Everyone. Welcome to Non Trivial. I'm your host, Sean mcclure. In this episode, I talk about the role that magic superstition, irrationality has played in human progress, specifically the so called enlightenment. I will use the life of Paracelsus, the Swiss physician alchemist and Latt theologian of the German Renaissance as an exemplar of one who paved the way for progress, yet believes wholeheartedly in things that today we would not associate with elect advancement.
So I want to show how much of science, engineering came not from some departure from myth and magic as the usual narrative goes, but because of beliefs and things that today seem counter to enlightened thinking, I will argue that there are strong evolutionary mechanisms behind superstition and irrational thinking and that to continue making progress, humanity will need to return to magic. Let's get started. OK. I'll return to magic, the illogical roots of progress.
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OK? So a quick overview of what I'll be talking about in this episode. Um This is really about the, well, it's about a number of things. It's, it's ultimately about the role that things like, you know, superstition or religion or what we might think today as being almost outdated or fictitious thinking, right?
When we think about science and progress, we, you know, we think about objective, logical, rational thinking and we kind of think of, you know, much of that progress as, as removing ourselves from the myth and the magic that preceded it. Um The book that I'm gonna use for this week's to, to, to anchor this week's presentation is called the Devil's Doctor by Philip Ball, the devil's Doctor Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance magic and science.
So, what I like about this book is, it's an uh an example of kind of that transition period or that intermediate period between, you know, when, when basically all of society had some aspect to it, that was, you know, mythical magical, a belief in the, in superstition, a belief in, uh you know, and of course, religion plays a big role here, you know, basically, people would anchor much of their life around things that they could not perceive. Right, because science wasn't here.
We weren't measuring a bunch of things. We weren't trying to apply, you know, logical thinking and mathematics to things. We didn't have, uh, you know, the scientific method in place. And so a lot of what drove uh society and the individuals within that society was a belief in things that today we would kind of consider maybe even a bit ridiculous, right? Um You know, uh you know, myth and magical, you know, ideas and incantations.
And of course, we've got, you know, witchcraft and then of course, there's the religious side of things and, and, and so the purely scientific, rational view that we have today supposedly departed from a lot of that. Ok. So today I wanna talk about that transition period. I wanna use Paracelsus's life uh in the, in this book, The Devil's doctor as an example.
And, and really what I'm going to argue in this episode is that the enlightened period that we're in now supposedly is not really a departure from my magic. And, and it wasn't that the transition period wasn't one where people were removing themselves from those beliefs. Actually, they were quite causal, in fact, the, the belief in something beyond yourself, regardless of what that is, whether that's a religious thing or a spiritual thing.
Um or, or, you know, a magic thing, whatever that is, uh that's actually critical to trying to make sense of the world, to motivate you to do it in the first place to try to mechanize, you know, the operations behind what you believe, you know, is magical or is possible. And it's that, that actually motivates uh individuals in society at large to, to, towards things like science and technology.
So I'll talk about what I mean and, and ultimately I'll wrap that up at the end, which is, you know, really, we haven't departed from that um in, in some ways and in other ways we have, but that's kind of to the detriment of progress. And actually, we, we kind of need to return to that magic. So I'll, I'll tell you what I mean by that.
And uh and we'll look at some of the mechanisms, uh some of the concepts um we'll be looking at is, is or the, or the patterns of this episode will be things like narrative fallacy, uh what I like to call the power of naivete, um something I call indirect targets. This idea that the target that you're aiming at is not necessarily what you're going to get out of it.
And so it's a, it's good to have targets that are actually quite unrelated to the ultimate thing that pops out because the thing that pops out ends up being a byproduct. So we'll look at that. Um we'll take a look at some evolutionary mechanisms and then uh universality, which, which kind of ties into the way Paracelsus was.
Um you know, understanding, well, today we would call health care but you know how it kind of uh you, you try to mechanize the understanding of things that were related to alchemy and, and uh and, and what we would call today as medicine. But anyways, we'll get into all of that. So let's get started again. This week's book is The Devil's Doctor by Philip Ball. So let's begin with a science narrative. What I mean by that is, you know, when we, we, we take a look at modernity, right?
Modern society, science obviously plays a very large role. And the usual narrative there at a high level is, is, you know, science kind of broke away from superstition, right, which seems to make sense when we think about things scientifically, we are, you know, supposedly looking at it quite objectively, we're trying to strip away a lot of the bias and the emotion. We're not trying to make claims about things that we can't measure. We want to make claims about things that we can measure.
And, and even though there's still a decent amount of interpretation, you know, we continually test that knowledge. Of course, we have the scientific method that, you know, I've argued in the past isn't really followed. But so the narrative goes, you know, we, we come up with hypotheses and then we test those hypotheses and then we, they do or they don't work. And if they don't work, we try it again and, and we, we basically try to converge on some um knowledge, right?
We try to accumulate objective knowledge that is testable. And so the story that we're told about the enlightenment, which is basically, you know, again, this transition period where before the enlightenment, you, you believe in things like superstition and magic and, and obviously a lot of religion and then that enlightenment came along and said, wait a second, let's not talk about things that we can't really prove quote unquote or at least show evidence for.
Let's, let's let's measure things and be objective about this. That's the enlightenment, right? So the story that we're told about the enlightenment is that men decided to break away from what I'll just kind of generally call superstition. The idea that increased objectivity and rationality supplanted, you know, quote unquote foolish beliefs in, in things that we cannot see. The idea that the origins of science must have bear the same patterns we see in science today.
So in other words, if there was a time in history where we started to break away from myth and magic or superstition, that it must have been people who are doing things that we associate with science today, right? I mean, it must have been individuals that said, no, I think that's, I think myth is ridiculous. I think we shouldn't believe in superstition.
I wanna do this objectively, I wanna start looking, you know, it must have kind of been people doing what we're kind of doing today when we think about science. But the problem is, you know, with this idea is something that I've called in the past. The pattern is not the path. In fact, I have a whole nontrivial episode called that, right? The pattern is not the path.
And, and just to remind listeners this idea that when you're looking at something today, uh you know, it could be a phenomenon that you're measuring, you know, scientifically, it could be a pattern in someone's life. It could be something that, you know, looks successful, whatever it is, you're looking at it, you're measuring it, you're talking about, it has a pattern to it. You tend to think that, well, that must be the pattern going forward.
In other words, if I want to continue to do this, just keep doing that pattern. And what I've said, you know, what I, what I argue is that the pattern is not the path. So whatever emerged as the pattern that you're looking at is not the recipe to get there. OK? And I give a number of examples in that episode. So you guys can, if you haven't already, uh you know, listeners can go listen to that episode. The pattern is not the path, but this is an example of that.
