In Materialist Conceptions of God, I wrote about how one can interpret religious claims as hyperstititions, beliefs that become true as a result of you believing in them. Since then, I’ve stumbled on a very simple, practical example of a hyperstition that you can test out in two minutes with a willing partner. It’s the Aikido exercise Unbendable Arm (link goes to a 1 min video).
The goal of the exercise is to hold one of your arms straight while your partner attempts to bend it at the elbow. It turns out that for most people, the default intention of “holding your arm straight” by tensing your muscles and resisting your partner is not very effective. What works much better is consciously relaxing your arm while imagining a situation in which your arm happens to be extremely strong and straight through no intervention of your own. The suggestion in the video is to imagine that your arm is a firehose spewing water at a fire; the way it was first taught to me, I had to imagine my arm extending as a horizontal beam of golden light into the nearest wall and past it into the infinite horizon.
I highly recommend trying this exercise with a partner and noticing what you observe. The two things I noticed were
with the beam visualization, my arm was clearly much stronger than without.
with the beam visualization, I did not feel any tension in my muscles the whole time I was resisting. Only once my partner stopped and I relaxed the visualization did I feel a sudden wave of soreness throughout my arm, shoulder, and lower back.
What is the epistemic status of “imagine an infinite beam of light”? It’s not a propositional claim, I’m not asserting that the beam of light actually exists or is actually infinite. But it certainly seems like the kind of mental operation I’d like to have access to. And if I stick purely to a pure scientific materialist understanding of the world, where anything I believe has to be intersubjectively verifiable, I’d simply lose access to this ability my body has, and be weaker as a result.
If I can make my arm stronger simply by holding holding a beam of light in my imagination, how much can a group of people accomplish if they hold a concept like “the kingdom of heaven” in their collective imaginations? Especially if they build magnificent cathedrals and paint beautiful paintings and write soul-shattering music as visualization aids? We don’t have to guess—we live in the world those people built!
Is the kingdom of heaven actually going to be as perfect as Christians imagine it? Is the lion really going to lie down with lamb? Is God really all-loving and omnipotent? Is that beam of light really infinite? That’s not really the point. Sometimes what’s important about a visualization is what it doesn’t include, what thought processes it forestalls or short-circuits. The beam of light probably needs to be infinite so my attention doesn’t latch onto its endpoint. God has to be all-loving so my attention doesn’t latch onto some bad thing that happened or could happen, distracting me from loving the people around me. In fact the most common use of the word “God” in common parlance seems to be as a stop-token, with a pragmatic meaning along the lines of “stop thinking propositionally / using your left brain / using near mode for a moment”. The clearest example is “Inshallah”—literally “if God wills it”—a verbal formula used to short-circuit worrying about things one can’t control.
Of course, there’s a huge gap between a visualization like Unbendable Arm, which you can toggle on and off in seconds, and a religious conviction like belief in the Resurrection, which many people hold to so strongly they are willing to die for it. I expect most religious people will say these are totally distinct and incomparable phenomena. And there is is certainly a distinction in kind, not merely in scale, which I’m still developing an understanding of. And yet… from where I’m standing, they feel like they share an essential nature—the nature of hyperstition, of using imagination to guide our predictive-processing-powered minds towards our goals.
P.S: If you do end up trying Unbendable Arm with a friend, I’d appreciate you leaving a comment or DMing me with your observations! even a simple “tried it, didn’t work for me” null result is helpful.
Notice the presupposition that “tensing your muscles” is the default way most that most people hold their arm straight? Notice how in the video you linked he explicitly specified “really tight” and didn’t just say “don’t let me bend your arm”, letting people do what actually comes by default? They seem to always specify to make the arm tense, which is unsurprising because if you’re not told to resist wrong, you might not resist wrong and then their trick won’t work.
I tried it with my wife, only instead of saying “Hold your arm really tight” I just said “Don’t let me bend your arm”. As a result, she didn’t foolishly contract her bicep to help me, and was able to resist just as well as when I told her to visualize stuff. It’s not that visualizing firehoses is unusually effective, it’s that you’re getting bamboozled into doing it unusually ineffectively to start with.
thanks for running the test!
IIRC the first time this was demonstrated to me it didn’t come with any instructions about tensing or holding, just ‘Don’t let me bend your arm’, exactly the language you used with your wife. But people vary widely in somatic skills and how they interpret verbal instructions; I definitely interpreted it as ‘tense your arm really hard’ and that’s probably why the beam / firehose visualization helped.
Makes me think the same is likely true of religious beliefs—they help address a range of common mental mistakes but for each particular mistake there are people who have learned not to make them using some other process. e.g. “Inshallah” helps neurotic people cut off unhelpful rumination, whereas low neuroticism people just don’t need it.
Yeah, that’s why I actually ran the test. It’s also why I used my wife as a test subject rather than one of the guys at jiu jitsu for example. My wife is definitely on the “less aware of how to use her body” side, so the fact that she got it right is more meaningful.
I wasn’t there so I can’t say, but it’s worth noting that the cues on how to interpret things can be subtle, and the fact that they’re being led in a certain way can really easily slide under people’s radar even while they simultaneously notice the cues and respond to them.
For example, if I wanted to tell my wife to tense her arm without telling her to tense her arm, I could have said “You’re going to hold your arm out like this and not let me bend it”—showing her a tense arm. Or I could have been more subtle and just kept a sub-noteworthy amount of tension throughout my body, and when I went to grab her wrist, grabbed it in a rigid fashion. This all suggests “this is how we resist things” without ever having to say it.
I’m not saying that Akido practitioners are deliberately misleading, just that people tend to nonverbally communicate in ways that convey their perspective, whatever that perspective may be. This tends to happen whether they realize it or not, and indeed whether they want it or not. For example, when my daughter was.. I think three, she watched a show explicitly intended to help kids not be afraid to get their shots. The thing is, she was already not afraid to get her shots and had actually thrown a tantrum because she could only get one flu shot the previous year. But as a result of watching that show, she picked up the creators’ actual beliefs of “Shots are scary, but they shouldn’t be so we’re supposed to insist they’re fine”—and the show had the exact opposite effect from intended. It turns out, insisting “You shouldn’t be afraid” isn’t very compelling when you simultaneously demonstrate that you’re coming from a place of fear—even if you never admit to the latter out loud.
