Not just medieval - Hindu philosophy has definitely had that concept for the few thousand years it's been in existence. The concept of "koti koti brahmanda" literally millions of universes is a pretty central concept.
Another central concept that says "Everything is Maya", hints at the idea that there is no absolute reality, and is very close to the simulation hypothesis..
Another one is the concept of 'Omkaaram' which is supposed to be a primordal "sound" or sensation from which all the universe was created, which can be thought of as saying that all reality emerges from consciousness..[1]
The stuff in Vedas and how it got written are really really intriguing.
shared because we have very similar neural structures and communicate with each others, partial because our knowledge isn't innate, so each has a restricted view of the universe; is it clearer now ?
Of course they did. It was heretical to imply that something conceivable by man would be impossible for God to create. If we can imagine it, he can do it. A rather roundabout way of arriving at a theory of parallel universes, but fascinating nonetheless.
But the fact that we can conceive of it, and that God can create it, does not mean that he did, does it?
I could conceive of another God that is able to destroy God. And since I can conceive of this, then God can create it - but it does not mean that he did.
I could conceive of God just doing nothing, and never creating anything in history eternal. But surely he has created something.
>But the fact that we can conceive of it, and that God can create it, does not mean that he did, does it?
There was an implicit belief in pre-modern thought that this is the case. That reality is a permutation of all possible forms. It's arguable that evolutionary models are a temporalized version of these beliefs.[1]
Thanks for the link, it looks like interesting reading.
But, how are evolutionary models a version of enumerating all possible forms. The forms accessible to evolution, are not all possible forms but only evolutionary peaks that can be climbed in the fitness landscape.
The worldview gave explanation for why there is gradation between nature's forms. The search for "missing links" predates evolutionary theory. There was an understanding that there are intermediate forms between any two species. Evolution adds a temporal dimension to this worldview where intermediate forms unfold from one another.
The counterintuitive moral of the story seems to be that ideological censorship has the potential to spur philosophical and scientific progress, even if this is an unintended and not very frequent outcome.
It is strange, but for a good chunk of time religious thinkers were "more right" about subjects like the eternity of the universe than the prevailing aristotelian philosophers, sometimes deploying surprisingly modern-sounding ideas in the process. I'm thinking of authors like Philoponus https://historyofphilosophy.net/philoponus and Crescas https://historyofphilosophy.net/crescas
There are some broader lessons from this than who believed what and when (or what other philosophical or religious traditions had similar or "better" beliefs).
Belief based solely on faith has a pronounced tendency to go off in the weeds. That's the distinction which the scientific method makes, particularly in the tradition of the bacons -- Roger Bacon (13th c.) and Francis Bacon (16th c.), no relation. Each emphasised the value of observation or experimentation.
Second: if you find your premises, or traditional authorities, at odds with observed reality, you might care to strongly favour dismissing your premises or authorities, rather than your observations -- so long as the latter seem to be independently verifiable. An interesting case of this developed most especially in the 19th century, within the field of geology, where the record of the stones was found in marked difference to the record of the scripts, particularly the biblical record. Noted geologists spent not inconsiderable time attempting reconciliation of these records. There was no reconciliation possible, of course, one of those records was simply wrong.
Third: if you've found a persistent discord between observation and theory, then it's quite likely you've illuminated a lacuna in your knowledge or understanding. Again to geology: it was clear from the geologic record that the Earth was at least some hundreds of millions of years old, but no known force or energy could explain the observed temperature of the Earth's interior. The answer to this turned out to be previously unknown form of energy potential and release: radioactivity. That also happened to provide the clock by which the Earth's age could be determined, as well as the mechanism by which geology is ultimatley founded: plate tectonics. Not fully accepted, it turns out, until 1965, though it's now considered the fundamental organising principle of geology. Which gives us a fourth lesson:
Fourth: You can study a thing for a long, long, long time before you come to a proper understanding of it.
Fifth: Study of ancient authorities isn't wholly useless. I advise people to look to philosophy, especially, if not for truth then as a record in how the truth, and error, are arrived at, over time.
And finally: it's not enough to come to the correct answer, but to come to the correct answer through the right chain of reasoning. Science is structured knowledge. It's not a dry recitation of facts, but rather, the structure, through which, those facts become evident. If not self-evident, then building on observation and mechanism. Precursors of current understanding, absent the underlying structural foundation, are interesting, but are not science as it's properly considered.
Good stuff, but that last point is what a lot of critics of science don't get. We don't believe scientific discoveries, such as that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal limit, because a famous scientist proved it years ago and now we take it on faith. We believe is because every physics student that goes through university and studies this stuff proves it themselves from first principles. We believe it because we have followed through the chain of reasoning, studied the experimental equipment and done the experiment ourselves. Many of us anyway. These experiments and the principles they are based on haven't been proven a few times, in many cases they've been proven hundreds of thousands of times.