We're looking at science, looking at technology and we can see the logic in it, we can see how things, you know, seem to add up and it's very objective and, and, you know, when you're making a scientific argument, you tend to leave the, the, you know, the majority of emotion out of it because you see that as bias and, and it just doesn't follow the logical path. So we tend to think that, well, if we want to do more science, we should be like that, right?
We should continue to try to be objective and we continue to try to strip away emotion and bias and a lot of that kind of organic, messy human stuff and focus on just what is just focus on the facts. That must be the pattern for it. And that must also be the pattern backwards. Meaning the again, the people that were part of this transition period, the people that were part of bringing the enlightenment must have had some aspect of that to them, right?
That, that, that pattern of stripping away uh a lot of that messy complexity and a lot of that emotional bias and belief in things that we would today maybe see uh deem as foolish. They must have been part of that journey of trying to strip that away. But I'm gonna argue that, that, that, that that's, that's not the case that whether you're going forward or whether you're going back, we'll do the forward stuff a little bit later in the episode.
When, when I talk about a return to magic that I don't think the pattern, I, I don't think the, the way forward is a focus on objectivity and logic. I think that's a bit of a myth that science works like that. But looking back, it's also incorrect. It's also a, a really a narrative fallacy to say that, you know, the men of the time that were ushering in the enlightenment must have just been more focused on, you know, like logic and rational thinking than they were on myth and magic.
And I don't think that's true and, and you know, we we we can back that up with historical accounts. And part of that is this book, The devil's doctor, right? When we look at Paracelsus, so um a little bit more on the mad on magic and the Enlightenment. So is, is magic and I'm, and I'm using these terms essentially interchangeably magic, superstition, you know, myth, uh even religion for now, let's just kind of bundle those into one category, right?
Things that you don't directly measure and do you know scientifically, right? Did the enlightenment overcome that old thinking or was such thinking the cause we kind of have this dark ages myth, right? The dark ages where humans weren't maybe producing that much in the way of technology or in the way of that of, of thinking that would have led to progress.
So we've got this narrative that there is, you know, there's this dark ages that was that, you know, that came before the enlightenment, right? So there's this, this kind of magic or, versus enlightenment or, or, you know, magic versus science.
But the other way of thinking about it is, is that it was actually the cause, you know, um because if it wasn't magic that or the belief in superstition or something, you know, beyond yourself that you couldn't perceive that wasn't driving science, then what was it, what was the aim? Because it's not that, you know, a serious amount of logic existed within many of the people that brought in the enlightenment. It's not like you had this big mathematical arsenal with which to use.
You know, again, we're kind of, it's, it's this anachronism to kind of look back and assume that, you know, people kind of had what we had today, but of course they didn't and they weren't thinking the way we thought today. Uh And, and so you got to put yourself in their shoes. You have to really try to think about what it was like back then. It wasn't a scientific world, it wasn't a mathematical world, it wasn't a super logical world.
It was full of myth and full of magic and that, you know, what your chances are, regardless of who you were you, that that is what you believe. That is how you were brought up. And even if you're part of you maybe were kind of skeptical of it. You know, you didn't have the lens that you have today with which to try to be skeptical. So you really would have doubted yourself even if you were, you know, uh, having some skepticism around that.
So if it wasn't, you know, logic or math or things we associate today, that was the aim, then, what was the aim back then? Well, there wouldn't have been an aim unless it was this idea of myth and magic. In other words, if you were trying to explain the world, you were trying to explain the things that you believed, right?
The things that you thought about the superstitions that you had the magic in, you know, magical incantation, incantations that would have led to stuff that, that, that's kind of what you were trying to mechanize. In other words, your interest in the world around, you wouldn't have been maybe the way scientists think today or they're looking at, you know, uh biology, the way we think of biology, you know, plant and animal life or things in the universe.
You know, now we've got all these pictures of the stars and the Galaxies and, you know, they didn't have access to any of that. So what was the interest? What was the aim back then? Well, I think the aim was the magic, right? The aim would have been to explain. Not, well, you know, necessarily how do plants and animals grow and do what they do.
I mean, there would have been some of that but it was more through the lens of, you know, how, how did God bring this to be, or how does you know, the life force inside of an element, you know, cure someone if that's what you believe or, or improve your life, why does you know the alignment of the stars, uh, you know, from a, from a astrological point of view? Um You know, why does that either do good things or bad things?
Why does it allow the crops to come up or not that whatever you were believing from a mythical standpoint, that's what you were trying to essentially understand on a deeper level. So that was the aim. It wasn't people back in time thinking, well, I need to be more logical, I need to separate myself from myth. It was the explanation of the myth. So, so that was the target. So when we think about the enlightenment and we think about things like magic, magic is not the antithesis of progress.
It was very much the goal that drove people towards what we now call the enlightenment. So I think, I think, you know, again, going back, there's this bit of science narrative, which is largely a narrative fallacy that the people back in the day were separating themselves from myth and magic. Not at all, they were aiming towards it. They were trying to understand the myth and magic more deeply and that is what brings us to what we would now call this kind of enlightened thinking.
So that, so there's this causal aspect, OK? And let, and keep that in mind as we start thinking about what we should be doing going forward. OK. I'll, I'll, I'll start talking about how there's this kind of self dampening. There's this mitigating aspect to thinking that the pattern forward is, is more logic and more mathematics. I think there's actually something wrong with that. And that doesn't mean logic and math are bad.
But again, there's a difference between what your target, what, what, what your target is and what the byproduct of something is. We'll get into that. But looking backwards, it's also problematic. This idea that, you know, the enlightenment must have came from logical, rational thinking. No, a lot of that didn't even exist. I think that's an anachronism to assume that people could look at the world through that lens.
The lens they were looking at the world through was very much one of myth and magic. And that is causal to their deeper inspection of those things, of those perceptions of those ideas. OK. So, so magic and enlightenment are not different things. Uh You, you, you take away the magic, you take away the chance of achieving the so-called enlightenment. So now let's talk about Paracelsus a bit. And again, I talked about the book being the anchor to this episode. Uh the devil's doctor.
So, so Paracelsus was a number of things, you know, but alchemist is maybe the best uh title. Um you know, he's al also part philosopher, part theologian. Um you know, uh uh someone who was involved in what we would now call medicine, I suppose, although not quite anywhere near as advanced um the the alchemist background. So alchemy is, is obviously, you know, this idea of basically transmutation. You, you, you can take substances and you can turn them into other things.
