The smartest people that I know have no problem speculating. Those are just not the things they speculate about.
I’d argue the smartest were likely atheists or agnostic and were either quiet about it or got killed over it.
@cameron_vale@lemm.ee absolutely nothing
But when a thousand people say they see a thing. And one person says he doesn’t see that thing. The logical conclusion is that there’s something wrong with that one person.
No, you’re reasoning by association rather than by evidence. This is how we ended up with the four elements of air, fire, water, and stone, and why people used to believe that something contained would just because it could burn or contained stone because it was hard.
Reasoning by association often leads to spurious and fallacious conclusions. This is why, today, we with evidence instead. 
@cameron_vale@lemm.ee people tried to explain the natural phenomena the best way they could. Now we know better (i.e., the rain or lack of it isn’t due to an anger man in the sky).
We grow in understanding, we need fewer made up explanations from our asses.
That’s just a longwinded way of saying “they were dumb”.
Thousands of years of dumb people. Then suddenly us smart guys appear?
That seems unlikely.
Those same people eventually thought the sun revolved around us and labeled scientists who theorized and eventually proved otherwise as heretics.
And now some still believe the world is flat.
Stick to the examples I offered.
They see it. We don’t. Why?
Stick the examples I offered.
No. You can accept my response as an example of groupthink being completely wrong.
Then you are strawmanning.
Arguing the more easily defeated interpretation.
Rather than steelmanning.
Which means arguing the actual point.
And to do that. Hmm. Why would anybody do that?
@cameron_vale@lemm.ee where did I say they were dumb? don’t put words in my mouth. Also, ignorance != dumb
I said they tried to explain natural phenomeana the best way they could. I mean that. Most likely every modern person would have done the same.
You offered that they “pulled it from their ass”. Let’s not quibble.
As for what explanations they’d contrive. They’d contrive useful ones. Just like us. Because time is money etc.
@cameron_vale@lemm.ee Well, then, good luck appeasing the angry god for the excess or lack of rain (which one? there are too many!). I think I’ll stop here.
I offered 4 examples of “known things”. You ignore that in preference for these caricatures.
The logical conclusion is that there’s something wrong with that one person.
No. That’s a fallacy (lack of logic) called “argumentum ad populum” (appeal to the masses). Truth value of a statement does not depend on who or how many utter it; you need to analyse the statement itself to know which side there’s something wrong with.
Note that claiming that “the smartest people did it, so there’s something wrong with us” is a related fallacy called “argumentum ad verecundiam” (appeal to authority). And another too, called petitio principii (begging the question) - did they do it?
Based on Roman history I don’t think that they did; the smart people were always a bit more cautious about this sort of superstition, but still “played along” when convenient for them. Octavian seizing Mark Anthony’s will, Constantine using Christianity as a political move, the general tendency to interpret gods as abstract aspects instead of actual “big humans in the sky”, so goes on.
Appeal to popularity and/or authority carry a good deal of weight, actually.
If a smart guy sees it, and you don’t, it’s fair to conclude that the error is yours.
But this is obvious. You are merely straining to refute me.
The sensible conclusion is that we really do see things differently these days. That we have gained and lost.
Appeal to popularity and/or authority carry a good deal of weight, actually.
Fourth fallacy / irrationality: argumentum ad nauseam. Repeating it won’t “magically” make it truer.
If a smart guy sees it, and you don’t, it’s fair to conclude that the error is yours.
In this situation, you wouldn’t be concluding, only assuming.
But this is obvious.
Nope.
You are merely straining to refute me.
Here’s a great example of why assumptions are not reliable - you’re assuming why I’m uttering something, even if you have no way to know it. And it happens to be false. [I don’t care enough about you to “refute you”. I simply enjoy this topic.]
The sensible conclusion is that we really do see things differently these days. That we have gained and lost.
We see things differently, but “we gained and lost” is yet another fallacy: moving the goalposts.
Also, it’s rather “curious” how you skipped what I said about the Romans, even if it throws a bucket of cold water over your easy-to-contest “smart people in the past believed it!”.
Now you’re really straining.
Now you’re really straining.
You do realise that this reads a lot like an implicit acknowledgement that you’re a failure to counter any argument contradicting your claim… right? “Run to the hills!”
That’s a rather self-serving analysis. Superficial and transparant at that. You should couch your bile more subtly.
No the sensible conclusion is that we have more information these days and can make different observations from that information.
It’s true but keep in mind that the other user is ignorant on the difference between “ignorance” and “dumbness”, as this comment shows. So he’ll likely distort what you said into “you think that people in the past were dumb?” like he did there.
You made a link. I’m touched.
Surely observation, ideally, acts independently from any information. To constrain observation that way might lead to a selective blindness.
@cameron_vale@lemm.ee LOL nope.
No actually, that really is the logical conclusion.
If I told people that I couldn’t see the sun in the sky, they’d tell me to see a doctor.
@cameron_vale@lemm.ee no, you ask for proof, that is what we do.
I think we’d just jump right to the medication actually.
But assuming that they saw little people and we don’t. (And there are methods for performing that experiment (meditation, hallucinogens, fasting…)). What do you suppose is going on there?
A culture-wide shift in research methods?
Still believing in that nonsense. That’s what’s wrong with modern people.
It seems to be that your question is a misinterpretation of past philosophies and theologies. Believing in an afterlife isn’t even natural for human beings and you can check that out in the work of anthropologist who trace our ancestry to hunter gatherers. Most of them have a really straightforward relationship with death.