The way I held myself when telling my wife to not let me bend her arm was relaxed, only contracting the muscles that had a specific purpose. I don’t recall if I demonstrated with my own arm, but if I did it was loose. When I held her wrist, I’m sure it was loose, etc. I don’t mean to suggest that people don’t unintentionally get confused into ineffective responses—that definitely happens a lot. I just mean that IME a lot of the time all it takes is not buying into it oneself, and that the confusions persist in large part because they’re actively upheld by the people giving instructions.
Kudos on doing the test!
FWIW, the key thing in unbendable arm isn’t about tensing only the relevant opposing muscles. It’s more about redirecting incoming forces at each other instead of fighting them directly.
The real test is in dealing with someone who’s way stronger than you. If you have no hope of keeping your arm straight via tricep strength.
I’m guessing that either (a) you’re not much stronger than your wife or (b) she didn’t click into the thing the visualization is meant to help people click into.
Seriously, the thing I mean when I point at this technique isn’t a vague “energy” trick that fails upon encountering an MMA fighter or whatever. And it definitely doesn’t rely on subtly deceiving people into tensing the wrong muscles. Unbendable arm is immensely demonstrable. As weird as the following might sound, I use it every day. It’s easily in the top ten most useful things I learned from aikido and might be in the top three.
Oh, no. I’m so much stronger than my wife that there’s no way she’s keeping her arm straight if I’m serious about bending her arm. The test was 1) is she tensing her bicep when I don’t subtly suggest she should and 2) is she able to put up more resistance when visualizing instead.
Do you have a preferred video demonstration? Or can you draw the force vector diagrams? I don’t doubt that you’re observing something real here, but from looking through YouTube I’m not seeing what you’re describing.
“I want you to hold your right arm out straight, really tight”
″I want him to tense up as physically hard as possible”—and then he has to admonish his volunteer for “losing focus” when his unbendable arm bends
“the only purpose of this is for me to experience relaxation completely on this muscle”—with emphasis that the arm is gonna bend at least a little bit and maybe more.
This guy is flat out falling over unnecessarily.
This one shows something closer to what you’re talking about, but it’s pretty clear that he’s cheating the starting position by giving himself a more advantageous position the second time and having the other guy start in a less advantageous position. Which I guess kinda raises the question of what exactly is it supposed to demonstrate? Is that “cheating” or is that the entire thing being conveyed?
My wife’s first reaction to “don’t let me bend your arm” was actually to swat my hand away from her wrist, which playfully points out that we’re implicitly holding back in unspecified ways for sake of the demonstration, and if we were actually trying to not let someone bend our arm we would be doing something quite different. So what are the rules, anyway? As long as the rules are kept hidden it’s really easy to move the goalposts around without anyone noticing.
Boy do I relate. For whatever reason, the demos on YouTube are almost universally weirdly bad. I’m guessing Ivan found the one he linked to because I linked to it; it’s the clearest short demo I’d found.
I’ll see about making one sometime. It’s a little tricky for me in particular to convey over video because I’m so visibly strong. But I’ll give it some thought. Maybe I can ask for help from some of the bodybuilders at one of the local gyms.
Sadly I can’t draw a force diagram because I honestly don’t know how it works. I can almost make sense of it. The technique works perfectly well if I put my wrist on an unyielding inanimate object like a table, so I think I’m somehow transferring the downward force near the elbow into the upward force on the wrist. But I’m not at all sure how that “somehow” works. I just… do it. By “extending ki”. :-P
This one is just awful. Just utterly dumb. It’s correct that losing focus when you’re learning the technique causes it to fail. But at no point in the video does he demonstrate the actual thing. They’re treating it like mysterious magic — which makes sense! It’s hard to do without treating it like a bit of magic at first.
I can do the unbendable arm while distracted now. It’s something my body just does when I choose for it to.
Yeah, I’m with you, this isn’t impressive. It’s kind of sort of right ish. But his understanding of how to do it is sloppy IMO. That slop shows up in how he stumbles around.
Complete relaxation is not necessary for doing this technique. But if you’re doing the technique right, tremendous relaxation is possible. So if you want to check if you’re doing it right, you can try relaxing more than you would be relaxed if you were fighting to keep your arm straight.
He’s right that the arm might bend a little. It’s an adjustment thing. Kind of like how your knees might bend a little if you catch a falling heavy object: it’s just a spring action as your body adjusts to the new incoming force. But if you’re doing unbendable arm right, you can actually let the arm completely fold up and then straighten it out again while they’re applying force. It’s quite easy.
But my guess is that he’s not referring to adjustment. I think he’s making excuses for poor technique.
At a glance, it looks to me like this guy really is doing the thing I’m talking about. There might be extra stuff going on, but my impression is that if you vary that extra stuff it won’t affect the power of the unbendable arm. I really don’t think it’s a matter of “advantageous position”.
I’m not going to die on the hill of “This guy is authentic.” It’s just a passing impression from watching the video. That said, I might start linking to this demo instead honestly! :-D Although I do like the original guy’s looseness better.
I’d be happy to do this demo with you with the “advantageous positioning” mostly however you want it to be. I say “mostly” because there are some things that’ll break the technique’s ability to work, and I can nearly always tell you ahead of time what those will be. (E.g., if you rigidly pin my upper arm to a stationary object like a countertop, the technique won’t work.) But it’s really not about the level of advantage I think you’re talking about. I can do the unbendable arm on my knees with my arm pointing straight over my head. I can do it with two people, one pushing up on my wrist and the other pushing down on my elbow. I hold totally inanimate objects using this technique, like sacks of groceries, by placing a wrist on a surface like a wall or a railing. I’m pretty darn sure it’s a physics trick having to do with redirecting forces somehow. It’s just a little tricky to learn how to do it.
I’m very, very confident it doesn’t work via moving goalposts.
I don’t know how to delineate all the “rules”. If you change the context such that you’re not testing the arm’s unbendability, then you won’t get to experience the thing I’m talking about. There are some ways of testing unbendability that will, in fact, get even my arm to bend in defiance of my trying to use this technique. There’s an amount of force that should, in theory, cause tendons/ligaments/bones to start snapping, at which point of course the arm will fold.