And the reason why you would want to do that is because you think those new things that you can create would be useful. If it sounds familiar, then it should, it sounds very much like chemistry. Today's chemistry, the roots are very much alchemy, right?
Uh That the difference being that today's chemistry is obviously uh more evidenced by, you know, again, objective approaches to measurement uh uh not so much proven because in a way you don't really prove anything in science, but they're much more grounded in reproducible, uh you know, experimental evidence, things as opposed to, you know, uh the Philosopher Stone or this idea that, you know, you can turn lead into gold or, or if you were to mix, you know, mercury with something else and rub it on a wound that maybe that's good for you.
Alchemy was very much the beginnings of what we would now consider uh you know, chemistry. But of course, it was not backed by evidence. It was, you know, not completely devoid of evidence but not nothing like today. It was very much, you know, hocus pocus, it was mixing things together.
It was believing that, uh, you know, when materials had certain properties, it wasn't because of some, you know, underlying physics or chemistry, like we know, today it was because of, you know, a life force or maybe the way, you know, the stars were aligned or the way that you held it, you know, things that you might see in movies today that are more based on myth and magic.
So believing materials contained a kind of life force that could be harnessed, you know, via the mixing and matching of materials and the application of those materials to uh to largely to people. Uh that, that, that's alchemy and Paracelsus is kind of the prototypical example of the alchemist. Um He became very well known during the German renaissance. He traveled all over the place. I mean, the book goes into the details. It's a pretty interesting life actually.
And uh and, and he believed that he had the, you know, the ability to exploit the the forces within these materials if you will. And, and he had good reputations in certain places of the world and really bad reputation in other places of the world. Some people thought he was a Charlatan and some people thought he was uh almost next to Godly uh with his abilities uh and of course, there's all kinds of narrative on that.
But what's interesting about Paracelsus as a character is that, you know, really he wanted to understand his beliefs more deeply. So, going back to this idea of, you know, what was the aim? Is it, you know, magic versus science, magic versus the enlightenment or is it magic as kind of a causal?
Paracelsus is a really good example of someone whose deep beliefs in alchemy, myth, magic superstition, his want to understand his need to understand those more deeply as any, you know, philosopher or deep thinker would is really what drove him to start to kind of think about things in a more kind of mechanistic fashion. Now, he, he, he got nowhere near what you know, medicine would be considered today, but that was the push and that was the aim.
And so Paracelsus is that quintessential example of someone who was looking through the lens, looking at life through the lens that was available to him at the time. And it was very much full of myth and magic. And that pushed him to try to understand what we would now call chemistry, right? What we would now call materials and how things got together and the effect and what were the causes behind them? That was very much the aim.
So, so this is really about making sense of magic, not magic versus logic, not magic versus science, not magic versus the alliance uh enlightenment, but magic as the aim making sense of magic. And uh and there's this, you know, anthropologist uh Bronislaw Malinowski, who, who calls this ritualize optimism. So, so science resulted not from the effort to get rid of magic, but from the effort to make sense of it.
And Malinowski said this is this making sense of magic is, is a way of ritual man's optimism. So, so man goes through life and he believes in these really big things and then you start to add to it and that starts to add a type of logic, a step by step approach to the way that you understand that magic. So that ritual is this is connection between belief in something as quote unquote foolish, as let's say myth and magic and what we would now consider science.
And so Paracelsus's religious thinking merged seamlessly with his chemical philosophy of the universe. That's what they say in the book. His religious thinking merged seamlessly with his chemical philosophy of the universe. These were not stark, different things, right? His, his, his religious magical mythical thinking was not in, in juxtaposition or in contrast to the philosophy of the universe and the rituals and the the mechanisms that were starting to be teased out.
They were, they were very much intertwined where you have someone like Martin Luther in history who distrust uh distrusted reason. Paracelsus did not distrust reason. He believed that reason, rational thinking could be used to understand the supernatural. OK. So again, we have myth and magic being the aim being the causal root of things that lead to, to the enlightenment going forward. And so we have this evidenced power of ritual.
So there's actually been, you know, a number of studies done and there's this article in Scientific American that gives some some kind of funny examples and but actually also provides some of the research to back this up, this this idea that there's a performance enhancement via unrelated customs. So for example, you talk about rituals, you talk about kind of superstitions. Uh you know, apparently Michael Jordan wore his North Carolina shorts underneath his Chicago Bulls shorts in every game.
OK. Now, most of us would say it's obviously a bit ridiculous, a bit silly, you know, that's just a superstition or that's just some ritual that he has and he believes that's going to improve his game. Of course, there's no scientific reason to believe that wearing, you know, a pair of shorts underneath another pair of shorts is gonna somehow improve your game. Um And there's all kinds of other examples and then this article kind of goes through them.
But superstitious rituals are, are actually shown to enhance people's confidence, which makes sense because even if it's complete nonsense, it might for whatever reason, if you believe it, that's gonna make you more confident, but that confidence is gonna start to leak into your abilities and that's going to motivate greater effort and, and you can actually do the studies on this and it, and it shows that there are performance benefits from Preper performance routines.
And, you know, there's things like emotional stability and confidence.
So you think about a ritual as being kind of ultimately pointless if you just look at it objectively, if you kind of take the thin slice through reality and say, ok, everything before you before whether, you know, whether that's sports, you know, or singing or science or philosophy or whatever it is, you're, you're embarking on, you know, if, if we can't see the connection, the direct determinist a connection between this little ritual that you have at the beginning and what ends up happening in the moment, then we, we're gonna think of that ritual as being pretty pointless.
You're following these steps. You, you have this ceremony, uh you have these customs but it really has nothing to do with whatever you're trying to, to be good at whatever you're trying to perform. So, is that pointless? Well, this is where we, we step back and we start thinking about, you know, is it really just maybe it's a little boosting confidence and maybe that improves you. But there's, there's really no connection to this ritual.
Let, let's think about this from an evolutionary standpoint. OK? Because the reality is that behaviors that appear irrational do exist for a reason. OK. People are more likely to perform rituals in situations of extreme uncertainty. Ok. Now, why would that be? Now, this makes sense if you just step back and think about this, right?
If there is something that's really, really uncertain, which, which probably means you have fear attached to it, uh a lot of nervous energy, uh you know, a lot of anxiety around a situation that's when people's rituals will tend to kick in. I mean, even, you know, the atheists might find themselves praying if someone had a gun to their head or, or they were about to, you know, uh fall over a cliff or something like that in, in, in, that would be, of course, the very extreme example.
