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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
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Metaphysical is a fun woo woo word, because one definition of it is basically as you have said, a synonym for supernatural (ie, physically impossible), whereas the other definition of it relates to metaphysics, the philosophical approaches to understand the rules that govern or give rise to the rules/laws of physics.
So you have one contextual usage that means 'weird unexplained spooky impossible nonsense', and another that means, 'logical structures that seek to explain the nature of reality as understood empirically, often by academics.'
Thus its a perfect word for mystical woo people who love to conflate different contextual meanings of words and pretend they are not doing that.
It’s also a bedrock concept in philosophy. How-we-know-what-we-know, etc.
I mean, it can be two things, but c’mon.
... You are not understanding me. It seems you stopped reading at the part you quoted and disregarded the rest of what I wrote. Let me expand:
In one context, in one kind of usage, 'metaphysical' is an adjective referring to a very technical outline or system of logical reasoning.
In another context, in another kind of usage, it is a vague catch all term for fantastic things that seem to defy logic and reason.
Because these two valid but nearly opposite meanings of the word can be switched out, or conflated, woo woo peddlers love to use this term, as it easily convinces those who do not understand that is what they are doing, and sounds grand, wise or profound.
Its the same with 'energy' and 'frequency'. Both of these terms have valid definitions that are highly specific and empirical in a scientific context, but also have commonly used, colloquial meanings which basically indicate a vague notion of pleasantness or unpleasantness, or maybe enlightened vs unenlightened.
Woo woo peddlers also love to use these words and conflate their two different meanings.
Most people think that the phrase 'good/bad vibes' means that you feel good or bad about a person or situation's attributes, qualities or what not.
But a person who has been listening to too much woo woo peddlers will believe that there is some kind of actual, literally real, energy or frequency surrounding or exuding from a person or situation they find pleasant or unpleasant, because they are so used to the empirical/scientific concept being totally equated to the whimsical concept that they do not understand that there even are two distinct meanings.
The point I am making is not that metaphysical is a woo woo word that means nothing.
The point I am making is that there are many terms with nearly contradictory meanings, where one is associated with objective, ordered, rational, logical, complex concepts that can be studied and meaningfully argued over, and another meaning that is fantastical, defies empiricism or logic, and is highly subjective.
These terms are woo woo terms not because they mean nothing, but because they are often used by woo woo peddlers who jump back and forth between these different meanings to confuse people.
Quantum is another one. So is 'AI', at this point.
I really enjoyed your comments.
Thanks!
That makes sense, I get that you’re arguing a word is being misused or appropriated for unhelpful uses.
I just disagree that we know what metaphysics is beyond a shared understanding of a basic framework. “It’s what organizes all physical matter” is a terrible definition, but let’s use it for a second.
If I’m Joe Woo Woo and I say “metaphysically, these a-here crystals will affect your monkey chakras beneficially”, you’d argue they’ve misused the word ‘metaphysics’ in that reading. I’m saying that the woo woo brand of crystals is still following “what organizes all physical matter” and we’re not misusing the term.
What we’re really talking about is “there’s no physical evidence that the woo woo crystals beneficializes the monkey chakras”. And we couldn’t find evidence, because it’s pre-physical evidence.
I agree making a “Quantum Fire Pit” or an “‘AI-based’ Sandwich” is a gross misuse of terminology, but those are different from a pre-physical framework. You have to already be in the physical world to have quanta, to have AI.
Maybe another way to say it is “Sometimes, metaphysics is woo woo.”
Maybe a more decent definition of a metaphysical theory would be:
The rules which give rise to a world which we can describe in more detail with other, more specific rules.
Or from another angle:
The rules which are followed by all of the rules of physics.
'What organizes all physical matter' is just a definition of physics, without the meta.
...
I think you have not had much exposure to more successful woo woo peddlers, and you're missing still the key point I am making of conflating meanings of a word.
Its more than just using the word in a vacuous or spurious sense, as with your 'metaphysically' example.
It doesn't really add any meaning whatsoever to just throw 'metaphysically' in front of the rest of that sentence (with your definition of metaphysically), beyond 'whoah, fancy word.'
You can just throw on fancy sounding words to a sentence or concept, but I am talking about a different and more insidious manipulation tactic.