Maybe there are other things for me to name there. I don’t know.
But if you’re concerned about any hidden rules here, feel free to ask me about them. If you give me a scenario, I can tell you whether (a) it’s testing the thing I’m talking about and (b) how it’d do.
E.g., if you vice grip my upper arm and use a car jack against my wrist to force my arm to bend, it absolutely will. I have no power against that setup.
E.g., if you stare really hard at my arm to try to get it to bend but you don’t touch it, you won’t be testing the thing I’m talking about.
E.g., if you are trying to bend my arm like in many of these demos but you surprise me by smashing my foot really hard, I might stop doing the technique and you might successfully bend my arm — not because it failed but because I stopped doing it. (Although even here, if it were somehow really dire that I demo it, I might flinch and it might falter for a moment, but I’d be able to recover it and re-extend my arm against your force.)
And as I said up above, within some sensible limits I’m very happy to demo this technique in person. I’d ask that you not smash my foot or otherwise be mean about it! And there are some tests you might want to do that I can just flat-out tell you would cause the technique to stop working, so I don’t think there’s much point in running those. But if you want me to, say, do it blindfolded while lying on the ground and singing the national anthem, I’d be totally happy to do that. It’ll work just fine.
I think we may be talking past each other a bit here.
I think we’re in agreement that it works through force vector diagrams, not through magic that defies the physics of force vector diagrams. Similarly, I think we’re in agreement that we get to force vector diagrams by patterns of muscular activation and limb positioning. It’s not that the visualization is a required component for doing or explaining, it’s that it allows you to do something that you don’t know how to explain (or do?) otherwise.
My skepticism about The Unbendable Arm is like my skepticism about The Unbendable Tibia. I don’t doubt that there are very good structural reasons the arm/tibia doesn’t bend, but I am skeptical of the implicit idea that in order to do it you need to learn how to visualize from an Aikido practitioner. Not “Will it work even when an MMA guy tries to bend you arm/tibia?”, but “Is the MMA guy actually getting his arm/tibia bent in fights in ways that they wouldn’t if he mixed in some Aikido?”.
If an Aikido practitioner tries to do the demo on me, there’s a few ways it can go.
One is for him to fail to bend my arm, and notice right away “Ah! You already know The Unbendable Arm!”. Points for honesty there, but not for teaching me anything.
A second is for him to implicitly or explicitly tell me to do things that make my arm bendable, and then show me that my arm is stronger when I don’t do them. Points for honesty if he admits “Yeah, all I’m showing is that you’re stronger if you don’t literally help me bend your arm”, but again, no points for teaching anything useful if you have to tell or imply that I should do things wrong in order to demonstrate your technique.
The third is that he gives clear objective rules, I do a bad job on positioning/activation on my own accord, and then he shows me how to not do that. This is the only case where The Unbendable Arm is worth anything, and it’s not because the technique itself is so great but because I was so dumb to start with.
You can say that you’re pointing at something that is physically real in the same that my “Unbendable Tibia” technique (of having an intact tibia) is physically real, and I don’t doubt that. But the relevance is up to the demonstration subject being dumb enough to need it. So when you say “it doesn’t work via moving goalposts” I kinda feel like “Yeah… but it might not seem so relevant once the goal posts are specified properly. And that’s an empirical question about the failures that people walk into rather than a statement about the things you can test on your own with weights and a table”.
I’m not saying this from a perspective of “Woo has no value, you’re crazy woo guy, only things that I personally understand are real”. I’m saying this from a perspective of “The implicit beliefs about what we’re allowed to do shape everything”.
I could tell you about when I performed The Unbendable Wrist in jiu jitsu, for example. I was able to let my friend set up her best submission, and through the power of The Unbendable Wrist I didn’t have to tap to her wristlock. In contrast, a similarly big and strong guy was forced to tap before she could even get her second hand on to assist in the pull. She was annoyed with him for pretending she was able to submit him instead of actually resisting, and he sincerely reassured her that he really was resisting and really wasn’t strong enough to stop it. So she taught him the power of my Unbendable Wrist and he was able to resist as well as I did after that. Can you guess what it took?
It didn’t take visualizations of firehoses, or any technical tips. All it took was “Jimmy was able to resist when I had both arms pulling, so unless he’s a lot stronger than you, then no, you absolutely can resist”. The problem was that he was unknowingly bound by a belief that resistance was futile, didn’t really give it his all as a result, and failed to notice the reason for his failure.
So is “The Unbendable Wrist” real? Or is it just that the illusion of The Bendable Wrist just more compelling and common than one might expect? I find the latter way of thinking much more useful.
I assume you’re still up in the bay area? I’m not likely to be up there anytime soon, but if you’re ever back down in socal and want to play with this stuff let me know. It sounds fun.
I bet we’d come out of it with a force vector diagram and a good way to clearly demonstrate what’s going on.
I obviously wouldn’t try anything that wouldn’t fly at a jiu jitsu gym between friends, but anything on top of that I might make you say explicitly :p
So in jiu jitsu a large part of what we do is try to bend arms and not have our arms bent -- the other way. You mentioned that getting your upper arm pinned defeats the effect, and unsurprisingly this is known as one of the requirements for doing an armbar against anyone who isn’t completely clueless. In general, if you don’t control the joints on either side of the one you’re trying to attack, the person can just move their body to relieve bending pressure.
In these “Unbendable Arm” demonstrations it gets a bit weird because their shoulder is free and the only way to control it is to put them on the ground. “This is supposed to stay standing” seems to be implied, and in any normal demonstration context I’d feel uncomfortable pulling some Aikido sensei off his feet. I’d expect that to get a response like “Dude, chill, this isn’t wrestling. Just try to bend my arm”—while missing the point that “try to bend the arm, without applying enough pressure to force him to bend the arm if he wants to stay standing” isn’t is kinda like saying “Try to bend my tibia—but don’t break it you brute!”. I’d expect that most people can sense this implicit rule and that the effective methods would violate it, without being aware that they’re holding themselves back.