But any time there's more uncertainty coming into the situation, humans tend to get more ritualistic and the ritual might not be connected to reality directly, but the behavior might still save your life, right?
There could be something in the ritual that is changing your behavior and then that behavior makes you do something that protects you, you know, um being paranoid, for example, you might have, you, you might be introduced into a more uncertain situation and then you start to get paranoid about things that you don't really have any evidence for. And so you start to pull back a bit, but that behavior from an evolutionary standpoint might be critical to your survival.
You might do this with, you know, health care. There might be maybe you avoid things like drinking a lot or, or, or there's a better example would be something like maybe like MS G where you don't really have evidence, very strong evidence that this is bad for you, but you kind of get paranoid about it. So you just, you start to not consume things that you don't know about.
And so maybe there's an evolutionary reason to do that because nobody needs MS G, nobody needs maybe a lot of fruit sugar or whatever it is you're trying to avoid. So you're paranoia even though it's not really evidenced by anything. Of course, as I've argued before, you know, you're always gonna find studies on both sides of the fence, but it's not that you have a, a strong amount of evidence for your behavioral change, but you do it anyway and it, and, and it ends up kind of protecting you.
I'll give you an example in the, in the next in a couple of minutes. But what I'm trying to argue here is that if you have extreme uncertainty, humans get more ritualistic and that ritualism changes their behavior and that behavior from an evolutionary standpoint can protect them. And it doesn't just have to be protecting it could do other beneficial things as well, but it can lead to a benefit. So ritual exists for a very powerful reason from an evolutionary standpoint.
And so we got this idea, I've got this picture on, on the, on the slide here you know, you've got your direct target and then you've got to the side of that, the outcome that is actually useful. So ritual myth, magic, religion, customs when that is your target, that doesn't mean the benefit that you get from that target is even related. It could be a byproduct and, and we don't see the causal connection, but there's a reason for it to exist. OK, let me give you a more specific example.
So hopefully I'm not confusing. So, superstition and evolution. So there, there, there's this quote, it seem uh Taleb has written about this as well, you know, never discount anything that allows you to survive even if you don't know why, right? Never discount anything that allows you to survive, you know. OK. So let's, let's use an example.
So imagine there is uh you know, a a tribe somewhere that has this superstition and Taleb gives us example that um you know, never sleep under dead trees, right? Never sleep under dead trees. And, and you can say why, you know, I don't know, it's just they're custom, it's, it's been like that maybe hundreds of thousands of years. They just, they don't sleep under dead trees. Maybe they think the dead tree has an evil spirit to it.
Maybe, you know, it's not that there's any super logical mechanism behind it that they know of that anybody knows of. They just have this baked into their culture, you know, dead trees maybe they're evil. Maybe they, they, they set you up badly for life, don't sleep under dead trees. Now, if I'm just looking at that through that thin kind of objective lens seems kind of ridiculous, but there could actually be a rational reason for that.
Maybe dead trees are, you know, have, have a higher propensity to fall on you, which would make sense. Right. You got rotting roots. Maybe a dead tree could tip over, maybe it could kill you or maybe there's some other aspect to it. What if there's, I don't know, a virus that attaches itself to, to decaying trees that could end up being bad for human life. What if there is and on and on on you can come up with all kinds of examples.
Now, the mistake is to try to look at that and say, well, I wonder, I wonder if there really is a reason? No, who cares? That's not the point that superstition exists for a reason. It could be that people with that superstition are the ones who survived, right?
If we're talking thousands of years from a civilization standpoint, if you know a culture standpoint, if we're talking millions of years in terms of hominid evolution, these superstitions exist for a reason, remember the people that are here today to talk about it and their ancestors survived and so they survived by having these beliefs. And so it's not for us to know whether or not they're have any direct connection to reality or not.
It's just that realistically, their beliefs led to a change in behavior and that behavior was either neutral or beneficial. Right. Probably beneficial though. So there probably is something to not sleeping under dead trees that does help you and your ancestors survive. Then you can try to pick apart what that, you know, is it a viral thing? Is it a, you know, things just don't fall on you as much, you know, whatever it doesn't matter.
Superstition changes behavior, behavior makes you survive or not. And, and, and, and the ones that are here today to talk about it and their ancestors are, are the ones that had superstitions that survived. So why am I talking about this? So superstitions can be, you know, vectors for risk management rules. As Naseem Taleb says, superstitions are potent information that people have and, and, and has allowed them to have survived and to, and to repeat that survival going forward.
OK. There's this idea of constructive paranoia. So, you know, regardless whether a superstition, you know, whether you're using superstition or some deep scientific understanding of probability, it's really one and the same, right? It's really one and the same. I mean, at the end of the day, these are, you know, superstitions are, are a way to deal with massive uncertainty. And you could actually look at it from a probabilistic standpoint and realize, oh, this actually makes a lot of sense.
I mean, you, you aim over here but that's unrelated, but that acts as an anchor going forward. And so probabilistically this changes your behavior and it reduces your risk and yada, yada, yada, you can get all, you know, you can nerd out on it and talk about, you know, discounting and risk management rules and you could realize, yeah, that seems smart.
Or you could just look at it from an evolutionary standpoint and said, look, these are the people that survived and they probably survived because they had the right behavior and they probably had the right behavior because they had superstitions. So superstition is just iii i it, it's not just some, you know, remnant of old society or old evolutionary whatever that, you know, maybe is still with us.
And we find, you know, a lot of psychologists, a lot of people still talk about it as though we've got, you know, biases and superstitions that really shouldn't be here. They don't apply to modern life anymore.
You know, they're from the 50,000 year old brain that we have and, you know, unfortunately they're still there, but you kind of have to overcome those and, and, and that's starting to become an outdated mode of thinking as we realize that no, no, no, these are powerful evolutionary mechanisms that exist that allow us to solve very complex problems.
You know, psychologists often try to disrupt our organic paranoid mechanism as, as Taleb has said, and it's true because, you know, a psychologist will want to try to look at something purely from an objective standpoint. And in doing so, we discount things like myth and magic as, as, as just being nothing but superstition and doesn't play any kind of survival role. But it really, really does. And it's, and, and I'm gonna argue, it's not just in the old world that, that had to use.
I'm gonna say it's, it's still very much with us, maybe even more because of the complexity increase of our technology and of our surroundings and of the world that we live in. So I'll get into that. So, superstition and evolution are tied. It's not just believing in something ridiculous. There is a very strong reason for it to be there, regardless of whether it's connected directly to reality, things that are connected directly to reality actually. Aren't that useful.
And I'm gonna argue that in a bit as well. I mean, this, this idea that, you know, science, you know, I talk about this, you know, the reductionism, right? You reverse engineer, you look at the components and everything, all those components are supposed to be deterministically adding up to the outcome that is a very outdated idea, uh an approach to science. It's just I, I can't stress that enough. It's very, not a, a lot of that simplistic stuff has been figured out decades and decades ago.
You know, we talk about the failure of the human genome project. We talk about the failure of theoretical physics, physics the last 30 years. This all ties into this this outdated notion that science is supposed to reverse engineer and understand the components which are I've called this the great disconnect, right?
I had an episode on science saying more but explaining last, right, this this whole idea as as we go forward into more complex worlds, dealing more with more emergent phenomena, you know, leaving behind the simplistic things uh that, that have been figured out in, in, in, in, in kind of old school physics and chemistry. But that are unfortunately still with us, we we've got to get away from this idea that, you know, you can strip away and extract in order to define something, right?
Uh It, it's much more emergent, it's much more cause ope and so the the these these targets that are not deterministically related to the outcome become more and more important. OK. So things like myth magic superstition, I'll talk about what I mean, you know, what does that mean today? Right? I'll talk about that in a bit but keep that in mind. So there are there, there are strong evolutionary reasons why things like superstition, myth, magic religion exist.
They are actually quite causal to this so-called enlightened thinking that we have because people try to explain the myth and magic that was the lens that they were looking at and going forward we're going to see that this is actually quite critical. So the mechanics of magic is really what I wanna get at right in this episode. Self delusion. If that's what you want to call it, think of that as a necessity, right? Magic told us what buttons to push, to get an outcome. Now it failed all the time.
But the belief was that if the stars align, if you inhale the mercury vapors, yes, that was a thing made people's teeth come really loose. But anyway, for whatever reason, they believed it, right? If you, if you do this to lead, right? Supposedly it's gonna become Goldie all these crazy ideas. But it was mechanistic because it said it, it wasn't just believing this in your life is good. It was trying to tell you what buttons to buttons to push, to get the outcome.
And of course, that's science no matter how complex it is, right? At the end of the day, it's, you've got inputs and you've got outputs and you're trying to always trying to map or correlate the inputs to the output. So that, that obsession with correlation comes out of magic, right? It comes out of this belief in something that you don't know how it works and you want to know how it works right now.
Now, the failures that would have happened all the time with alchemy and incantations and, and you know, and, and even, you know, proper religions where you know, they might say something from the Bible. You know, the earth is the absolute center or whatever and then it starts to become, you know, challenged by what we view failures are just explained away as, as, as kind of a quote unquote, poor incantation. Well, you weren't, you weren't doing the incantation, right?
You didn't interpret it, right. You didn't interpret, you know, the Bible correctly. You didn't interpret the, the, the, the k whatever the religion is or the superstition, the myth of magic. You know, it's, it's not the magic that's wrong. It's not the superstition, that's wrong, it's not the religion that's wrong. It's just a poor implementation of it, right?
So, so however, you want to interpret that self delusion, you know, a ridiculous belief in something or you know, why are you still anchoring yourself on that? You can't see it that quote unquote, self delusion is the lifeblood of progress. Self delusion is the lifeblood of progress. Now, again, whether or not it's actually delusional, you can decide for yourself. But I'm just using that as a label, right?
That self delusion, that the, the belief in the impossible, the belief in what you cannot see, you cannot perceive the magic, what we might deem foolish today has been the absolute lifeblood of progress because it tells you if you push this, this is the outcome you're supposed to get it. It makes you uh you know, obsessed with causality, it makes you want to understand things at a deeper level. It is the lifeblood of progress, not something that's diametrically opposed to it.
Now, let's get a little bit deeper in, in this idea of the mechanics of magic, you know, something that I'm really big on. Uh And this, this relates to like a proper interpretation of Ockham's razor. You know, how do things get created? How do things become the right structure? So I've got this visual here for the, for the Patreon uh subscribers. But, but what I'm, what I have at the on the left, I've got this top kind of wrong structure.
So just some dots connected with lines and at the bottom, I've got the right structure and it's kind of this, this evolution from the wrong to the right. So this could be anything that you're doing, it could be building software, putting a program together, you know, some, some non-profit organization, you know, some it doesn't matter whatever it is, you're creating a shed like it doesn't matter. You, you're trying to uh build something, right? It doesn't have to be physical, right?
It could be, it could be, you know, coming up with a plan for something, a way of thinking about the world, whatever it is, think of it as a structure as a number of concepts or physical things that are connected in a certain way and, and you've got to try to get to the right structure, how do you create the right thing? Well, there's all this epidemic uncertainty there, right?
Because you don't really know unless you're replicating something, you don't really know if you're replicating, you just look at the, you know, the blueprint, the design you say, OK, I'm just gonna build the same thing, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about some coming up with something new, like genuine creativity. Well, the epidemic uncertainty, there is absolute there, there's no and what that means is there's no way you're going to access the information.
You need to create the right thing. At the beginning. At the beginning, you're never gonna, there's no way to get that information. It it doesn't matter. There's no nothing in the universe that can help you there, right? The information on, on what the right structure is supposed to be is not available at the beginning because this is a complex problem that has causal opacity. We can't access that information. So the epidemic, the epidemic uncertainty is absolute.
So the only way to get to the right structure is to put a structure together regardless how wrong it's it's obviously going to be because you're naive, you have to naively create something, you have to put something into the real world, right? And, and let certain pieces die and let certain pieces survive so very much trial and error. And, and this is the real reason behind Ockham's razor.
So Ockham's razor is, is you know, obviously a number of ways we can, you know, don't, don't, uh you know, multiply the uh the unnecessary assumptions. There's always, you know, many different ways you could wear this. But the, the kind of colloquial way of saying Ockham's razor is the simplest theory is the correct one, right? So, so put the simplest theory forward the reason why that is, is not because, you know, just well simple is good or simple is easy to understand the real reason.
And I've talked about this before is because simple is easy to kill, right? Vague things are hard to understand, they're hard to interpret. So you don't really know if it's right or wrong. But simple things, you know, right away if it's wrong. So Ockham's razor which says, do what? Simple, right? The simplest theory is the correct one. Don't multiply too many assumptions. However, you want to word that simple is good.
The reason why simple is good is because it allows you to put something out there that can be destroyed quite easily. It's not vague. It doesn't have things that you can't really understand because vague things live too long, right? Because their their their vagueness makes it hard to kill. Simple things allow it to be destroyed and that's what you want things to be destroyed very rapidly so that you can converge towards the right structure. So why am I talking about this?
