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Comment by dr_dshiv

1 day ago

A good place to start is Cornelis Agrippa’s “Three Books on Occult Philosophy.” Agrippa was a lawyer and esoteric feminist (eg, he wrote “on the nobility and preeminence of the female sex”) and defended women accused of witchcraft throughout Europe. His “three books” gave birth to the “occult” nomenclature.

Or my favorite, Marsilio Ficino. There is a statue to Ficino when you walk into the library. Ficino was hired by Cosimo Medici (the Florentine who invented banking and funded much of the Florentine renaissance) to translate Plato and other esoteric books coming from the fall of Constantinople. He published “De Mysteriis” in 1497, which paraphrases neoplatonic understanding of Gods, Demons, Heroes and Soul — arguing that gods and demons don’t feel — indeed, not even the soul (“the lowest of the divines”) has any part that feels.

(Aside: This idea was actually referenced in “K Pop Demon Hunters,” where they debate whether demons can feel — or are “all feelings”)

It is an old Pythagorean tradition that sensation or consciousness arises out of the interaction of the immaterial soul and the material body. That “three world” idea is echoed by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose in his book “Road to Reality.” He talks about how the material world produces the world of consciousness which produces the world of ideas (including mathematics), which seems to produce the material world…

In any case, there are many old ideas and nuggets of wisdom that have yet to be mined and discovered— don’t think for a moment that scholars have read all these books! We might need AI for that…

41 comments

dr_dshiv

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ryandv  1 day ago

> It is an old Pythagorean tradition that sensation or consciousness arises out of the interaction of the immaterial soul and the material body. That “three world” idea is echoed by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose in his book “Road to Reality.” He talks about how the material world produces the world of consciousness which produces the world of ideas (including mathematics), which seems to produce the material world…

You see this idea echoed in Hermetic Qabalah as the "Four Worlds" - the world of action & physical materiality, the world of psychology, thought, feeling, & egoic consciousness, the world of creativity, and the world of archetypal abstraction.

The Hermetic influence comes from the assertion that the three immaterial worlds of the "soul" or "mind" (synonyms with the same referent) are in some sense equal to, or at least intertwined with, the material body, in a mutually reciprocal dance: "As above, so below; as below, so above."

For some 20th century texts in this neighbourhood: The Three Initiates' primer on occult studies The Kybalion, Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah, and the classic Qabalistic reference: Liber 777 by Crowley (or its updated, more legible version, Liber 776 1/2 by Eshelman). The works of Israel Regardie such as The One Year Manual or The Middle Pillar are also good for grounding occult studies in more psychological or psychotherapeutic language which is a good moderating influence when experimenting with pretty out-there material.

Be careful with the meaning of words in this field.

  • Simon_O_Rourke  6 hours ago

    This is one step removed from swinging a crystal from a piece of string and using it to divine the stock market. Absolute nonsense the lot of it, and a waste of good printing paper that would otherwise have better use as a instruction booklet for a TP-link router.

    • davidguetta  5 hours ago

      The same could have been said of Galileo studying cosmology at his time. "Better spend time taking care of his garden".

      Don't read it if you dont like it but don't discourage people asking questions and making funny theories. Most of human progress wasdone that way about aspects of life that was not yet understood. Your attitude is nothing but nihilistic and it never built anything.

    • ryandv  5 hours ago

      You're holding it upside down. Nobody earnestly believes in soothsaying, prophecy, or "magic missile" in this field - nobody worth your time anyway.

      Most of the problem with the occult is that people have no idea what the fuck the words and vocabulary are actually referencing.

  • elmomle  16 hours ago

    Also reflected in Vedic/Hindu philosophy: conscious experience (cetanā) arises from the interfacing of ātman (the immaterial self / soul) with śarīra (the physical body).

    • unsupp0rted  4 hours ago

      Well as long as there are words for it then it’s probably true.

      It doesn’t actually predict or fix anything, even after thousands of years. But it’s hard enough to pin down that you can’t disprove any of it.

zoogeny  1 day ago

I think your description of Penrose's belief does not match a podcast I recently watched where he discusses these topics with the Christian apologist William Lane Craig [1]. In fact, he explicitly states early on in that video that he sees the world of ideas as primary as opposed to Craig's view that consciousness is primary.

At any rate, this video might serve as a quick introduction to Penrose's three world idea for those interested.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wLtCqm72-Y

  • dr_dshiv  1 day ago

    Oh, cool! I don’t recall a “primary” in the book — he suggests a range of different possible configurations that he was open to. What struck you as not matching?

    Personally, I do think that the immaterial world of ideas must be primary—at least certain aspects of mathematics seem so necessary that they’d be discovered by intelligent life, no matter the galaxy… or simulation…

    • TheOtherHobbes  7 hours ago

      The idea that ideas are primary is exactly what you'd expect from an Oxford academic.

      Unfortunately it needs a definition of "idea" which isn't recursive, so...

      As for math - it's a conceit to believe that the mechanisms we call math aren't just a patchwork of metaphors that build up from experience.

      There's some self-insight in the sense that after a while you start making meta metaphors like category theory.

      But it's a very bold claim to suggest that any of this has to be universal, especially when the structures math uses can't be proved from the ground up.

      Or that completely different classes of metaphors we can't imagine - because we evolved in a certain way with certain limitations - might not play an equivalent role.

      Does the universe know what pi is? Or an integer? Or a manifold?

      Does it need to?

      1 reply →

    • zoogeny  1 day ago

      I was considering your explicit "material -> conscious -> ideas -> material" description. It feels more correct when you say he considers a range of possibilities that connect these, not explicit causality.

      My take away was that he sees a mystery in the connections between these things (physical world, consciousness, ideas) that hints at some missing ideas in our conceptions of these things. But he clearly wants to avoid that mystery allowing what he calls out as "vague" answers to the question (mostly religious dogmatic certainties).

    • ryandv  1 day ago

      > Personally, I do think that the immaterial world of ideas must be primary—at least certain aspects of mathematics seem so necessary that they’d be discovered by intelligent life, no matter the galaxy… or simulation…

      For some speculative philosophical fiction that explores related ideas I highly recommend Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

Archelaos  20 hours ago

> don’t think for a moment that scholars have read all these books!

Umberto Eco probably did.

MarkPNeyer  4 hours ago

If the material world produces ideas, then there is no truth and ideas can’t be wrong: it’s all just, like, your opinion, man.

But if consciousness and ideas come first, the creation of the material world becomes a kind of game. The hard problem of consciousness is then confused, and replaced with a simpler question: why would pure consciousness that could play any game (ie explore any mathematical structure) choose to play within these laws of physics?