I don't know if you caught wind of any of the "decolonising science" movement, one adherent of whom claims that science is based on who says a thing is so. The truth is the exact inverse. The motto of the Royal Academy is particularly instructive: In nullis verba. By the word of no one.
Nothing to see here. It is a naive or rather primitive concept based on assumption that there are more than one "future" (while actually there is none).
The traditional example is that if I cross the street everything will be different. Parallel universes is related to this nonsensical multiple-parallel-futures assumption.
For those who are interesting in seeing things as they are instead of piling up nonsense upon nonsense, consider a process of evolution. There is no multiple versions of the same species because they might turn the other way. Everything happen as it happen (everything is the way it is because it got that way). It is an unfolding of a single process.
There is no future(s). It is an "organic" growth (like growing of a tree). Future is a concept of the mind. A meme. So are parallel universes. There is nothing parallel to what is. At least outside of one's head.
I am standing on the shoulders of giants (Eastern philosophy since Upanishads).
The notion that the nature of reality (of what is) is hidden from one by the veil of ignorance (one's own and socially constructed bullshit in the first place) is an ancient one and goes back to the early Upanishadic seers and the historical Buddha.
Removing an observer (and all products of his mind which constitute the veil that obscures what is) is an ancient hack of early Buddhists, I am only re-emphasizing it.
Man is just a by-product of the Universe - a mere sub-process of nothing permanent or substantial (leave alone divine). Mental concepts are not required for the Universe (or what they call Brahman) to be and most of these concepts does not exit outside one's conditioned and conceptually infested mind.
Wrong concepts is the veil which obscures the view of what is. This is at least two millennia old philosophy of the nature of mind. Before knowing what lies outside know what lies within. There is the same facility and related social dynamics which produced gods, daemons, chakras, tantras, mantras, kundalini, mandalas, accelerating time, higher dimensions, multiple futures, parallel universes and other popular bullshit in which we are drowning.
Read some old tantras, then read some modern probabilistic modeling bullshit which they call modern science - it is all the same kind of piles of untestable socially constructed nonsense. Untestability and socially accepted dogmatism is precisely what makes it (and tantras and other religious crap) stand.
I think perhaps what you're trying to say, in a confusing and condescending way, is that you believe the universe is a motionless and unchanging four-dimensional solid (three spacial dimensions and time), of which we perceive a rolling three-dimensional slice.
Was it because they had a philosophy of hierarchical power that ensured the ruling class maintained rule by the utmost power, divine right, over the populace? One in which all suitable ideas would be approved and any unsuitable ones taught would cause their professor to be excommunicated or worse?
[T]he universities were given the task of providing an unceasing supply of ideologically correct candidates for vital positions in government, church and business. The state was able to make the faculties of the "'venerable institutions'" of higher education, or rather indoctrination, assume this duty because it controlled appointments and held the purse from which "emoluments" flowed into the coffers of academics. Hence the members of the university "hierarchy" made it their "business, the business for which they . .. [were] paid," to "uphold certain political as well as religious opinions," namely those of the "ruling powers of the state" (Mill 1981: 429: and 1988b: 350). Thus the universities pursued with vigor their assignment to inculcate in their students those political and ideological views that were cherished by the power elite. The graduates of the ancient universities were, therefore, well prepared for employment in, and by, those institutions that were instrumental in perpetuating the existing maldistribution of income. All of this might come to naught, however, if the masses of the underclass should achieve anything approaching success in potential attempts at throwing off their fetters.
Hans E. Jensen, "John Stuart Mill's Theories of Wealth and Income Distribution". Review of Social Economy, Pages 491-507 | Published online: 05 Nov 2010
Fortunately that kind of abuse of power has been around for thousands of years. People have interpreted it as damage and routed around it. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, but perpetually. Some of the most established organizations today started as grassroots responses to power imbalances.
People preferred religious philosophy as a framework to model the universe because it has proven to hold families and villages together for thousands of years.
The non-religious philosophy - in those times there was no scientific method and it basically amounted to what Aristotle said. And by the Middle Ages, what he said has become increasingly irrelevant, while Christianity have been refined for the past thousand years.
It boils down to an ideology that was adaptive (at least evolutionarily speaking) versus and ideology that was nothing more than dogma.
Of course almost a thousand years has passed, and people in this time see the situation has completely reversed, religion now seen as dogma and non-religious philosophy is the ideology that has adapted to humanity's changing needs.
Religion fulfilled two roles in the primitive world: Explaining how the world worked, and how an individual should behave in the world.
It took a long time for society to mature and learn. The accumulation of knowledge enabled rationally explaining the world from scientific first principles, and rational self-governance from philosophical first principles.
