Neutered shamans, moods, anti-materialism

Some snippets of things I may elaborate on later:

Ver Sacrum, Vienna Secession magazine. By Koloman Moser

I. Doctors are neutered shamans

Doctors are shamans, neutered from magical potential, but given broad, technical, isolated knowledge. We need more shamans for our social health. They have the psychotechnologies to help us collectively re-orient what is relevant and meaningful to us. As Vervaeke points out, collective ritual was a way of making our culture more intelligent; roles are reversed, we are forced to ‘see’ outside our current perspectives, often with the help of ritual substances that take us “out of our mind”. Nowadays medicine does none of this. Doctors for the most part are trained to treat us as biomechanical machines. There is no culture, no social health within the current medical system. I’m grateful that modern germ theory exists but can’t we agree that dancing around a fire is just as legitimate for healing as ingesting a barbiturate?

II. We don’t have moods; moods have us

To say that I am “in a bad mood” is in a way wrong. We think of moods as “inside us” and the world as “outside” but this ignores the fundamentally porous boundary between me and world. It’d be more accurate to say “the bad mood has me”.

Moods come out of our way of being in the world, the interaction between me and my environment. We say that “moods are infectious” and certain people “spread good vibes”. My shoulder slump spreads my bad mood.

Moods are atmospheres in which we are immersed

III. The world is not a collection of objects

The dominant technological materialist view holds that everything that exists is just a set of objects of different properties. Sofas, knives, butterflies – all are just arrangements of atoms with different properties. 

The GOFAI paradigm had this view of knowledge as just being a series of statements about objects in the world. People thought you could encode all the knowledge of the world with a few thousand axiomatic statements which could be recombined to make all possible knowledge.

Seed of doubt 1: How many grains of sand does it take to make a heap?

Inductive logic breaks down here. 1 grain of sand is not a heap, 2 grains is not a heap. In general, for any added grain of sand, the collection does not suddenly become a heap. We can say the same thing of any object larger than a grain of sand. Is a three legged chair still a chair? Examined closely enough, every seeming object is fuzzy; atoms are always moving between things, and there can be no absolute boundary. In general, object-like-entities are more akin to processes than definite categories.

Seed of doubt 2: Feelings and ideas exist

There are entities we interact with that are intangible. Our negotiations with them ultimately inform what clothing we buy, who our friends are, and where we spend our spare time. I’m talking about ideas and feelings.

You have surely felt times when you are ‘in love’ and ‘out of love’. When in‘love, we say that the love is ‘real’. Yet what is the object that corresponds to the love? Similarly, what is the object that corresponds to the idea of money? A materialist might call these ‘patterns of neural firings’ but then what is the object behind the pattern?

When I say “the world is not just a set of objects”, I am saying a few things. One is that “set of objects” is a very particular way of seeing that is not the underlying truth. Two is that “entities besides ‘objects’ exist for us”. Our world contains love and money and all types of non materially grounded entities. Third, I am doing something a bit radical here too; that we and the world are not so cleanly separable. This is not the same type of fuzziness as objects have because we actually perceive and engage in the construction of our world. But that is a point for a later time.

Science, then, is mainly about articulating the properties of the objects, or uncovering the underlying laws. Technology is about using science to build new objects that are useful.

Other updates:

I did a lecture on the “How the British Prevented a Christian China During the Deadliest Civil War of All Time”. I will upload the video soon

Going to DEF CON to speak to people about hardware security for benchtop DNA synthesizers. Let me know if you are around and we can meet up

Portrait of Joseph Raulin, Van Gogh