So who is responsible for keeping the defender on his feet, assuming he’s supposed to stay standing? If he falls over with a straight arm, how is that judged?
Similarly, what are the rules on footwork? I think one of the key points is “You don’t have to treat it as an isolated joint, so you can work to lift your elbow up as well as working to push your wrist down” (which contributes to the similarity with “reaching”, btw), but if you’re allowed to step in closer as well then you can get better leverage so there might be even more going on.
I haven’t tried any version of this, but @Valentine wrote (in a post that now seems to be deleted, but which I quoted in a previous post of mine):
(Of course, this doesn’t change the overall point that the visualization trick is useful if you don’t know the physics.)
Huh, I’m not aware of having deleted that post! I wonder where it went.
FWIW, after teaching a bunch of folk the unbendable arm, I’ve had to revise my impression in that original comment. Telling people the physics helps in a few cases, and seemed to help pretty dramatically in the first few (hence my original comment), but the variance was just way wider than I thought.
(Aside: wanting to acknowledge that the strength of my earlier comment wasn’t in epistemic integrity. It’s part of a communication pattern of mine that I’ve been examining lately.)
My impression is that people actually get to the full unbendable arm more reliably from the firehose imagery. In most cases, describing the physics does not help them find the surprising ease. They might succeed in keeping their arm straight, but it tends to be a struggle.
The firehose thing is not how I do it though! It’s more like, there’s an extension feeling in my limbs. When someone tries to bend my arm, if I’m already focusing on the extension feeling, they just can’t bend it. If it starts to bend a little bit, I reach a little more. No effort against the force. It’s more like I’m trying to reach the far wall — but just a little.
But telling people to reach doesn’t seem to help as much. IME folk tend to reach by bending their spine, which seems to destabilize the whole thing. (Doesn’t have to, but in practice it does.) They also switch from reaching to fighting once the pressure is on.
Things like Alexander Technique seem to help a lot more. Getting them to focus on the horizon and being peripherally aware of the pressure, instead of collapsing their awareness on the struggle at their arm.
Maybe more detail specifically about unbendable arm PCK than most need! But since my earlier comment now looks deceptive to me, I wanted to offer a correction.
Really interesting, thanks! I wonder the extent to which this is true in general (any empirically-found-to-be-useful religious belief can be reformulated as a fact about physics or sociology or psychology and remain as useful) or if there are any that still require holding mystical claims, even if only in an ‘as-if’ manner.
While this works for some religious claims, it doesn’t work for many of the most important ones. If heaven doesn’t exist, believing in it, and even acting as though you want to go there, won’t get you there. And believing that the world was created in seven literal days, and acting thus, not only doesn’t cause the world to have been created in seven literal days, it leads you to damage the society around you.
I’m not so sure. My impression is that while dying, perception of time and reality can break down. It might be kind of like falling into a dream state or dropping into an intense psychedelic trip. As the subjective experience of time breaks down, each moment can stretch out until it’s subjectively eternal. If at that point you have a well-developed belief in Heaven, that could very well be what opens up for you, and you could reside there “forever”.
Given that it’s going to feel like something as you die, it sure seems preferable that it be something utterly wonderful. Rather than (say) something horrifying as your animal terror around dying defines the thoughts and anticipations that shape the psychedelic dreamscape you “eternally” fall into. Shaping the dying experience sure seems to me like it’d require some kind of prep work.
Obviously I agree that if Heaven isn’t a place that your eternal soul literally goes to, then what you believe won’t get you there. Because there’s no “there” to get to.
I just want to suggest that maybe that’s a strawman. Depending on your disposition, you might really wish you’d developed faith in Christ or whatever as you watch your death take you. At that point “salvation” won’t be theoretical, I’m guessing. It won’t matter that Heaven/Hell/whatever is “just” a dying brain experience; that’s not much consolation in the middle of it IME.
(This thought inspired by both strange meditative states and some horrific psychedelic experiences. Hence “IME”, not “IMO”. Both are a bit deceptive though: I don’t mean to say that my experiences are for sure equivalent to the dying experience.)
You’re right about the ‘seven literal days’ thing—seems like nonsense to me, but notably I haven’t seen it used much to justify action so I wouldn’t call it an important belief in the sense that it pays rent. More like an ornament, a piece of poetry or mythology.
‘believing in heaven’ is definitely an important one, but this is exactly the argument in the post? ‘believing in the beam of light’ doesn’t make the beam of light exist, but it does (seem to) make my arm stronger. Similarly, believing in heaven doesn’t create heaven [1] but it might help your society flourish.
It’s an important point though that it’s not that believing in A makes A happen, more like believing in some abstracted/idealized/extremized version of A makes A happen.
This does pose a bigger epistemic challenge than simple hyperstition, because the idealized claim never becomes true, and yet (in the least convenient possible world) you have to hold it as true in order to move directionally towards your goal.
well, humanity could plausibly build a pretty close approximation of heaven using uploads in the next 50 years, but that wasn’t reasonable to think 2000 years ago
We can happily and easily disprove the idea that Judeo-Christian cosmology “damages society” by comparing the modern secular society developing after 1500AD with that of the Christian society before it.
Poverty was a virtue, and neglecting the needs of others was sinful. The ancient unspoken law of hospitality remained, and turning away a beggar or a traveler who arrived at your door was an extreme taboo that has only very recently flipped. In the modern world, accepting an impoverished stranger into your house is widely considered a dangerous or harmful behavior. This attitude that poverty makes people evil stands in stark contrast with ancient superstitions that taught us Gods often take humble forms and seek hospitality to test our virtue. A failure of this test is most spectacular in the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Warfare in medieval Europe and the ancient world did not very often target civilian populations as a strategy for conquest, as is the norm in modern warfare. Examples of the razing of cities and the mass killing of civilians in the premodern world are always framed as regrettable examples of cruelty or excess. In modern wars, the elimination of both internal civilian populations and those of an enemy have been repeatedly carried out as a systematic war strategy with a significant portion of resources dedicated and indeed sacrificed to that end.
You’re cherrypicking features of the society. I could respond by pointing to feudalism or slavery, for instance. Having less hospitality but no slavery seems overall positive.
