Escaflowne: Eternal Love

[cloudkitt]

I watched this show 12 years ago and had forgotten just how unsatisfying that ending was, haha.

[Beastro]

That school lesson was completely inaccurate Newton did not turn to metaphysics or alchemy later in life he was always a loon pursuing weird metaphysics and alchemical experiments involving boiling pots of mercury etc. that's what made him great, he was metal not like your current physicists. The man investigated how the eye works by sticking a bodkin (a big blunt needle) in his eye socket and squeezed his eyeball to see what happens and this was when he was in his 20s I bet Einstein or Stephen Hawking never stuck foreign objects into their eye cavity and we are all poorer for it.

People need to realize what the kind of thinking in the Early Modern Era was like and those things were one and the same with science as we now consider it.

I'd only add metaphysics isn't a bad thing; a problem in our world today is the lack of that leaning that leaves so many trapped in a bare, lifeless axiomatic world for so many.

By the same measure, the witch hunting in the 16th and 17th Centuries has more in common with modern medical and mental health practices than with outright superstition; it was people applying a rationalist view towards things that there were processes and criteria to identify and deal with witches which they consider something as solidly defined as schizophrenia today.

[Robovski]

Sticking a bodkin in your eye to flex your eyeball sounds really uncomfortable but it isn't the act of a crazy person. He did it to observe how that affected how he could see through that eye, how the lens was warped and how that affected the light entering his eye. Newton experimented with light (amongst many things). The bodkin is part of that process of discovery.

[AllanO]

Sticking a bodkin in your eye to flex your eyeball sounds really uncomfortable but it isn't the act of a crazy person. He did it to observe how that affected how he could see through that eye, how the lens was warped and how that affected the light entering his eye. Newton experimented with light (amongst many things). The bodkin is part of that process of discovery.

I never said he was crazy, I said he was metal by which I meant he went to extremes, he was not normal. He could be perfectly rational and be eccentric, strange, abnormal, weird and extreme. However I am not clear that it is even strictly reasonable in the sense that it was probably unnecessary for him to reach his conclusions, he probably could have saved himself the trouble. However it was a perfectly natural thing for him to do given his obsessive exploration of these things, the same thing that drives him to write lots of notes and create intricate mathematical theories, drives him to the physical explorations like that some of which were probably ill advised (like the time he stared at the Sun for a long time). Some of Newton's quirks were clear boons to his investigations and some like the fact that he did not like arguing with people and so stopped telling people about his research for decades were not at all helpful.

I was mostly reacting to the idea that somehow Newton could neatly be divided into his ground breaking physics and a bunch of weird mystical mumbo jumbo and bible research that he fell into later in life, it is a mischaracterization of his biography. Now Newton as mad genius (and arguably that is what Dunkirk is) is probably also a gross mischaracterization and simplification of his life and genius and madness etc., but I hope I'm trying to get at something different than that. The mad genius idea is wrong both because it is not like somehow confronting the world in the way the genius does inevitably drives one mad and different geniuses have had very different personality etc. and further the mad genius tends to be mad and a genius the two things are easily separated. Whereas I would say no the same extremes that lead to achievement can also make you weird and been impractical in other situations.

People need to realize what the kind of thinking in the Early Modern Era was like and those things were one and the same with science as we now consider it.

I'd only add metaphysics isn't a bad thing; a problem in our world today is the lack of that leaning that leaves so many trapped in a bare, lifeless axiomatic world for so many.

By the same measure, the witch hunting in the 16th and 17th Centuries has more in common with modern medical and mental health practices than with outright superstition; it was people applying a rationalist view towards things that there were processes and criteria to identify and deal with witches which they consider something as solidly defined as schizophrenia today.

I think its way more complicated than that. Newton was not a conventional person of his day, it seems fair to guess that he had unconventional religious beliefs that led him to not be willing to swear to the articles of faith required to be a regular university professor (hence his getting the special Lucasian chair), he probably denied the trinity. I don't think his beliefs and practices in any part of his life are best understood as somehow just normal beliefs for his day. On the other hand he was deviating from the beliefs and practices of his day which are indeed very different from those of today to be sure, but I think your suggesting what we (most people etc.) believe or do today is simpler than it is.

Alchemy was more intellectually respectable in some ways then it would come to be, but it was not viewed the same way we view science now. This was why Newton's contemporary Robert Boyle was spending so much time writing books trying to make chemistry a respectable subject free it from prejudices against alchemy and suggest alchemy was more than just burning, stuff mixing stuff etc. Alchemy as I recall both faced public opposition in some ways and also the practitioners did not share results in straightforward publications and the like but instead if they circulated writings at all (Newton did lots of Alchemical experiments and made lots of notes, but published basically nothing) circulated stuff written in a symbolic way that you would need to know a lot to decode. Whereas Boyle was trying to establish chemistry as writing to tell people exactly what you did in plain terms and great detail.

There are lots of different authorities that are used in various different ways in modern life and in the 17th century likewise. I'm pretty sure the witch trials were not like science because they were not done by professional researchers at university or private institutions labs and the like. They may have been like something else, like clinical therapy (ie actual psychiatrists seeing patients) or clinical medicine (where you can't always relate the symptoms you are seeing to some simple scientific model etc.) or police investigations and so on. So the witch trials might be like the red scare in the USA in the 50s or the claims of ritual satanic abuse in the 80s and so on.

Even now we can have a thriving conventional scientific medical business thriving alongside various alternative or supplementary industries providing things from vitamins to claimed cure alls with medical claims that go from the unproven to the highly dubious and lots of people believe and pay for them and use them despite the lack of a scientific imprimatur. We don't just need to understand that in the past they did not have the same conventional scientific understanding we do now, we need to understand that in the present that is not the only standard people bring to bear either.

[Beastro]

There are lots of different authorities that are used in various different ways in modern life and in the 17th century likewise. I'm pretty sure the witch trials were not like science because they were not done by professional researchers at university or private institutions labs and the like. They may have been like something else, like clinical therapy (ie actual psychiatrists seeing patients) or clinical medicine (where you can't always relate the symptoms you are seeing to some simple scientific model etc.) or police investigations and so on. So the witch trials might be like the red scare in the USA in the 50s or the claims of ritual satanic abuse in the 80s and so on.

The issue with the witch trials was that there was a methodological way of thinking to apply to the situation. One can see that today with a lot of North American Protestant church counseling services that have a very laid out process and only differs from secular matters in the fact that it involves religious ideas and things like prayer. I've encountered it and it has more in common with secular equivalents than it does with religious rituals.

So the witch trials might be like the red scare in the USA

The only difference is that there weren't any witches~

Even now we can have a thriving conventional scientific medical business thriving alongside various alternative or supplementary industries providing things from vitamins to claimed cure alls with medical claims that go from the unproven to the highly dubious and lots of people believe and pay for them and use them despite the lack of a scientific imprimatur. We don't just need to understand that in the past they did not have the same conventional scientific understanding we do now, we need to understand that in the present that is not the only standard people bring to bear either.

Scientific thinking is something we cannot always apply in life. Life isn't rational and rationality isn't a panacea to life's woes (indeed the woes are themselves something of a cure as anyway in mental health knows - a measure of suffering is needed to mitigate larger amounts, it is the essence of why exercise helps the depressed).

In the case you mention, I'm reminded of the amusing fact that placebos are increasingly valued in helping people, which ties back into the ritualistic nature of human life lost in the modern times. It is something called an illusion that nonetheless has very real positive impacts upon people.

So long as that alternative stuff isn't harmful nor robbing those buying them blind, it can have a good impact based upon their belief for it to be healthy for them.