Last time we took a look at Martin Luther and the deep impact in our cultural grammar made by the Protestant Reformation. We talked about things like cultural training for narcissism, sapiential obsolescence, the division of church and state which furthers secularism, and the rise of the Protestant work ethic and how that’s got integrated with emergent corporate capitalism.
We then took a look at some initial responses by Pascal to this change and the loss of the cosmos, being replaced by the infinite spaces that terrify. We looked at an individual who tried to respond to that, a brilliant genius from the heart of the Scientific Revolution: that’s Rene Descartes. He creates a new psychotechnology, the psychotechnology that is at the core of the scientific enterprise as understood today: that’s Cartesian graphing. The whole proposal is that we could render everything into equations and that if we mathematically manipulate those abstract symbolic propositions we can compute reality.
Descartes saw in that a method for how we could achieve certainty, and he understood the anxiety of his time as being provoked by a lack of certainty, and the search for it, and this method of making the mind computational in nature, would alleviate the anxiety that was prevalent at the time. So I noted that we had two different elements in our grammar that are in significant tension with each other: they both share, and that’s who so interesting about them, I think they share, they overlap significantly in the idea of the isolated individual mind. Whereas Luther’s going to put an emphasis on conscience, well, Descartes is going to put an emphasis on what I will now call consciousness. Of course these two words are highly related in nature, but on one side we have the grammar from Luther telling us that we need to accept without question, without evidence, without argumentation, and then Descartes is we should only accept that when we have certainty.
Neither one of those is viable for us! They’re both pathological in a very deep way, but we saw that Descartes nevertheless proposes this new method. It’s similar in so many ways to essential features of the Protestant Reformation. A method cut off from tradition, a method cut off from institution, a method that relies just on the individual mind in relationship to itself. So although in one sense these grammars, the Lutheran grammar and the Cartesian grammar seems so opposed in our culture, and these grammars are at war in our current culture war, the war between an understanding of faith as a radical acceptance and knowledge as the pursuit of logically derived certainty, although they are that, that grammatical tension is at the core of a lot of our cultural wars.
Nevertheless these two views are so deeply bound together because of their mutual influence and shared commitment to the isolated individual self. Descartes has a couple of contemporaries, as I mentioned Pascal (we’ll come back to Pascal in a bit), but we also talked about Hobbes. Hobbes comes up with the radical proposal, following on Descartes, if cognition is computation and if matter is real then we can build a material computer and we could artificially make cognition. Artificial intelligence is a product of the Scientific Revolution and is part and parcel of the advent of the meaning crisis in modernity.
Vervaeke’s split between Luther and Descartes reminded me of SSC’s On First Looking into Chapman’s “Pop Bayesianism”, but the camps are importantly different. There, Aristotelianism is the camp of certainty, and Anton-Wilsonism the camp of anti-certainty. Here, both Luther and Descartes are after certainty; Luther thinks you get it by a sort of ‘pick it and stick with it’ faith (which is importantly detached from action, but not necessarily from evidence!), whereas Descartes thinks you get it from careful deductive reasoning.
Luther found the practise of “buying your sins away” that the catholic church was doing as highly bad. In that way “no you can’t wealth out of moral dimension in anyway” makes it more sensible. The catholic church was turning into a organization that exercised political and societal control rather than spiritual service.
In science if you make multiple replications you would expect them to have similar outcomes if the phenomen in question is in fact real. If there is a central authority that has beforehand decided what the result should be then that is not true measurement. Thus freeing all the differerent experiment runners to indiviudal verify the result rather than leaning on a opinion leader makes for a more reality-sensitive process. Luther thinking that persons should read the book for themselfs rather than have it read for them doesn’t seem so obviously lead to fractuation.
Luther thinking that persons should read the book for themselfs rather than have it read for them doesn’t seem so obviously lead to fractuation.
IMO it does, because 1) people’s innate judgment / different life experiences / contrarianism / etc. can lead them to disagree on interpretation. [Relevant xkcd] If your centralized authority is a person who can respond to events and questions, it’s obvious what the Pope says you should do about X, whereas if it’s a book that needs to be interpreted, people can more easily disagree about what the Bible says you should do about X.
Note also that a centralized authority both discourages rather than encourages that sort of disagreement and directs status-seeking to climbing the hierarchy instead of finding a thing to disagree on.
Episode 21: Martin Luther and Descartes
Typo: “if matter is real the we can build a material computer” should be then
Vervaeke’s split between Luther and Descartes reminded me of SSC’s On First Looking into Chapman’s “Pop Bayesianism”, but the camps are importantly different. There, Aristotelianism is the camp of certainty, and Anton-Wilsonism the camp of anti-certainty. Here, both Luther and Descartes are after certainty; Luther thinks you get it by a sort of ‘pick it and stick with it’ faith (which is importantly detached from action, but not necessarily from evidence!), whereas Descartes thinks you get it from careful deductive reasoning.
Luther found the practise of “buying your sins away” that the catholic church was doing as highly bad. In that way “no you can’t wealth out of moral dimension in anyway” makes it more sensible. The catholic church was turning into a organization that exercised political and societal control rather than spiritual service.
In science if you make multiple replications you would expect them to have similar outcomes if the phenomen in question is in fact real. If there is a central authority that has beforehand decided what the result should be then that is not true measurement. Thus freeing all the differerent experiment runners to indiviudal verify the result rather than leaning on a opinion leader makes for a more reality-sensitive process. Luther thinking that persons should read the book for themselfs rather than have it read for them doesn’t seem so obviously lead to fractuation.
IMO it does, because 1) people’s innate judgment / different life experiences / contrarianism / etc. can lead them to disagree on interpretation. [Relevant xkcd] If your centralized authority is a person who can respond to events and questions, it’s obvious what the Pope says you should do about X, whereas if it’s a book that needs to be interpreted, people can more easily disagree about what the Bible says you should do about X.
Note also that a centralized authority both discourages rather than encourages that sort of disagreement and directs status-seeking to climbing the hierarchy instead of finding a thing to disagree on.