
Against Disenchantment - Vigier
https://aeon.co/essays/enlightenment-does-not-demand-disenchantment-with-the-world
======
idoubtit
Metaphysical subjects like this are mostly a matter of taste, but I can't
resist pointing out there are bias and errors in this.

> the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in
> spirits, myths or magic.

Religion is excluded from all this "enchantment" talk. I don't know if it is
because of the personal belief of the author, or because it would hurt most of
the American readers. E.g. Christians generally believe in miracles and
saints, or at least they believe that some kind of omnipotent spirit watches
over them. Isn't that the most common form of magic?

> Chasing the domination of nature, humans began to dominate each other. [...]
> led toward the objectification of humanity; the concentration camps and
> Gulag followed.

This is absurd. When Tamerlan destroyed cities and killed hundreds of
thousands of people, there was no desire of dominating Nature, nor
"enchantment". Three thousand years ago, Assurbanipal organized large scale
transfers of populations, and he claimed he tortured civilians routinely. Many
"enlightened" religious wars led to huge atrocities, where the opposite side
was treated worse than cattle. And of course, slavery and "sub-human races"
are an old invention totally unrelated to the domination of Nature. Modern
tools led to powerful acts, but "objectification of humanity" is nothing new.

[edit: typos]

~~~
rjf72
The article hit on this exact point with a rather interesting quote: "I should
note that disenchantment should not be confused with secularisation. The
sociological evidence suggests that de-Christianisation, while usually equated
with secularisation, often correlates with an increase in belief in spirits,
ghosts and magic – not the reverse.".

The article is more about animism than magic. Personally I find the confident,
sometimes bordering on militant, rejection of animism by some to be no less
peculiar than the no less confident adoption of others in religions
undoubtedly invented by men. Why? We know that our brains seem to drive most
of our decisions through various complex interactions with the rest of our
body. And when these actors are manipulated, our behaviors thus change. This
seems like a clear enough argument for determinism that would clearly run
contrary to animism, but there's one little problem.

"Me." I am standing here believing that I am the one choosing my words,
formatting my text, conveying my thoughts. Why would I be observing this,
imagining myself to be the one engaging in such actions? If you write a
program to generate a pseudo-random number I think everybody would agree it's
quite absurd to imagine some being briefly flickers into existence, imagines
himself picking a number, and then flickers back out of existence. Yet how
does this notion become any less absurd as the program becomes more complex?
You have to engage in extensive hand-waving and appeals to unknown and
untestable facts to argue against animism in this case. Quite ironic then that
it is this same behavior that people use as a critique of animism.

Don't take this as an endorsement or condemnation of either side. If anything
it's an an appeal against radicalism on either side: believe what you want,
try to persuade _interested_ others if it gives you satisfaction, don't
escalate beyond that.

------
dr_dshiv
This has relevance to the magic of AI and the disenchantment feeling when we
understand it.

What we need is Feynman's enchantment at integrating scientific understanding
with awe, where they aren't in opposition. Where learning the biology of a
rose can enhance appreciation.

E.g., "Wow, such a simple algorithm can create intelligent outcomes"

~~~
im_down_w_otp
In the tech industry it doesn't feel to me like we're erring toward
disenchantment. If anything, it feels like we're imbuing enormous numbers of
mundane things with magical properties and cult-like followings to go along
with them.

There's a massive ecosystem of merkle trees which are purportedly going to
completely transform humanity through how we transact payments.

There are multiple glamorous conferences, dedicated to banal things like
process schedulers, that an outsider could easily mistake for Sunday Mass at a
megachurch. Furnished with altars reserved for an evangelizing priesthood
sermonizing the congregation. We sometimes even live stream them too!

Contrasted against being disenchanted, we're constantly generating enormous
amounts of enthusiasm about what we do, why we do it, and even every nook &
cranny of how we do it.

I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it does stand in sharp
contrast to the idea that we're wallowing in disenchantment.

~~~
bartcobain
What a way to look at things. I agree with you. Also, that makes me think that
there's even the term "evangelist" used in the tech talks...

~~~
vinceguidry
The central definition of magic at use here is that an act is magical to the
extent that _control_ is removed from _causation_. Something went my way, but
I didn't directly do anything in order to make it happen, and there's no
_rational_ way to ascertain how. It's as if I waved my hands and my will just
manifested.