I’m pretty sure you’re exaggerating what hospitality requires. If it was actually required to feed and house all beggars who come to your door, people would be overwhelmed by beggars.
“Judeo-Christian” here doesn’t make sense. You’ll have to at least include Islam. And even then, I wouldn’t say that non-Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions made the society especially horrible. Ancient China and Japan weren’t great, but in ways comparable to how “Judeo-Christian” societies weren’t great.
“Judeo-Christian” cosmology “causes problems” by holding science back. Obviously, ancient societies had less science than we do, so this is perfectly consistent with reality.
It’s very good for this discussion that we compare modern era chattel slavery with the feudal arrangement of serfdom, and I am glad you brought this up. In the premodern Christian medieval context, slavery was all but completely forbidden, with most of slave trade in Europe taking place between the pagan fringe and the Islamic world in places like Dublin, which were set up to traffic peoples captured in these raids. This is in stark contrast to the systematic chattel slavery of colonial powers of the modern era, which purchased and utilized slaves in entrepreneurial schemes. The common controversy was between dehumanization by 18th century sciences and church insistence upon the humanity of other races. However, by the time of the 18th century the church had long deprecated its worldly functions and was often little more than a shattered and subservient arm of various nation states. Serfdom explicitly forbid the displacement of peoples, and while it certainly was a form of servitude it was not one that broke families or had a motivation in profits. It was closer to a protection racket than to ownership.
What hospitality really meant in practice is hard to reconstruct from texts, but perhaps the greatest exemplar of virtue in the medieval era is Saint Francis of Assisi. His innovation was an order which accepted the most extreme poverty in order to be closer to the glory of God. Your fearful phrase, “overwhelmed by beggars,” is a modern perspective, as being beggars indeed provided the Franciscans with a spotless reputation. Indeed, when Byzantium faced an overwhelming influx of poorly-prepared crusaders out of the West, the failure of their hospitality formed much of the enmity which would later lead to their becoming a target for invasion. There is no rule which says a value must be practical or fair, and indeed this virtue of hospitality did occasionally set off international conflict.
As for this “You have to include X and Y” type rhetoric, no, I don’t have to do what you say. Don’t be rude. I am trying to contrast Christendom, medieval arrangements and society, to The West and the development of increasingly secular nation states in the modern era. I will talk about Islam now because that is a striking example of how the sudden appearance of a religion with extreme emphasis on textual rather than oral tradition quickly generates a class of literate experts and clerics. Indeed, new textual traditions rapidly propelled natural philosophy and societal organization forward by advancing literacy. If religion really did cause “dark ages” as the industrial-era mythology suggests, one would expect the Islamic world to have plunged into idiocy rather than making so many advancements. If Christianity indeed held back science, then why was the church the primary organization dedicating resources to intellectual life throughout the middle ages?
The big fallacy is that the church could have held back science at a time when it didn’t even exist yet. At the time of Galileo, there was no “scientific method” and no literature rationalizing why or how such a non-existing concept might be useful. We don’t see the concept of a “scientific method” until the industrial era! How can the church hold back something which doesn’t yet exist? And then, when science does actually exist, this is an era in which the church has not had worldly power for centuries. They are long gone as an intellectual force! There is some dumb kind of knock-on effect where some religious people now feel the need to deny and hold back science, and it is fair to say that religious people in the industrial era have the desire to hold back science. But they simply don’t have the power anymore, they are no longer the center of learning.
It’s certainly true that we are more sophisticated than more religious societies of the past, however, the cause and effect relationship you are implying is utterly conventional. The only problem is that upon nearly every consideration of the actual history, it is utterly wrong.
It feels like you’re gerrymandering a time, place, and scenario to make the answer come out correctly. The medieval era was not the only era where Christianity was powerful, and you’re just handwaving it away by saying that Christianity was an arm of the state after that (and ignoring the period before that—the Romans kept slaves even when they were Christian.) You’re also including or not including Islam depending on whether it’s convenient for your argument (they don’t count when they keep slaves, but they count as religion being a source of learning). And you’re handwaving away serfdom—yes, it isn’t slavery, but it’s still a pretty big violation of human rights practiced by religious people back then that we don’t practice today.
(For that matter, I’m not convinced that “we only enslave pagans” is much of an excuse. Modern secular society doesn’t enslave pagans, after all, so we’re still better than them.)
By making it dangerous for it to come into existence.
There’s a big gap between “no power worth speaking of” and “not in the position of the Pope in 1500″. For instance, religion had enough power to be a serious obstacle to the acceptance of evolution, even if in the 21st century the remaining creationists are a joke.
When you say, “Christian Rome kept slaves,” that’s indeed underlining the point that the Christianization of Europe led to a long process of abolitionism taking place over hundreds of years. This trend would only reverse with the introduction of secular reasoning to dehumanize far-flung peoples of colonial territories. This slavery took a uniquely brutal form as the rationality and reason behind the dehumanization of others was, at the time, something more like expert consensus, and it would be religious concerns which, yet again, propelled abolitionism in more recent centuries. It takes quite extreme rhetorical gymnastics to force the long history of servitude into some traditional linear progress where the modern secular society is in all cases better. The fact is it was much worse.
The Islamic world did not in fact only enslave pagans. The Christian involvement in European slave trade through most of the medieval era was that of the victim and the slave, with their monastic sites perennial targets of viking raids. Because of the demographic collapse of the dark ages, Christian Europe was a backwater. Our enlightenment and industrial era histories roundly tell us that it was backwards Christianity to blame for the dark ages, but they were indeed making presumptions with logic rather than evidence. This kind of history tells us more about the historian’s society and its attitudes, while archaeological data and closer study has revealed that indeed, the people of Europe were ravaged for centuries by disease and the subsequent collapse of supply chains. The counterexample of Byzantine success shows that absolutely Christianity did not hamper the society in any meaningful way. One might say “but if they were liberal and secular they would have done better,” but that’s also like saying “if I had a machine gun I could have taken over medieval England.” True but facile. These things simply did not exist at the time.
I am not making the simple argument that religion makes for better societies, and I can see you’re totally confused here. Rather, there are many mistaken and misunderstood aspects about the time and especially the role religion played, which are covered over by this overreaction in industrial era revisionist histories, which have unfortunately become a point of faith and a conceit illustrating the superiority of the present. At no point did religion meaningfully forestall the “acceptance of evolution” nor did it similarly stop the investigations into Copernicanism. Copernicus was a canon of the church, a lifelong employee. Intellectuals such as Copernicus were nearly untouchable and had vast freedom to publish ideas of all kinds, given they do so with what we would consider an obscene degree of humility. Galileo had every right to publish anything he liked, but like Giordiano Bruno his more modern personality with reputation and glory-seeking behavior violated medieval norms of humility, leading to some degree of persecution for both of them. Certainly that offends our liberal and secular norms which celebrate individuals who do great things, but it is wildly incorrect to say that the church prevented Galileo or anybody from theorizing or studying astronomy. Indeed, the church was the motivator of most intellectual life, and it was far better to be doing astronomy for the church than astrology for power hungry nobles.
The main argument that the church stalled science is flatly absurd. One can equally say that “science forestalls science” because of its high standards for accepting novel theories. J. Harlen Bretz’s theory about the inundation of the scablands met extreme pushback from geologists because he had discovered evidence of ice dam floods. It is almost comical that the idea of a sudden massive flood was such a taboo for industrial-era scientists that they held back progress in their field out of a fear that Christians might somehow justify their great flood myth with this new evidence.
If all you’re saying is that at least one thing was better in at least one religious society in at least one era, then I can’t disagree, but there isn’t much to disagree with either.
And I think you’re making an excessively fine distinction if you’re not arguing that religion makes for better societies, but you are arguing that religion doesn’t damage society. (Unless you think religion keeps things exactly the same?)
We want to believe that as moderns we are better, more rational, so much more wise than people of the past, and it is this very conceited and highly sympathetic view of ourselves that is just so unthinkably blind. We may associate religion with the past in some vague way, an irrational set of beliefs that have been superseded by science. And perhaps that is true, but one can only look at the medieval and ancient world with a sense of their great innocence in all matters. Their values of humility, honor, faith, and so on are so different from our own imperatives of competition, survival of the fittest, and so on. There has never and hopefully will never be another era as vicious as the past five hundred years. Almost every comparison we can make is absolutely withering for the phony perspective that we are progressing into a more enlightened species. The more conventional view is that indeed humanity has become increasingly cruel, cold, and calculating even as standards of living, life expectancy, and political freedom has improved.
I can furnish you with the usual last argument in this back-and-forth. Indeed, the people of the past may have committed their own holocausts had they only invented factories and railroads, they may have bombed cities into oblivion had they only the technical knowledge to build massive fleets of thousands of bombers. Maybe ancient people would have worked harder to ship slaves across oceans and displace more peoples, if only they had better sailing ships. They simply couldn’t afford to house prisoners in massive systems before the industrial era made food incredibly cheap. But even if we accept this as true and factor religion out of this judgment, moderns are still left holding the bag. We are the ones who did these things, not them, and this constant fake history by which we make them out to be monsters is ludicrous in the extreme. It was the modern era when witch crazes began, it was the modern era when antisemitic pogroms begin, the modern era where we see the state persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition. These are all great examples of how religion can be made harmful, but they are also the leading edge of the modern world, mere hints of things to come. And let’s be clear, the Spanish Inquisition is carried out by a state that has seized the reigns of the church and is using it to their political advantage. That’s the common pattern in the early modern era, the passing of worldly church powers to nation states, it is reflecting a secularization of the powers, and their falling into the hands of the ambitious. Modern people are the ones who made religion a tool of harm, as we’ve done with literally every tool at our disposal. We are the ones to blame, I’m afraid.
Yet I don’t keep slaves or have serfs. Your people of humility, honor, and faith did.
I mean… yes? They had a problem doing lots of things well. Of course that means they couldn’t oppress very well either.
Only if you carefully define “moderns” to… not be modern. Blaming pogroms and the Spanish Inquision on “moderns” is blatantly distorting what most people mean by that in order to whitewash religion.
Serfs were not property of any master and ideally had protection against displacement and violence. In practice this didn’t always play out, but neither do liberal human rights. Equivocating serfdom to the displacement of millions of Africans as property is convenient and lazy, and completely illogical. And there is no denying the modernity in the African slave trade, the massive scale, the involvement of mechanization of the cotton gin, and on and on.
Probably just about every historian you can find is going to refer to the 1500s as the early modern or late medieval period, depending on just where in Europe you are, and it’s a time when religion became remarkably more harmful than it had ever been before, along with many other changes such as a terminal disruption of the church’s centralized worldly powers and the concentration of total powers into the state. And these changes are continuous with the present.
I’m not redefining modernity in some twisted way, this is all very conventional stuff. Who cares what “most people” think, they’re fucking wrong!
You are supposedly criticizing other people:
If you are criticizing other people, you have to criticize what they are actually talking about. And pretty much none of them are saying that moderns under your definition are better than religious people. People who believe that “we are better than the past” count the 1800s as the past.
Of course there’s denying the modernity. Because you’re not defining “modern” to mean today, you’re defining it to make your answer come out the way you want.
You also already gave the explanation:
And you made the odd concession before:
Okay, so religious people, from your own specified time period, not only enslaved pagans, they also enslaved others. And somehow it still doesn’t count as religious people from that time keeping slaves?
Liberal human rights tells me to not keep serfs at all. And serfdom is evil at its core. “Serfs ideally weren’t mistreated” means nothing, because they were being inherently mistreated by being serfs.
In technical parlance you’re supposed to say “contemporary,” or even “postmodern” to refer to the current era. In many important ways, modernity is passing. While your insistence that I use colloquial rather than technical terms is cute, it’s also despicably ignorant and you’re not making strong arguments against the wider view of history I’m presenting. You’re taking this a bit too personally, and I wish you would quit it with this rhetorical crap whereby you insert an overarching argument I’ve never made and knock it down with contemptible logical tricks. Read the history or don’t. Feel free to air out your ignorance in more of these facile posts of utter ignorance.
