Yuxi Liu is a PhD student in Computer Science at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, researching on the scaling laws of large neural networks.
Personal website: https://yuxi-liu-wired.github.io/
Yuxi Liu is a PhD student in Computer Science at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, researching on the scaling laws of large neural networks.
Personal website: https://yuxi-liu-wired.github.io/
Okay I posted the whole thing here now.
Relevant quotes:
Original text is from Discourse on Heaven of Xunzi:
雩而雨,何也?曰:無佗也,猶不雩而雨也。日月食而救之,天旱而雩,卜筮然後決大事,非以為得求也,以文之也。故君子以為文,而百姓以為神。以為文則吉,以為神則凶也。
The Britannica says:
Another celebrated essay is “A Discussion of Heaven,” in which he attacks superstitious and supernatural beliefs. One of the work’s main themes is that unusual natural phenomena (eclipses, etc.) are no less natural for their irregularity—hence are not evil omens—and therefore men should not be concerned at their occurrence. Xunzi’s denial of supernaturalism led him into a sophisticated interpretation of popular religious observances and superstitions. He asserted that these were merely poetic fictions, useful for the common people because they provided an orderly outlet for human emotions, but not to be taken as true by educated men. There Xunzi inaugurated a rationalistic trend in Confucianism that has been congenial to scientific thinking.
Heaven never intercedes directly in human affairs, but human affairs are certain to succeed or fail according to a timeless pattern that Heaven determined before human beings existed...
Thus rituals are not merely received practices or convenient social institutions; they are practicable forms in which the sages aimed to encapsulate the fundamental patterns of the universe. No human being, not even a sage, can know Heaven, but we can know Heaven’s Way, which is the surest path to a flourishing and blessed life. Because human beings have limited knowledge and abilities, it is difficult for us to attain this deep understanding, and therefore the sages handed down the rituals to help us follow in their footsteps.
I am very doubtful of this. Humans are hardwired to think in cause-and-effect terms, and Confucianism does not explicitly deny causality.
In very early China (about 500 BC), there was a period of great intellectual diversity before Confucianism dominated. There was a School of Names which is very interested in logic and rhetorics. Philosophers in that school have been traditionally disparaged, which seems to explain why formal logic has not developed in China. For example, the founder, Deng Xi, ’s fate was used as a cautionary tale against sophistry.
This has been demonstrated to persist even in modern times, by psychology studies. A reference is (Nisbett, 2003).
My guess is that in any large population of humans (~1 million), there are enough talented individuals to generate the basic scientific ideas in a few generations. The problem is to have a stable social structure that sustains these thinkers and filters out wrong ideas.
They were also lucky that they got remembered. If their work didn’t get copied that much by the Arabs, we would be praising the medieval Arabs instead of ancient Greeks.
Also, a personal perspective: in current Chinese education (which I took until high school), Chinese achievements in science and math are noted whenever possible (for example, Horner’s Method is called Qin Jiushao Method), but there was no overarching scheme or intellectual tradition. They were like accidental discoveries, not results of sustained inquiries. Shen Kuo stands out as a lone scientist in a sea of literature writers.
Confucian classics, which I was forced to recite, is suffocatingly free from scientific concern. It’s not anti-science, rather, uninterested in science. For example: