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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.
Interesting. It does make me wonder what future analogs of the simulation hypothesis and multiverse theories might look like.
I often wonder if reality is defined as shared partial interpretation of our limited brains.
The term is "Consensus Reality".
What exactly does "shared partial interpretation" mean?
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 ?
So you mean "does reality depend on the viewers?"?
That our social constructs somehow have a bearing on what is actually real?
not only social constructs, everything is only "true" to our poor brain notion of truth.
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.
I guess I wonder about can vs did
>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.
It says they believed in the possibility, so it's 'can'.
ah yes, not that they do exist. makes sense thanks
They beloved all sorts of strange stuff, often without any evidence at all.
This is indeed fascinating. Never thought of it this way.
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
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an entry on the condemnation of 1277: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/condemnation/
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dwight_Dana#Publicatio...
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.
Right.
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.
Some of our best science fiction come from Mormon or Mormon-raised authors (e.g. Dan Simmons).
That's not news really.
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.
You seem very certain about things that are kiterally unknowable.
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.
"Upanishads"?
Interesting! Thank you for mentioning. I am currently reading Gilgamesh and there is "Uta-napišti" meaning "the far away".
The Sanskrit term Upaniṣad (upa = by, ni = nether, shat =sitting) translates to "sitting down near".
In Gilgamesh epos, he (Gilgamesh) travels to seek wisdom from Uta-napišti.
Now I am curious if there may be a relation of the two.. I wouldn't be surprised.
> "Upanishads"?
Beware, it is a "rabbit hole".
Yea.. Too late.
From there I also discovered Rig Veda and its siblings. I guess I have to quit my full time job to get through all of this^^
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.
There's a reason religious philosophy took precedence over "scientific" thought in those times. And it wasn't because people were dumb.
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?
That's a fairly standard tactic.
[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
DOI: 10.1080/00346760110081599
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599
Refs:
Mill, J. S. (1981) Autobiography and Literary Essays.
Mill, J. S. (1988b) Journals and Debating Speeches.
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.
Please don't do religious flamewars on HN. They're boring, and never lead anywhere new or good.