Holy books are an artifact from a more primitive time, when experience was spread so thin it had to be accumulated across generations in singular books. If anything, those ideas survived because they lacked flexibility - their persistence reflects built-in error-correction that minimized mutations over time.
If I can amplify on that second function, it also had a few components.
One was guiding people in how to live within typical social and community structures -- mostly smaller towns.
The other was providing for people to act in a reasonably predictable way, across great distances or times.
Realise that a typical large pre-industrial empire might span a few thousand miles, meaning that a journey from one region to another would take days, weeks, sometimes months. Sea and river travel was preferred to land, but ships were restricted to harbour from November to May, in the Northern Hemisphere. Which meant that a provincial regent or magistrate might be on his own for months at a time. As business and commerce expanded, those also required trust.
(It's not surprising that the first financial networks developed either among specific subcultures, particularly the Jews, who had dispersed throughout Europe, were restricted from owning land or participating in trades, and had strong ties to other areas, or families, such as the Rothschild banking empire, founded by brothers in London, Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, and Naples.)
Religion effectively provided that structure, firmness, to both social relations and political and business behaviours.
Is this a personal theory or do you have referernces or citations on this?
Asking as I'm curious. And have arrived at somewhat similar conclusions.
I'd also note that science suffered under the handicap that it was difficult to conduct with tools available at the time. And that the matter of questioning dogma itself was considered heretical -- see the case of Giordano Bruno, for example, if you want to get all fired up.
It's my philosophy - if our ancestors were strongly religious, it was because it was necessary for survival. If they were attached to particular religious theory for a long period of time it's because that particular theory held society together. If they preferred religion over Aristotle it was because Aristotle's philosophy was outdated and mostly baloney. I believe our ancestors are intelligent human beings who did their best to live as I do. These days humanity is preferring observation/evidence to religion because the latter has become dogma and the former is helping us survive. People in each time try to do the best in their time.
Our evolution involves both our physical bodies and DNA as well as the knowledge we are passed down from our ancestors. I am wary of the modern perspective that everything old is obsolete. These days people are more cautious about avoiding removing their tonsils or appendix unnecessarily than in trying to keep the experience and mystical knowledge our ancestors have given to us, because we assume their knowledge is old and must be obsolete.
Personally I am not a Christian and I'm religious and spiritual, at least I try to be. But I do believe Christianity was given to us because we needed it, and we ought to be careful when discarding our religions and practices we don't do it too quickly in a rushed manner. Just because our appendix seems extra and have some obvious disadvantages and no obvious advantage doesn't mean we have to rip it out of every newborn.
Can singularity be reached before humanity collapse in disaster? I think it depends a lot on our spirituality.
Anyway, personally I'm content to live with and pray with my wife each day, raise a family together, and just enjoy the sights we see, the sounds we hear and the food we eat until the day we pass.
Keep in mind that path dependencies can lead to outcomes -- peacocks have tails and songbirds specific songs not because those specific patterns or sounds are necessary to survival, but because the dyanmics set up promote them.
(Evolution is not teleological. Self-selection and trend-propogation occur.)
That said, multiple societies, and virtually every major empirical society (Egyptians, Persians, Hittites, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Indians, Chinese, European, Aztec) have had some form of religion, though the specific form (polytheistic, monotheistic, ancestor-worship, mystic, meditative) has varied considerably.
But the thought occurs that where literate knowledge and communications were limited, religion provided critical social structure.
I'm aware of some research and literature on this, mostly Weber and Durkheim. I'm meaning to explore further. I find your thoughts interesting, though I'd like to find more substance.
I'm also fairly certain a collapse of some nature is inevitable. Spirituality probably won't change that, though it may affect the outcome.
>if our ancestors were strongly religious, it was because it was necessary for survival. If they were attached to particular religious theory for a long period of time it's because that particular theory held society together. If they preferred religion over Aristotle it was because Aristotle's philosophy was outdated and mostly baloney.
One does not follow from another.
Christianity that formed was mostly an aggressive militant political system that did not leave much room for dissent [0].
The same can be observed in our modern world where violence against religious dissent has become systematic and open in many parts of the world.
For practical purposes, "non-technological" == pre-19th century.
Rationale: technological societies have mechanisms, most especially transport and communications, which obviate the reliance on social structures for establishing trust.
Put another way, the ability to micro-manage and surveil workers, citizens, residents, etc., reduces the need to rely on their innate behaviour. The thought's occurred to me that this is itself a swapping of information for trust.
My 19th century boundary is early (most of the technologies and adoption post-date 1800, many considerably), but sufficient to clearly demark a before/after point. Following 1800, you'll see an increasingly significant set of cultures which don't have to rely on cultural and religious protocols and regulation.
My request then translates to: show me a massive (continent-scale, or at least wide-ranging) culture, prior to 1800, which didn't have a significant religious component to its culture.