When I said that medieval Christians held a taboo against slavery and did not practice it, and explain the process by which secularization and early proto-sciences justified the creation of history’s most vicious form of slavery, medieval slavery in the Islamic world is not a counterexample in some kind of logical trap you’ve sprung. It’s a non sequitur.
While Liberal human rights tell you not to “keep serfs,” a stupid phrase meant to insist upon your false narrative of equivalence, remember that the most hard-headed Liberal of the early US, Thomas Jefferson, ensured that the institution of slavery would continue while owning slaves himself. And if you investigate his personal thoughts on the matter, he is weighing his religious misgivings against his proto-scientific reasoning, a common pattern in the slavery debate. His conclusion is that it was a regrettable economic necessity, and so Liberal values might tell you not to “keep serfs,” a painfully ignorant phrase, but like the medieval Peace and Truce of God, these are norms which can of course be broken or applied unevenly throughout the modern period.
If I were to criticize what you’re actually talking about, I think it’s nothing to do with history. Your whole thinking is suffused by mythology. Frankly, your ignorance of the topic of history is pretty typical and your supposed interest in the topic is patently fake.
It’s a pretty basic principle of debate that you have to dispute things that people actually said. When “we” say that modern people are better than past people, that doesn’t count the 1800s as modern, never mind the 1600s. If you don’t want to call that “modern people”, you can call it something else, but then your dispute is about the something else. The claim about your kind of modern is not one that people have been making; addressing it as though it is is addressing a straw man.
You’re equivocating between “religious” people and Christians specifically.
If you’re going to say things about “religion”, Islam is relevant.
(You also brought up Jefferson claiming his religious misgivings were against slavery. Thomas Jefferson believed in God, but wasn’t a Christian.)
And the same goes for the things that your religion is supposedly doing—I can find prominent, influential, religious believers who thought that slavery or whatever is good. You just say that they don’t count because they’re “really” the state.
(Also, I’d appreciate a reference for Jefferson.)
I agree with the point of “if your worldview forbids you from doing these kinds of visualizations, you’ll lose a valuable tool”.
I disagree with the claim that a scientific materialist understanding of the world would forbid such visualizations. There’s no law of scientific materialism that says “things that you visualize in your mind cannot affect anything in your body”.
E.g. I recall reading of a psychological experiment where people were asked to imagine staring into a bright light. For people without aphantasia, their pupils reacted similarly as if they were actually looking into a light source. For people with aphantasia, there was no such reaction. But the people who this worked for didn’t need to believe that they were actually looking at a real light—they just needed to imagine it.
Likewise, if the unbendable arm trick happens to be useful for you, nothing prevents you from visualizing it while remaining aware of the fact that you’re only imagining it.
I think we mostly agree, I was pointing to a strawman of scientific materialism that I used to but no longer hold. Maybe a clearer example is a verbal practice like a mantra, chanting “God is good”—which is incompatible with the constraint to only say things that are intersubjectively verifiable, at least in principle. If someone were to interrupt and ask “wait how do you know that? what’s your probability on that claim?” your answer would have to look something like this essay.
This does seem to be the case for unbendable arm, but I’m less sure it generalizes to more central religious beliefs like belief in a loving God or the resurrection of the dead! I don’t see an a priori reason why certain beliefs wouldn’t require a lack of conscious awareness that you’re imagining them in order to “work”, so want to make sure my worldview is robust to this least convenient possible world. Curious if you have further evidence or arguments for this claim!
I tried Unbendable Arm and it didn’t work at all for me.
thanks! as in there was no difference between visualizing and not?
When visualizing it was actually easier to bend my arm.
The Aikido visualization exercise reminds me a bit of “follow-through” (such as in tennis): it’s weird how strongly the rest of your swing well after the ball has lost contact with your racquet affects its trajectory.
Oh cool! In aikido we’d call that “extending ki” (in contrast to “cutting ki”, where your “mind” stops at the point of contact and your “ki” (here roughly “followthrough”) abruptly halts).
(I have successfully done Unbendable Arm after Valentine showed me in person, without explaining any of the biomechanics. My experience of it didn’t involve visualization, but felt like placing my fingertips on the wall across the room and resolving that they’d stay there. Contra jimmy’s comment, IIRC I initially held my arm wrong without any cueing.)
Strongly related: Believing In. From that post:
I feel like this post is similarly too lax on, not deception, but propositional-and-false religious beliefs.
For believers (which I do not count myself among), leaving aside the beam of light, that very much is the point. That God really is up there/down here/in here and it is our duty to live as He has shown us. “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8.)
Another has commented that the Unbendable Arm demo is headology, and that you can just do the thing without tricking yourself into it.
I must wonder whether this “as if” conception of God will wear thin in adversity. Are you really going to put a life’s work into building a cathedral for the glory of God on that foundation?
I remember that back in the 60′s, the hippy era, the concept arose of the “earth mother”, a woman fulfilling an ideal of bountifulness, nurturing, and attunement to Mother Nature. It did not take long for people — or at least, the women — to realise that this was a scam to get the women to do all the cooking and provide free sex (which was called free love, but that is another story). As a woman of the time put it, “there’s only so many pounds of carrots you can scrub and still imagine you’re having a valid spiritual experience.”
See also Proper posture for mental arts, which also mentions the Unbendable Arm and explains how it works biomechanically, namely via the latissimus dorsi.
As the author, I want to note that I’m way more skeptical of my earlier explanation.
(Accordingly, I’m less confident of my current explanation too!)
I’m pretty sure the movement cannot work if you vice grip my upper arm such that it can’t move relative to my body (or to the ground). The elbow must be free to rise a bit.
Sometimes I’ll demo the trick by letting people fold my arm, asking them to continue applying as much pressure as they like, warn them that I’m about to start straightening my arm, and then just do so. It’s close to effortless for me. But when I do it, my whole arm goes up first. I then lower my arm again once it’s straight.
The lats might be closely involved, but I don’t think that’s the main issue. I haven’t noticed any effect whatsoever in terms of unbendable arm strength based on lat strength.
Also, once someone who’s vastly weaker than me gets the “click”, they’re able to (sometimes) defy me regardless of how much muscular strength I put into it.
So I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of leverage trick.