The key is that behind every act of magic is a hidden jungle of complexity
that the magical practitioner must master. A wizard masters arcane
correspondences, which largely involve study of magical _law_ , which is a
rational domain divorced from human intention. If you mumble the words right
and have just the right slice of frog lips, then your fireball goes boom. Or
your code has to pass the syntax checker before it can get on with semantic
evaluation.

A priest masters the domain of human emotion and feeling, learning how to
harness these things to earn mastery over _divine_ power. If enough people
believe a thing to be true, the truth manifests, called by a higher power into
physical expression in the world. Or your startup manages to find funding
because YC gave you their stamp of orthodox approval.

You can't dispel magic because that means that there's no longer any
complicated domain that we fail to understand but will pay dearly for a guide
through it. Any time you have that, the emergent property of people willing to
front-load time and effort for later riches and the dramatic flair for making
it all look easy will manifest.

~~~
bartcobain
... and there's also the Placebo Effect.

------
skybrian
In some areas, superstitions persist because scientific research isn't doing
all that much to dispell them. The science is controversial and available
evidence isn't straightforward. Consider how many people think about nutrition
and diets. Often people choose what to eat based on invisible attributes
associated with food (labelling) that we as consumers can't observe directly.

Opaque processes can do it too. With the rise of targeted advertising,
coincidences can easily be interpreted as the result of someone watching you
whether they are or not.

~~~
hyperpallium
Countless millenia of empirical observation has the stronger scientific claim.

I'd like an elementary theory of nutrition, but evidence first.

~~~
skybrian
You don't have direct access to past observations. Most were never recorded.
At best you have highly filtered and biased summaries.

------
beefman
I'm glad to know there's a name for this. The world has definitely become less
enchannted in the last 30 years, and even the last 10. I imagine this process
has been roughly continuous since ancient times, and that would be consistent
with my understanding of history.

It's not as straightforward as the fraction of people who believe in magic,
though that is certainly related and decreasing. It's also the importance of
art, the importance of holidays, how easily we have sex, how much violence we
tolerate...

------
paganel
Up until recently I had only known of most of max Max Weber's thoughts through
the books written by other thinkers (I had only read his "Protestant Ethic"
about 10 years ago) but as I'm about to finish his "Economy and Society" [1] I
more and more realize that we live in a Max Weber world, we have been doing so
since the advent of capitalism (I'd say since the early 1400s by which time
the Italian city states had "invented" most of capitalism's basic tools).

I remember an interview from back in 2002 or 2003 with today's most wealthy
man, that is Jeff Bezos, and I was stuck by his insistence even back then of
measuring and counting almost everything that involved Amazon's business,
there was no room for happenstance or of "we think of taking that business
decision because [insert some intuition-based thing]", everything was
rationalized, there was no room for "enchanted" solutions (the ones involving
intuition, for example), disenchantment had already taken place.

Couple of years later (I think around 2005-2006) I also remember the partial
furore caused by a Google designer who had decided to leave the company
because he was unhappy with Marissa Mayer's decisions of using certain colors
on the Google front-page based on A/B testing alone, there was no room for
"artistic thinking" anymore (not his exact words, but the general idea of his
post back then), a specific blue nuance had to be chosen only after A/B
testing, there was nothing left to the designers' imagination. Again, a big
step towards rationalization and a big step away from the "enchanted" artistic
work.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_and_Society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_and_Society)

~~~
hguant
If you're interested in Weber, you might find Erich Fromm interesting as well.
He studied under Weber's brother in Germany, fled to America during the rise
of Nazism, and wrote a monograph for the officials and State Department types
who would later coalesce CIA about the conditions which lead a democratic
people to turn to Fascism. The monograph was later expanded into a book called
_Escape From Freedom_, which is widely regarded as the first work of political
psychology.

~~~
paganel
> If you're interested in Weber, you might find Erich Fromm interesting as
> well

I did read his "Sane Society" just recently and he was almost like a
revelation to me, I didn't know about "Escape From Freedom" and the story
behind it, I'll sure be checking it out, thanks for the recommendation!

------
eli_gottlieb
Bloody hell, that was one of the most uselessly long-winded essays I've ever
read! Do you actually expect to find any fairies, gods, ghosts, successful
sorcerers, etc, or not? Worse, the basic question is never even posed: why
should we tie our conception of society and our meaning-making capacities, as
applied to our own lives, to belief or disbelief in the supernatural?

After all, if the "supernatural" existed, it would just be _more natural_ ,
more _stuff with causal powers_ , which would therefore be intrinsically tied
into the rest of the causal order of things.