What you mean is the thinkers of civilizations, and that’s a topic that Lewis Mumford covered in his book The Myth of the Machine. That thinking in the afterlife and all those tools like spirits and gods were used along history for… Power. You can think of that like proto-science or just trying to make sense of the reality, but to assume that all smart people of the past believed in gods, spirits, “the little people” and the afterlife is to picture a really homogeneous (probably greek or egyptian) past of humanity.
I wouldn’t say “What’s wrong with us modern people?” since today I find really reasonable to be critical of one’s and other beliefs. Not for the sake of destroying it, but in search for better philosophical answers. If you say something exists, you better try to explain what it is and how did you conclude that it exists and, if possible, show some empirical evidence. Today we’ve got science that is to date our best shot at nailing some comprehension of our material realities, yet, it all exists in a socio-political context, so to assume that something is “scientific” and therefore “real” is to have things mixed.
I suggest you to check the history of philosophy, that work of Mumford that I find it to be a masterpiece in sociology that everyone should know, and if possible, maybe understand how serious thinkers think: some are believers, some are not, but a sure thing is that a conversation about the validity of some positions exists somewhere. Like Spinozas god or Descartes god, how magical thinking works, why we believe what we believe, etc.
“Brave defenders of the truth.”
Says the guy who edited his post down to barely nothing but an insult.
For hundreds of years, people assumed lightning to be caused by divine intervention. Myth is an easy way to explain things you do not have the tools for to understand.
As for gods: every area around the planet at some point developed some kind of system of deities, many of which were completely incompatible with each other. Christianity and the Greek pantheon don’t exactly mix, and they both have conflicting explanations for certain phenomena. Are the tribespeople of one particular island of the coast of Africa the ones to crack the code and figure out the meaning of life? Should we believe the Abrahamic take on religion based on the amount of believers alone? It’s hard to say.
You should also consider the situation people lived in before the age of news papers, printing press, radio, TV, and the internet. The size of your world view depends on how much information is able to reach you. As a medieval villager, your reach of information is “the local town, maybe two towns over, and whatever merchants have heard on their travels”. There was no Spiderman x MLP fanfiction for you to read, you had to make your own fun. Your community had to come up with stories, games, and songs to keep yourself entertained, with a little help from neighbouring populations, of course.
There’s also superstition; when your life doesn’t exactly involve travelling the world, it’s easy to come to weird conclusions. You do one new/different/special thing, or you see someone else do it, and then all of the sudden your cattle gets sick? There must’ve been some connection, because you didn’t change anything else! There’s nobody to contradict you, no books to explain what really happened, all you have is your reasoning and observation. It’s so easy to just look up an explanation for something, or ask Lemmy “why does this happen” with a picture, but fifty years ago you just didn’t know. What’s the biggest religion in India? If you want to know, you’d better hope your local library has a recent book on that (do you even have a library?), or you’ll just… never know. Best you can do is ask your family and friends, but if they don’t know (or say something wrong), the trail just ends.
Superstition can also be good for a society. If you believe the trees are full of nature spirits, and bad things will come to you if you hurt nature around you (combined with a solid “see!” whenever a storm hits right after some kids burned down a small patch of forest), you’re less likely to damage your environment. Watching out for gnomes will also have you watch out for other creatures on the ground. Evil bog spirits make you afraid of dangerous areas that can drown you.
The best we know now comes from the people who could write, and those were often either rich people (scholars, scientists) who had the means to access new material, or deeply religious people. This makes for quite the bias when it comes to reading about what the common people actually thought. For example, we have extended descriptions of what the Germanic tribes were like from Caesar, but as a Roman general his views were far from objective truth, and parts of his descriptions were blatant lies. Similarly, religious travellers may exaggerate how much heathens really believe in things that don’t fit within the known “correct” religious context.
A thousand years in the future, a scholar may look at our popular culture and conclude that Christian nations believed in an immortal Greek saint living on the north pole with an army of elves. Much of our written works pretend that Santa is real, because that’s part of the fun.
Also: most people still believe in an afterlife. Plenty of scientists are religious; 16% of Harvard students are Catholic, 12% are Buddhist, and the list goes on. Agnostics and atheists are actually a minority, and I would consider Harvard students to be either very smart or part of the elite. And it’s not just the elite.
Genies/Jinns are accepted as fact in many Muslim circles because the Quran verifies their existence, even if their origins lie in an entirely different pre-Islamic religion. There are also plenty of cultures that believe in spirits, gnomes, woodland ghosts, monsters, you name it; you just don’t hear about them all that often if you don’t belong to a culture that does, because there are so many other stories for you to absorb. There are entire books about this stuff, from secular perspectives but also from the perspective of believers, though you may need to look for one in your language, as many English countries have been heavily Christianised.
If you’re Christian, perhaps the tale of an immortal carpenter born to a virgin mother absolving the sins of all sounds a lot more sane than gnomes or elf folk, but I would posit that the holy trinity is more of an unfathomable clusterfuck than any nature spirit ever was. I’d also think the belief that the bread and wine/juice you eat on Sundays turns into that carpenter’s flesh and blood is pretty fantastical to those who first learn about Christianity. On the other hand, far from every Christian believes that the food is literally transformed; churches and religious people aren’t one humongous hivemind.
Perhaps you should check your local area for folk tales. Ghosts in caves, monsters in the woods, that kind of thing. A local group of researchers collected half a book’s worth of local folk tales from my home town, which I thought was quite strictly Christian; the woods had stories about Germanic rituals despite the entire place having been Christianised for about a thousand years or more. Old Germanic rituals involving fires are also quite popular, although it’s less about appeasing the spirits and greeting the new year and just “a thing we do” these days.
