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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Dunno. As a scientist I say bring me flowery language and religiosity any day on this subject.

Some things are improved by formalism, empiricism, and positivist reductionism. Some things are made worse by that kind of thinking.

Science is not always a process of "removing confusion". A mature scientist who can question science itself stops seeing it as a hammer and everything else as a nail.

Secular post-modernity is brilliant at giving us power plants, roads, and medicines. In other regards it's stunted our emotional and social development, bringing us to the brink of total war and social disintegration.

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> Some things are improved by formalism, empiricism, and positivist reductionism. Some things are made worse by that kind of thinking.

But that doesn't mean anything is made better by mysticism and appealing to some vague idea of transcendence.

If nothing formal can be said about a topic, then perhaps nothing at all can be said about that topic. Which is perfectly fine. It seems to me that so much of the available literature concerning such things is driven by the desperate insistence that it must be possible to investigate it, and if it cannot be done scientifically, there must be some other way.

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

I'll respectfully disagree and explain why.

> But that doesn't mean anything is made better by mysticism and appealing to some vague idea of transcendence.

Actually it does. Let's talk about "better". Better for what, for who?

Some of the most powerful forces for positive change are stories. Stories are made-up, vague, hand-waving. metaphorical and allegorical. They occupy a different, parallel communicative realm to science, maths and equations. But they are no less true, particularly with regard to their utility if you want to communicate important ideas to lots of people.

Certainly, mysticism is not an analytical or investigative tool. But it is a powerful communicative, and - since you raise Wittgenstein - a powerful symbolic tool for word-concepts that "stand in for" formalisms.

To be honest I think that the way the younger generations relate to smartphones, the Internet and AI is very much mysticism. The words have changed, but I don't see concepts like "The Cloud" having any more substance than "Ectoplasm" and "ethereal spirits".

Again, that new generation mysticism isn't a bad thing, it's just a way of dealing with unfathomable complexity through stories that we can all share.

I think you're confusing mysticism with abstraction. The Cloud is an umbrella term for a collection of technologies and services, and for the way people interact with them. That interaction isn't "mystical", it simply happens through so many obscuring layers of abstraction that most people don't understand what is actually going on. But the cloud itself is very much a real thing, or, to be more precise, composed of many things that are very much real.

By contrast, ectoplasm is a pseudo-scientfic term for something that has never been demonstrated to exist under controlled conditions, and has a long tradition of association with known charlatans. The two aren't comparable at all.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Pile in enough abstractions and yeah, the cloud becomes magic.

Are there many mystical experiences that if you peeled away enough layers you could have rational explanations? Probably. But we don't, and in the meantime the mystical explanations do give us a big picture approach.

I agree with you regarding Ectoplasm, but one could choose a different mystical example. The ancient notion that thunder and lightning were the Gods getting angry or fighting. Lightning is real enough, but ancient people didn't know what it was, so had a story to explain to themselves what was happening. People like stories. I used to know an atmospheric physicist whose project launched small rockets into thunderstorms to try and trigger a lightning bolt discharge. He would joke that he was tempting the Gods' anger.

Since you raised the idea of abstraction (and having typed my fair share of Lambdas) I'd say that it's a powerful idea we can both focus on. Not all abstractions are mystified. Some are. Clearly there are things that do not exist yet retain utility as concepts; money, democracy, wellness. And there are "real" things that only muddy the waters.

Yes, one can point to a specific computer and say that it is part of The Cloud, just as you can point to a neuron or person and say that is part of a brain or a society. But what does that really tell us about societies, brains or clouds? I'm obviously channelling an inner Douglas Hofstadter here.

The Cloud is something mystical not because it's an abstraction but because people don't care. It's more of an abdication than an abstraction. You can read a thousand comments here on HN literally saying stuff like "I don't care how it works".

We positively celebrate it's mystery.

It's not a noble-savage argument to ask, whether there is more intelligence and honour in the hopelessly unscientific, lost person who in their heart knows astrology is nonsense, but cares.... or the well educated scientist who has the capacity to deeply understand the Cloud but chooses not to as a "don't care" coping mechanism for complexity. That is what I mean by modern mysticism .

> Secular post-modernity is brilliant at giving us power plants, roads, and medicines.

Postmodernism hasn’t been around long enough for any of that. Perhaps you meant “enlightenment”. It’s the “Age of Reason” that kicked society along this road. Post modernism has given us something else. A set of tools to deconstruct any human concept you can name, until it can be shown as meaningless. Which, I would posit, is the “end of enlightenment”.

Postmodernism posits that everything is bullshit when you look hard enough.

Unfortunately the bullshit is useful when building things.

Indeed, I was copy-pasting the parent poster's words so as to faithfully respond.

Enlightenment, Modernism and Post-modernism all being distinct things, no-one parodies their confusion better than Monty Python; What have the Romans ever done for us?

Is Post-modernism the end of Enlightenment? Maybe yes, but not in a 'bad way', simply that post-modernism is the last stage of enlightenment, when a developmental stage has attained self-awareness and self-critical capabilities.

First we had to become enlightened in order to see the limits of enlightenment.

> Post modernism has given us .. a set of tools to deconstruct any human concept you can name, until it can be shown as meaningless. Which, I would posit, is the “end of enlightenment”.

I enjoyed reading this pithy summary of post-modernism. As for the parent post:

> it's stunted our emotional and social development, bringing us to the brink of total war and social disintegration.

This was the doing of "modernism", the age of reason, the enlightenment, and the industrial age. Post-modernism is the questioning and subversion of that grand narrative of objectivity, rationality, science, social progress.

From the wasteland of everything deconstructed as meaningless.. Hopefully something new can be born, maybe even a "spiritual language in the vocabulary of science and empiricism".

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