So from wrong structure to right structure requires that you put simplistic things in place. So the simple thing that you're putting in place so that you can do the trial and error to get to the right thing is, is very naive. And, and what I'm arguing here is that, that, that naivete is required to move forward because something has to be destroyed to coax the information from the environment. OK? It's, it's another reason why stupid questions are really important.
You know, people don't like asking stupid questions or they always preface it. I have a stupid question because I always feel a bit guilty. Stupid questions are the absolute most critical questions you should always be asking because their simplicity will coax the information out from the environment that you need. If you instead don't want to ask a stupid question.
So either you don't ask a question, which means you get no information at all or you be kind of vague or you put a bunch of jargon in there to kind of buffer or protect yourself so that you don't sound stupid. You're not going to get very good information out because your vagueness means that whoever you're asking the question to doesn't really understand exactly what you're asking and you don't even really understand what you're asking, right?
So, so you're being vague to kind of protect yourself to maybe sound a little bit smarter, but because nothing can be destroyed in what you're saying, you don't end up coaxing out good information. It's the same thing with physical things or informational things. But if you're kind of naive and you ask a really quote unquote dumb question, it will either survive or not right away. OK? And that, that, that is the true purpose of Ockham's razor right there.
You wanna put the simple thing forward again and again to get the right information. OK. So you need wrong structures, naive, quote unquote stupid things to make progress. So that, so, so why am I talking about this? I'm tying this back to the idea of magic, right? Of superstition, you know, even religion and and that's not to call these things stupid obviously, but quote unquote stupid, right? This idea that you're doing something that on the surface seems quite naive, right?
Like you, why are you talking about things? You can't see that you can't measure, why are you, you know, you can't back up anything you're saying? Why do you believe so wholeheartedly? That is required because the naivete baked into it is what allows information from the environment to be folded back in. It was the belief in magic, the belief in superstition that allowed people to mechanize their world, to understand things at a deeper level, regardless of whether the magic was real or not.
Right? Again, going back to this diagram on the right, I have this wrong structure at the beginning. If you looked back with the hindsight bias and said, well, that was a really stupid design. No, next time, next time, we're not gonna start with such a dumb design, we're gonna try to. No, no, you really should start with a dumb design next time because it's not. You, you, if, if you're creating something new, you have to start naively.
So the evolution of progress from pre enlightenment to post enlightment or, or in the enlightenment, whatever. And now, right, that requires the naive thinking, regardless of whether the naive thinking is true or not, we, we can debate that. That's not what I'm here to debate.
I'm just saying that you have to not know, you have to put what you don't know forward, you have to believe in something that you can't see that you can't perceive, however you want to interpret that in order for progress and, and, and in this case, science and technology to actually progress the way it is OK. It's, it's, it's a, it's, it's a narrative fallacy. It's a hindsight bias. It's a, it's, it's an anachronism to go back in time and say the beginnings must have looked like the end.
No, they never do, they never do because it's not a deterministic connection like that. We're not talking billiard balls that bump into each other to produce an outcome. We're talking about massively complex constructs within reality. So the mechanics of magic are very much about using naivete, about believing in what you cannot see about being quote unquote stupid. Just like a stupid question is super powerful because of its ability to be part of the evolutionary process.
Vague questions cannot be part of the evolutionary process. So they cap you off. People who don't know a lot, ask quote unquote smart questions. A lot. People who know a lot are always fearlessly willing to ask the stupid questions. So hopefully you see the connection between those two that the belief in the magic, the belief in the naive, you have to, you have to just enter the environment without knowing. And that's what myth and magic is.
It's, it's very much wholeheartedly believing in, believing in things that you can't see. You, you probably believe you can feel them, right? You have your own kind of version of evidence, but it's not the evidence that we associate with science and technology there that naivete is critical. It's not a remnant from something in the past. It's absolutely critical. So, so there's this, there's this uh comparison that comes up in the book, The Devil's Doctor, uh Doctors versus surgeons.
Um Paracelsus did not like the university people, he did not like the educational system. Uh There was way too much theory, there was not enough practice, right? Not enough practical application. You know, the the doctors of the day who were purely kind of theoretical, they're almost just doing things for show, they're very ostentatious. They like to dress up. They like to um be a doctor for the sake of being a doctor. And unfortunately, I think that's actually quite prevalent today as well.
But back then there was no, the, the surgeon in contrast who actually had to deal with, you know, the cadavers or the, or the live bodies, obviously, and, and, you know, it was very messy, it was dirty work. They were kind of looked down upon and not like today actually, I mean, surgeons are obviously quite respected alongside doctors, but back then the doctors were theoretical, they didn't get very messy. But because of that, you know, uh Paracelsus was very critical of their knowledge.
I said their knowledge is, you know, garbage because it's just so separated from reality, whereas the, the surgeons had to be doing the real thing. Um So, so, you know, what led to progress, you know, was it, was it the theory or was it more of the practical, it's very much the practical, you know, and, and this, this kind of gets into this idea again, you've got to, you've got to jump into the world and do the thing. I mean, the surgery, especially at the time was extremely naive.
They didn't know what they were doing. I'm sure they made all kinds of mistakes, but that's what led to the knowledge, right? Theory is always after the fact, the, the this notion that theory precedes certain aspects of, of practical application. I think that's largely incorrect. I think it's largely correct because the epistemic uncertainty in these in these situations, particularly new situations is always absolute, you have to have the practical application of things.
So anyways, I thought that was interesting that the doctors versus surgeons example. So it it just kind of shows some of Paracelsus's thinking, right is you got to naively go into the world and seize and now again, remember Paris believed in superstition and alchemy and myth and magic. You know, he was, he was, he was a theologian. He was very much not looking through the lens of pure objectivity.
He wasn't, he wasn't arguing for practice because he was trying to strip himself away from myth and magic. It was his attempt to explain the myth and magic that led him to the practical interaction with reality as opposed to just sitting back and theorizing about it. So, so, you know, we recognize the importance of of hands-on practice today and, and you might think, well, that seems like such a separation from things like myth and magic.
But again, no, it was his belief, Paracelsus belief in, in, in the alchemy and in the magic that pushed him towards the practical applications of things as a superior form of knowledge. So, so this is really about indirect targets and that's what I want to talk about right now. The true purpose of a goal is to never achieve it. OK? The true purpose of a goal is to never achieve it there, there's a big difference between what you're aiming at and what you're going to get the bottom, right.