~~~
carapace
You're right I think (about the "supernatural", not the "uselessly long-
winded" bit, although I feel ya.)

Here's the thing that bother's me: _both_ the superstitious people and the
enlightened (in the sense of disenchanted) people are missing the point.

There is _always_ a boundary between the known and the unknown.

(Just to pick a wacky one at random: there is no scientific evidence one way
or another that "ghosts" are or are not made of "dark matter".)

I am not a scientist, but I am an amateur: I love science. Carl Sagan is a
hero of mine. So one day I attended a Reiki session. What's Reiki? (Spoiler
alert: NO ONE KNOWS! But I'm getting ahead of myself...) Reiki is the name
given to a kind of healing energy (apologies to any physicists reading this)
that can be channeled by people to engender healing effects.

So, I'm sitting in this chair, and this person is waving her arm at me from
about a meter away, and damned if I don't feel _something_ "filling me up" as
it were.

Now I've felt e.g. high voltage fields, I'm no stranger to the Van de Graff
generator and it's potential (no pun intended) to enable various party tricks.

This wasn't an electric field. For one thing I could feel it within the volume
of my body and (somehow) extending into the space around me. For another it
_heals_. I don't want to get into the personal details, but it accelerates or
engenders healing on mental, emotional and physical planes simultaneously.

Now my first reaction, after the awe waned a little, was, "OMG let's do
science to this!" But _neither_ the Reiki practitioners _nor_ the scientists
that I have met are interested.

If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki
"energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it
is just "more natural, more stuff with causal powers". But in my experience
the intersection on the Venn diagram of "Science People" and "Reiki People" is
very sparsely populated.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki
"energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it
is just "more natural, more stuff with causal powers". But in my experience
the intersection on the Venn diagram of "Science People" and "Reiki People" is
very sparsely populated.

Well dang. _A priori_ , I'd jump to a psychosomatic explanation, since your
body's interoceptive afferents are _extremely_ noisy, and so using top-down
beliefs to engender an illusion that a vast energy is filling your body
_ought_ to be easier than generating other sorts of hallucinations.

(Why yes, this is my research field. Why do you ask?)

But we should still be _testing_ this sort of thing. Assuming it _is_
psychosomatic and nothing more complicated than that (which is already pretty
reasonably complicated), what is it about the Reiki session that _allows_
engendering powerful psychosomatic effects?

~~~
carapace
> But we should still be _testing_ this sort of thing.

Yes!

I did some informal experimentation in the years following my introduction to
Reiki. Nothing you could write a paper about, but I ruled out (to my own
satisfaction) simple psychosomatic or placebo effects.

> ...a psychosomatic explanation, since your body's interoceptive afferents
> are extremely noisy, and so using top-down beliefs to engender an illusion
> that a vast energy is filling your body ought to be easier than generating
> other sorts of hallucinations.

I agree, but that's what struck me about the incident I described: no one told
me what was happening or what to expect. As a "sciency" kind of a person, I
was astonished by the sensory impressions. I'm not prone to hallucinations
generally (I used to work with self-hypnosis a lot and I'm pretty well-
calibrated to my own "interoceptive afferents". It would have been very
strange for my nervous system to have presented hallucinations to me without
"telling me", so to speak.) The other astonishing thing was that at that time
in my life I was suffering from severe depression and immediately as the Reiki
treatment concluded the depression lifted and I felt (wonderfully!) normal for
the rest of the evening. The effect wore off but the depression was never as
severe again after that. I can offer no explanation why or how someone waving
her arm at me for a few minutes could have done _that_.

> what is it about the Reiki session that allows engendering powerful
> psychosomatic effects?

Indeed.

Since then, I have sometimes demonstrated Reiki with people without telling
them much about it beforehand. Some people feel nothing. One woman, a very
spiritual Christian, jumped because she felt "a tingling clear up to my
shoulder." Some feel warmth, others tingling or vibration, etc...

And Reiki seems to be effective on animals, even at a distance without
physical contact or even motion. E.g. I can stand still and "beam" Reiki at a
sick animal and it will get better. I would _love_ to do this in a proper
experimental set up. It has just never come together.

For what it's worth, from the viewpoint of rational materialism, that Reiki
aids healing is one of its _least_ astonishing properties.

