally consistent and not influenced by observation. Many worlds? How about no worlds? We're all just making up our stream of experience on the fly, and we don't have to agree on what's "real" unless we're trying to share the convenient illusion of a third person reality.

The mystery that remains is the definition of the self, because the "me" that's creating reality is not the same as the "me" that feels banged about by a confusing external world. Also, this whole time I'm trying to use language for something that is described, by people who glimpse it, as being beyond language.

Related, Helen Keller on Her Life Before Self-Consciousness. This was posted last week to Hacker News, with a long comment thread about the effect of language on consciousness, and the possibility of some further human awakening. Keller writes:

I am inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious reasoning one may see in the material world simply a mirror, an image of permanent mental sensations. In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and the limit of our consciousness. That is why, perhaps, many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves -- and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either.

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