I've got that image again where you've got the direct target. But then you've got the actual useful outcome as being a byproduct. And if you think about your own life, you should realize this is, this is the case. You were probably aiming all through your life. You have these goals and try to achieve them. But a lot of times they don't happen and that seems disappointing.
But then because of that push, you ended up uh achieving something that often was even more aligned with who you are and, and led to better outcomes. And so we see this all the time and if you really stop and think you'll realize you had all these targets throughout life, you know, you failed all the time at them. But because you kept pushing towards those targets, you ended up getting a bunch of great stuff out of it.
Um And so again, I think it's, I i it's, it's anachronistic to look back and assume that today's paradigm of science and technology had recognizable roots that, that the people who were, let's say, led to what we have today were aiming towards things that look like today.
They weren't, they were aiming for very different things, you know, the myth, the magic, the beliefs, the stuff that we don't associate with science and technology at all today, those were the goals and, and, and that's why it led to what we have today. So the authors so-called of what we see today, not a big fan of uh you know, thinking about they're being authors to things because again, there's, there's so much, you know, there's mountains of contributions that lead to things.
But the, the, the characters, the authors of what we see today were, were unlikely to have been focused on recognizable outcomes, right? The the the there there's an unfortunate power of narrative fallacy and that's why we keep getting stuck into it. We again, the pattern is not the path we look at the pattern today. And then we say, oh, that must have been where it came from and that must be the way forward. But it's not, the targets are, are are often very indirect to what the outcome is.
And, and, and this just gets back to the epistemic uncertainty of situations. You can't know what leads to the outcome, but you do need to keep working at something and let the trial and error constantly happen and let that, that, that, that constant push. All you need is the push. It almost doesn't matter where it's targeted, right?
You, you need to push and then reassess and push and then reassess and and in many ways, the more unrealistic that target, the more indirect, that target that can even be better because you just need to sample from reality. You need to, to, to go into the world and sample the, you know, access different information, see how that comes together and through iteration is the only way you're gonna get to the right structure. So the target, you know, I think people make the mistake a lot.
It's like, well, I, I know what I want to achieve in life and so I'm gonna keep trying to target towards that. That's often I, I, in some sense, we have to do that because we're always naive. But as long as you keep, have that willingness to keep fail, failing because that target that you have is not going to be achieved. But that doesn't mean you don't achieve something better, right?
So, so paras own contributions to alchemy had a profound impact on the development of the science of chemistry specifically, but we should never forget that this was not his intention. OK? And now that's straight out of the book, right? Paris, he's own contributions to alchemy had a profound impact on the development of the science of chemistry. But we should never forget that this was not his intention going even deeper in terms of how we think of science and technology.
Um We get into this idea of general patterns in universality. So the motivations of religion, I belief in something supernatural makes one believe things are universally applicable. And this is really core to the drive to, to to scientific progress and technological progress is not just looking for how something specific works, but very much generalizing that, right?
That's what we do in science, we generalize that out because if I figure out how this specific things works, but then I can apply to all kinds of other things. Now I really have a powerful knowledge, right? A powerful type of knowledge that that is, that is more general, right? It's the reason why, you know Einstein's general relativity is much more powerful than his special relativity, right?
Because something that is general is much more applicable and, and says something much more far reaching about the universe, right? Well, it's a belief in the supernatural that tends to make one believe things are universally applicable because you know, the the the religious thinking, the superstitious thinking, the mythical magical thinking, it, it makes you think everything's connected, right?
It makes you think that something isn't just about this rock, this stone about this tree, about that star. You think things affect other things right now, again, whether that's how, you know, the star is aligning, actually affecting my life. That might not be true.
But me thinking that naively thinking that that is the case makes me, you know, if it's me, whoever it is, start to think, you know, if I'm, you know, hundreds of years ago, it would make me think that things are universally connected, that patterns are general, that they have this universal aspect to them. And that is at the absolute core of scientific thinking that is really what leads to scientific pro to, to, to progress.
So anything that can motivate you to explain things that are universally true, because you think everything is connected to everything that that's what's powerful. So again, going back to superstition, myth, magic religion being the causal factor in much of progress. Right? Para el was a, you know, they talked about in the book was a, a massive fan of analogy, right?
And that's again, you, you analogy is there is to the, you know, the mental ability to connect to what seems like disparate things, right?
But they share some, some at some level of abstraction to things that are seemingly different, share, you know, a set of properties, they have something in common and that's this analogical reasoning and that's absolutely the heart of scientific or any type of thinking really that that analogical reasoning, reasoning um as, as, as Hofstadter has said is, is, you know, the fabric of cognition, there's no such thing as something not being an analogy, right?
You, you can't think without making analogies. Analog thinking is how you get cross domain knowledge, how you mix and match it, how you leverage the variation that exists in the, in in reality, to, to come up with new inventions, to come up with new theories, right? So general patterns, universality, analogical thinking. This is very much stemming from a belief in the supernatural.
OK. Uh and so I think that is, is again just going back to this kind of causal aspect of, of the role of myth and magic and progress. So what about looking forward? So I, I've largely focused on looking back, right? I said it, you know, it's kind of a narrative fallacy to say, well, whatever we have in science and technology. Now, we think about today's paradigm, today's thinking that must have been where it came from, right?
People must have been thinking like that, acting like that and, and you know what I'm arguing in this episode is no, I I don't think that's at all how they were thinking. And I think it's very beneficial that they weren't thinking like that. So what does that mean going forward? We've also got this kind of narrative fallacy going forward, right? Where we assume scientific thinking is going to lead to better progress, right?
Let's be more logical, rational objective because we see the benefit, we see that as a pattern. That's that, that, that spits out of science. So we tend to think again, the pattern is the path. So let's take that path going forward, right? Using scientific thinking to attempt progress in science is actually a bigger, you know, quote unquote myth than, than magic, right? That's actually uh not, not the way forward.
I would argue because scientific thinking will lock you into something that doesn't necessarily propel you forward. And this is kind of hard to get our head around, right? Because we see the value of science, we see how it leads to a lot of great things. It's good to understand more about the world. It's good to think about it, you know, logically, rationally, objectively, you know, to leave the human bias o and that's all great as, as, you know, the here and now to appreciate that knowledge.
But the idea that that type of thinking is going to lead to more of that knowledge I would say is, is a fallacy. I don't think that's true. Not that it never can, but I think that's that, that there's, I think it's highly problematic because again, the targets need to be indirect unrelated and perhaps even impossible. OK. So I've got this image and I've, I've created this for Twitter back in the day as well that I posted on Twitter.