~~~
AgentME
>Since then, I have sometimes demonstrated Reiki with people without telling
them much about it beforehand. Some people feel nothing. One woman, a very
spiritual Christian, jumped because she felt "a tingling clear up to my
shoulder." Some feel warmth, others tingling or vibration, etc...

If you asked me at any time to list off what I'm feeling now, I'd probably
list a bunch of things like those that I wouldn't have noticed before being
asked to consider what I'm feeling. If you told me you had done something
right before that could plausibly affect me, I'd be suspicious you had
something to do with it, even though it's most likely coincidental.

The fact that you weren't told the full explanation doesn't mean it couldn't
be psychosomatic. People respond to visible attention, especially if it's done
in a unique way. A proper test would either have to show that the person still
gets the effect without them noticing any attention on them, or show that the
person doesn't get an effect when there is the same kind of visible attention
on them but the practicer is secretly not beaming Reiki to them. The practicer
might act or interpret the subject's responses differently when not actually
beaming Reiki, so a double blind study would be necessary. You could have an
interviewer explain to a subject that you (in another room where the subject
and the interviewer can't see or hear you in any way) will beam Reiki into the
subject, and the interviewer records how the subject says they feel. During
the experiment, you flip a coin and only beam Reiki if it lands on heads.
(It's important that the placebo sequence is random and not known to the
interviewer. The easiest way to avoid accidentally communicating the sequence
ahead of time to the interviewer is to only decide whether it's a placebo run
or not during the individual experiment after you're split up from the subject
and interviewer.)

Another kind of experiment that can be done is to see if Reiki can be used to
communicate information through timing. Put the subject in one room and you in
another where the subject can't see or otherwise perceive you at all. The
subject is told that you will beam Reiki to them at some point, and they need
to write down the time as soon as they sense it. In the other room, you write
down the time and set a fifteen minute timer. You roll a d10 and then wait
that many minutes before beaming Reiki to the subject and writing down the
time of that. You wait until the timer goes off before exiting the room and
telling the subject that the experiment is over. (Subjects might be likely to
think they feel Reiki when they hear you coming over to them to end the
experiment, or they might think they feel Reiki randomly after a longer wait,
so you wouldn't want the time you end the experiment to be linked at all to
the random time you beamed it to them.) Then you collect all the written times
and see if the times you beamed Reiki line up to when people received it. (I'm
not sure if it's strictly necessary, but you could also add a control group by
making it so after you leave the subject to your own room, before you roll the
d10, you flip a coin to decide whether or not you'll actually beam Reiki to
them. Imagine you ran the main experiment without controls, and the analysis
on whether the individual times lined up was inconclusive and you didn't know
what to make of it, but on average they said they felt Reiki after five
minutes, and you knew you beamed it on average after five minutes, so you
thought it was a success. But if had a control group and knew they also said
it happened after five minutes on average, that would tell you that the main
group's results had nothing to do with Reiki.)

If the social interaction between the Reiki beamer and the subject is
important -- well, that would be a hint it's a psychosomatic effect -- there's
still a further double-blind test that could be done. You could train a group
of people to be Reiki practitioners, and then you could train a second group
to be Reiki practitioners but change some detail that causes the Reiki beaming
to not work, and then set both groups loose on some subjects and compare the
results of both. It's not perfect because you might teach the two groups
differently, you might accidentally teach the control group a different
version of Reiki that still works, the control group might work out the
missing detail, or the control group might notice the lack of results and act
differently, but it's still something.

~~~
carapace
First of all, thank you for responding in the spirit of the thing. Cheers!

Experimental design for Reiki would be a big challenge. Without getting into a
lot of details (that would sound outlandish anyway) much of these suggestions
wouldn't work.

Whatever it is, Reiki is exquisitely sensitive to intention of the people
involved. It only "cares" about healing. If your intention is to test Reiki,
it won't work. Reiki doesn't care. If your intention is to heal people, it
will work but you'll also heal the control group. There's no way to use Reiki
_not_ to heal some people, you see? You can't administer "placebo" Reiki.

> you could train a second group to be Reiki practitioners but change some
> detail that causes the Reiki beaming to not work

You couldn't though: if a student were worthy the "fake" training would work
anyway; conversely a "real" training would not work for a student who wasn't
worthy.

Like I said above, I don't think Reiki can be studied scientifically, although
I'd like to try.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>Whatever it is, Reiki is exquisitely sensitive to intention of the people
involved. It only "cares" about healing. If your intention is to test Reiki,
it won't work. Reiki doesn't care. If your intention is to heal people, it
will work but you'll also heal the control group. There's no way to use Reiki
not to heal some people, you see? You can't administer "placebo" Reiki.

Ascribing emotion and intention to a hypothesized nonliving object is a step
too far for me. Put up or shut up.

