i use this as a premise and joke about it pretty often, but the orientation ancient stuff had towards why things have the properties they do was completely inverted from how we presently see it. for most of human history, take metal for example, iron had the properties it has (hardness, malleability, and so on) because it was iron. its essence was “iron-ness”, and what you observed about it flowed backwards from this mysterious quintessential aspect. this also applies to the larger categories its in, like “metals”. everything was like this. why is water usually cold? why does water tend towards coldness? it just does: that is a property of water. things that have this essence of “water-ness” just do that. you can basically model the project of us “becoming modern” as: people going through every field and smashing these concepts, because they saw them as outdated, magical, or nonsensical - and then building it back up the other way. example: why is iron hard? it has nothing to do with this magical made up concept of “iron-ness” or “metal-ness” that exists out there somewhere as a metaphysical ideal. that’s just made up. a metal is hard because of the way the molecules are arranged. if its malleable, thats because it is actually made up of these other things, which are bound together in this way - then, if you understand how heat affects those bonds and component parts, you could obviously see why it’s malleable. it doesnt possess malleability because its a metal, it possess malleability for purely logical material reasons that we can deduce. there’s no magical category called “metals” that you need to understand and use to deduce the properties of metals and explain why metals are the way they are. you can just look at the component parts, and apply what you know about the world, and you’ll explain to yourself why the metals have the properties they do. this sounds completely insane and perhaps needlessly pedantic, but it’s actually a completely different way of viewing the world - and in my opinion, this shift took place successfully in every even remotely scientific field - except one. the reason this is extremely relevant for our time - this exact specific time you presently inhabit, is that this never happened for consciousness and the mind. consciousness was never taken out of the top down semi-magical tautological “it is consciousness, therefore it has these properties” shelf and put on to the “we can explain this by analyzing its component parts and using what we know about the world” shelf. the mind still stands alone as the last true vestige of a previous, much older, way of seeing the world that this new view has been totally unable to colonize. and because it’s the last real holdout, we allow people to pretend it stands alone for other reasons: sentimentality, religion, self-aggrandizement, whatever. or, we let people pretend the project i’ve described above was completed. but it wasn’t. “the mind” has modernized everything but itself.
https://hell.twtr.plus/media/af0508df2b9256ab28d7f5eb63d9399579f87cd3334e797758a5ec01aacf8f09.file