You've got like the whole situation being very complex and that your view of reality is just a very thin slice through that your understanding of the situation is very narrow. It's, it's hard to know how much of, of what is connected to what and how it's going to affect things. If you, if you just focus on the way science is now and assume that that's the way forward, that's going to be an extremely restricted view of things.
And it's going to be hard to, you know, quote unquote, think outside the box essentially, which is really what that means, right? How do you get outside that box? How do you sample the space of possibilities if you're stuck in your paradigm? Well, the way you do that is to have targets that are quite unrelated, right? You have to, you have to believe in something that is quote unquote stupid.
You have to have naivete, you have to, you have to have something that is outside your paradigm and, and the more that you're stuck within the narrative of this is how things work, the, the, you know, the harder that is to do, right? How do you unlock? So, so there's a self dampening, self arresting aspect to scientific thinking. Science is not bad. Science is great.
It's, it's, it's a wonderful way to think about the world to understand the world and it's good to be objective and, and, and good to think of things kind of mechanistically and mechanically. But if you think that that's the path forward to improved mechanical thinking to more objective thinking, I think that's actually wrong. I think again, the target has to be indirect. You when I say self dampening, I mean that if you keep doing the thing you're doing, it starts to stop itself, right?
It's kind of like the opposite of bootstrapping, right? You, you something about the way that you are doing things in your current paradigm is actually stopping or arresting the movement to continue forward. It, it hurts itself. Ok? And it's hard for humans to kind of have, you know, two things can, can, can be true at once, right. Science can be really good with the knowledge that it gives us, but it can also not be the way forward to, to, to increase scientific knowledge.
The pattern is not the path. So I think the targets have to be indirect. So hopefully that makes sense. So going forward, um if, if we actually look at the world that we're in now a lot of technology and I've talked about this before, is becoming much more soft, right? So a lot softer, a lot less about the logic, rationality thinking.
So a good example would be, you know, in, in something like data science where we're using these machine learning technologies, those technologies are very black box, they're very, you know, kind of mysterious. It's not about engineering a solution, it's not this deterministic connection between input and output, you're creating software that basically runs off on its own, right?
You you, you design the scaffolding but then you say go and you just give it this very high level target and it just keeps running until it converges as close as possible to that target. And if you, if you ask the engineers uh of of, of these machine learning technologies, specifically deep learning, you say, well, how does that thing work? You can, you can say at a high level, how it's been put together, you can, you can talk about the process that it uses to, to converge on a solution.
But, but, but from a deterministic, you know, peel back the layers, what's actually happening on the inside, nobody knows. Nobody knows. Because that, that, that's that, that, that epidemic uncertainty is absolute because now you're in the realm of complexity, you do not have access to that kind of information.
So a lot of the technologies uh are moving in this direction now that you, you, they're softer, they're higher level, they converge, they're more evolutionary, they're not explicitly programmed, they're not explicitly engineered. So the paradigm is changing about how we actually do things and how we aim towards it. There are only very, very higher, higher, more abstract targets that are being used to produce the outcomes that we need.
And we have to separate ourselves from this idea that we can know the internals of how something comes to be. And so there was this increased mystery, this increased opacity about what we do. We're now entering an environment that is much more complex in the information economy.
Uh And that means more mystery and that means what do humans do when they have more mystery and when they have more uncertainty, it's, it's they start to get superstitious, they start to believe in things that they cannot see and they, and, and they cannot perceive directly. Now. What does that mean? So, so I've got the slide now or return to magic. So, what I'm saying is that to continue to make progress forward, it's not going to be thinking scientifically, so to speak. Right.
It's going to be you. We're, we're gonna have to get out of that paradigm and think much more non or unscientifically. Right. We're gonna need a kind of return to magic. Now, what does that mean? What does magic mean today? I mean, I don't think that's gonna be alchemy. I don't think it's gonna be returned to the kind of magic that people necessarily believed in back in the day. Although maybe there are some aspects that are the same, right? And I don't have the answer to that.
I don't know what magic is supposed to mean today and going forward. But I do know that our targets are gonna have to be very much indirect. They're, they're gonna have to be very unrelated to the thing that we think we want to achieve. They're gonna be very high level, very abstract. We're gonna have to move away from this idea that we can explicitly engineer the outcome of things.
We're gonna have to deal with massive levels of uncertainty except the absolute epidemic, uncertainty of things, accept the mystery, accept the fact that we cannot know how things come to be but still be able to operate in that paradigm and push ourselves forward and enjoy the fruits of that labor. In other words, regardless of what we're doing or even why we're doing it, the byproduct of that effort will be continued progress.
But if we step away from those indirect targets, if we step away from a sense of magic, we're going to be in this, this kind of self dampening, uh you know, uh process that, that thinks the pattern is the path when it's not and that's gonna halt the progress. So we need to kind of return to magic, return to the mystery, leverage, uncertainty, ok.
Embrace myth while still remaining objective, appreciating the the power of object of objective thinking a as, as an understanding of the world, but not as a way forward necessarily. So what does it mean to embrace magic today? What does it mean to embrace myth? Right? How can we ensure that our targets are unreachable so that we can continue to make progress going forward? And I don't have an answer for that in this episode. I think that's gonna mean different things to different people.
I think over the next few decades, it's gonna be interesting to see how that uncertainty gets embraced, what myth and magic means and that, you know, kind of the post enlightenment, you know, what comes next, but some sense of quote unquote magic, you know, will need to be returned to because that really is how we deal with complex problem solving. And that's the paradigm we're entering, you know, I've talked about coming full circle and other episodes, right?
We've got everything before the industrial revolution, right? Kind of like pre enlightenment stuff, right? And then we've got the industrial revolution, which is very logical and rational and slide ruler and you know, everything kind of adds up deterministically. And now we're getting out of the industrial revolution into the information economy, which is very much back to unknown complex Cali ope situations.
So whatever this means to you and whatever this ends up meaning to people going forward, there will need to be a return to magic. So I hope you guys understood that episode and there was a lot of different concepts in there. But I think, you know, again, that book, The Devil's Doctor Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance, Magic and Science. It was a really good read.
It was interesting, you know, obviously there's all kinds of other details that I didn't touch on in this episode about the life of Paracelsus and what he believed and how that motivated his exploration of the world. Go ahead and give that a read if you like a couple other references. In here, the scientific American article that I referenced is called Why Rituals Work.
And Nasim Pale wrote an article called How To Be Rational About Rationality, which touches on some of those concepts specifically that don't sleep under dead trees. Example. So thank you so much. Until next time. Take care