~~~
carapace
I never said it was nonliving.

The most parsimonious hypothesis I have come up with is that Reiki is life.
(That's a bit of a cop-out because both terms are somewhat loosely defined so
there's enough wiggle room to simply equate them, and it doesn't really add
much to a _scientific_ conversation does it?)

Check out: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the
Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698)

Reiki could be as simple and (relatively!) unremarkable as some kind of
biological near-field communication ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-
field_communication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-field_communication) )

> Put up or shut up.

Honestly, I'm just some weirdo on the internet. I'm in SF, if you're ever out
this way hit me up and I'll demonstrate Reiki for you. There are Reiki
practitioners in your city no doubt. If you're really interested you should go
meet some of them. I'm willing to keep answering your questions but if you
want to really see hard science doing some wild "supernatural" stuff, Levin's
work (above) is much more worth your time.

Cheers! :-)

\- - - -

edit: I was rereading my replies and it occurred to me that since, as I told
AgentME, there is apparently no distance limit to Reiki, we _could_ attempt a
demonstration. To wit: if you reply within, say, 24 hours with a time (Pacific
Standard if you would be so kind) I'll go ahead and do a distance treatment on
you. The image from your Github account is enough to "dial it in". (For sake
of parity I'll tell you that I'm "calroc" on that site. You can see what I
look like. ;-) Maybe nothing happens, maybe something. YMMV

@AgentME, same offer.

------
bfuller
This is something the situationalists addressed with the theory of derive.
There are plenty of people carrying on in that tradition, including my own
project.

------
PavlovsCat
> _Furthermore, the widely repeated claim that modern science necessarily
> produces disenchantment is equally a mistake. It fails on a philosophical
> level because it has been impossible to successfully and fully demarcate
> ‘science’ from other domains. As Larry Laudan, the greatest living
> philosopher of science, has shown, ‘there are no epistemic features which
> all and only the disciplines we accept as “scientific” share in common’ and,
> moreover there is no unitary scientific method._

There is, however, a result they share in common:

> _The rise of the natural sciences is credited with a demonstrable, ever-
> quickening increase in human knowledge and power; shortly before the modern
> age European mankind knew less than Archimedes in the third century B.C.,
> while the first fifty years of our century have witnessed more important
> discoveries than all the centuries of recorded history together. Yet the
> same phenomenon is blamed with equal right for the hardly less demonstrable
> increase in human despair or the specifically modern nihilism which has
> spread to ever larger sections of the population, their most significant
> aspect perhaps being that they no longer spare the scientists themselves,
> whose well-founded optimism could still, in the nineteenth century, stand up
> against the equally justifiable pessimism of thinkers and poets. The modern
> astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the
> adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose
> qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring
> instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much
> resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber."
> Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and
> instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man
> encounters only himself._

\-- Hannah Arent

You might say that's being blind and alone, and knowing it. I _still_ don't
agree that this necessarily needs to lead to pessimism or nihilism or
disenchantment, I am joyful because I want to be, not because I have reasons
for it I couldn't dissect and disappear with "rational thought".

But what I observe is that, we seem to have regressed from that, we love to
pretend objectivity is even available to us, and think science is somehow the
opposite of "mere subjective experience". It's still just subjective
experience, on a larger scale by more people, but that doesn't make it
fundamentally different. Heisenberg knew this, we no longer, and I wonder why
that is.

> _How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the
> entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its
> sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns?
> Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all
> directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through
> an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not
> become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to
> light lanterns in the morning?_

\-- Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Parable of the Madman" (1882)