My best guess right now is somethingsomething redirecting force between the incoming hands into each other somethingsomething.
I use the same feeling to hold very heavy objects when I put my hand on a table. Like hanging a heavy grocery bag on my elbow with my arm straight and my palm up. I keep it suspended by letting the bag press the back of my hand into the table. IME I’m not so much fighting the bag’s bending my arm as I am just… reaching. If you make the bag heavier, it presses my hand harder into the table. That’s it. It’s not relevantly harder for me to keep the bag suspended.
Again, no lats.
I think this is related to how interfaces are selected for by functionality, not accuracy. Accuracy is one thing that can make them functional sometimes. But not always!
I like Donald Hoffman’s example of computer GUI desktops. Those aren’t meant to reflect the actual state of anything at the hardware level. A given “file” on your “desktop” might be scattered across your hard drive for instance. The point of the desktop is to create a kind of semi-fictional interface that humans can use. It’s not totally disconnected from what’s going on in the computer; otherwise it wouldn’t work. But in many ways it’d get worse as a usable interface if you made it more accurate.
Likewise, motivational inner speech (“I can do it! I can do it!”) isn’t meant to be an epistemically justified conclusion. It’s a way of drumming up resources to try something. Refusing to use it because its literal denotations aren’t justified is a kind of confusion.
Another example is the common thing about fixing posture by imagining a string attached to the top of your head that’s suspended from far up in the sky. Obviously there’s no such string. But somehow visualizing and “feeling” the string and kind of “hanging” from it can often help people rearrange their spine in a helpful way. It’s much harder to give specific instructions about what shifts to make in the spine: that’s just not the natural interface for making the right adjustments.
A maybe stranger example is learning to balance on one foot with your eyes closed. A lot of that is just your body getting used to using the vestibular and proprioceptive senses, and lots of quick micro adjustments, to stay upright. But AFAICT it’s completely irrelevant whether you understand that. You just… try. And you keep trying. And eventually something hidden happens, and you get better at it (probably — some don’t!). The interface there is this magic “trying” thing. More accurate detail about what you’re trying is just noise (AFAIK)!
It’s unclear to me where the boundaries of this effect are. If I don a frame of faith in Christ, does this create a world interface that makes some things available that are harder to access in some other way? How would I tell? If it affects how pleasant life feels to me, and by it how open-hearted I’m able to be with those I love, and those who don’t hold that faith don’t seem to be as free to open their hearts… well, it kind of looks like the faithless are the confused ones, aren’t they? Kind of like a person who won’t use a GUI interface because it’s deceptive.
(I’m not claiming that specifically faith in Christ does this, by the way! I’m giving a hypothetical example. I also think some people in fact do have a subjective experience as though this hypothetical example is real — but that involves a lot of social complexities such as that they’re supposed to experience it as true. So please take it as a purely theoretical example. Or feel free to debate whether it’s accurate of course! But please don’t frame it as though you’re debating with me about its accuracy.)
I’ve done some Aikido and related arts, and the unbending arm demo worked on me (IIRC, it was decades ago). But learning the biomechanics also worked. More advanced, related skills, like relaxing while maintaining a strongly upright stance, also worked best by starting out with some visualizations (like a string pulling up from the top of my head, and a weight pulling down from my sacrum).
But having a physics-based model of what I was trying to do, and why it worked, was essential for me to really solidify these skills—and incorrect explanations, which I sometimes got at first, did not help me. Could just be more headology, though—other students seemed to be able to do well based off the visualizations and practice.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rZX4WuufAPbN6wQTv/no-really-i-ve-deceived-myself seems relevant.
tagged this post as self-fulfilling prophecies!
yes!! “focusing on what you want!” (i talk a little more about this and self-fulfilling prophecies here)
**aiming** at what you want. vector. (teleology, not etiology)
I’m pretty sure I learned to do this based on a simple mechanistic description (without detailed physics) and practice.
The experience of eternity is not analogous at all to a conscious visualization exercise of any kind, as popular as the idea might be. Rather, it is far more relatable in the example of cathedrals and artworks.
I also recommend faith, but not because it has any kind of hyperstitious benefit for manifesting strength or so on, but rather because of the theological argument of Occam’s Fideism ringing true with my own personal mystical experience. The presumption that God, the very universe itself, should be coherent or rational and thus fit well to human conception is just an attempt to reassure ourselves that we are outside observers when we absolutely are not. What you call pure materialism, or what philosophers might call Platonism is indeed a form of profound faithlessness.
This comment doesn’t seem to make much sense—that is, it doesn’t seem nonsensical, but seems to be missing enough context that I don’t know how your statements are meant to fit together.
Medieval logicians, theologians really, typically had a very strong Platonic principle whereby they could often prove the existence of God and derive His properties through reason alone. It was quite complex and tedious, and Occam’s razor left us with Fideism, the idea that any gap between reason and reality is in the final analysis filled only by faith. Overly complex self-justifying and self-reassuring linkages that attempt to schematize the relation between map and territory are practically useless and yet take up much of the intellectual life. History has been pretty harsh to Duns Scotus: the dunce, whose logic is considered by later secular sources to be utterly asinine and ridiculously wasteful. But, he was indeed a major influence for Occam.
In Occam’s words, “The ways of God are not open to reason, for God has freely chosen to create a world and establish a way of salvation within it apart from any necessary laws that human logic or rationality can uncover.”
Platonic thought wants us to be seeing shadows of reality, as in the cave allegory, and to use our power of deduction and reason to identify the essence of what it is, exactly, casting the shadows. Occam’s great breakthrough is in recognizing that using reason in this way relies on the presumption that God reasons in the same way we do, and that such a presumption introduces rather than reduces logical complications. This does not shut down the project of reason in the least, and it is far more like refactoring bullshit out of code.
None of this in any way proves or even supports belief in the existence of God. It seems just as believable as an argument for agnosticism.
I’m glad you understand. More properly, it is an argument for the Formalist philosophy of mathematics. The implications in terms of one’s personal religious choices are going to vary, of course, but Fideism is not a full equivalent to Agnosticism. Agnosticism says that we cannot have knowledge while Fideism says that knowledge is still possible through faith.