...
Repetitive conflation of words with multiple meanings breaks down an ignorant audiences ability to understand that they are being lied to by making it unclear that different definitions are in fact different.
Its using a word with meaning A, in a sentence, then in sentence 3 you use meaning B, then in sentence 4 you use meaning A, so on and so on, such that an uniformed or ignorant person who has only heard this word a few times or didn't pay attention in school is functionally now being educated by woo woo peddler such that they now think the word has a kind of nebulous melding of meaning A and meaning B, and that this is the singular undifferentiated meaning, when in fact this is not the case, there are two distinct, context and domain specific meanings represented by the same word.
You could conceivably do that with the word 'nuclear', by switching between the phrase 'nuclear family' and 'nuclear energy' to the point that, in a long monologue, you might be able confuse some people into thinking that there is a literal subatomic nuclear strong force holding together families, or that quarks and electrons literally have feelings toward other quarks and electrons in their family/atomic unit.
...
Its basically the kind of phenomenon where you can tell that someone does not actually know what a word means, that they never looked up its definition and instead just read or heard it, assumed its meaning based on context, and just carried on using this word, usually wildly incorrectly, because they do not actually know what it means.
It creates an unconscious cognitive dissonance that collapses painfully if one tries to actually suss out what the word actually means, which heavily biases the woo afflicted person toward not attempting to do that.
Woo woo peddlers are successful when they can basically brainwash a person into believing an entire alternate worldview, and basically always this worldview is incoherent, contradictory, that ultimately relies on any cognitive dissonance being reconciled by the woo woo peddler.
The point is to basically brainwash ignorant or desperate people into a whole lifestyle of mystical nonsense where the ultimate authority, source of comfort, who you become dependent on, answerer of questions, arbitrator of disputes, is the woo woo peddler.
Yes, and well-argued. I see how conflating the meanings of the same words would help woo woo peddlers convince someone who didn't know better to buy a crystal for $36 dollars when the LHC hasn't found anything that supports that supposition. A distorting of truth for the sake of a few bucks, indeed.
I think we're probably at cross purposes here however, because I'm not disagreeing with that at all. My only point was that there was a period in scientific history when "metaphysics" was synonymous with "woo woo" or its equivalent. And that the presumed-proven superiority of scientific inquiry is a modern conceit we enjoy at the risk of missing the larger point.
As an example, let me quote from the Wikipedia entry from "History of Metaphysics" (I chose it because it's relevant and succinct, this Heidegger lecture at the University of Freiburg is of course a great read as well, and very much more thorough.)
I like this opening because right off the bat one is faced with the idea that the modern concept of metaphysics is not in fact modern, and that's perfectly fitting for a concept of All That Is. That it was practiced and taught by Shamans - while admittedly academic supposition - is pretty on-the-nose with the idea that "our" metaphysics - the academic, scientific understanding, is (or can be) "woo woo" - the out-there, seemingly beyond-reason, interpretation of it. At the same time.
So if we can return to my previous character, Joe Woo Woo, here he is now approaching in full Shamanistic regalia - the (I'm making this up but you know how I mean) feathers, the shakers, the paint, the wild primal being in costume(?). That implied image is a direct connection to our understanding of metaphysics surely as much if not more than our discoveries or the existence of the LHC. Far, far older and in some ways more complete than what the LHC has given us.
Is it not?
That's what I found such an interesting contradiction about this, uh, meme :) Of course that's heavy on the metaphysics and very light on the science, so I appreciate it's off-topic a bit. I think science tends to get so surrounded by the Tools of Science that it sometimes can't see anything that isn't Official Science. Of course, I'm not a real scientist, so I would think that I guess.
What Heidegger is saying in your excerpt is that in ancient times, it seems that people widely believed in a kind of unseen, parallel world of spirits, which Plato was using as a basis for his ideas, as opposed to wholly inventing his philosophy entirely on his own, without any precedent.
He is pointing out that Plato's metaphysics can be seen as inspired by, developed off of the foundation of earlier metaphysics, as opposed to Plato just wholly inventing them out of nothing.
When Heidegger gave that lecture, Europeans had very recently actually discovered or deciphered/translated actual empirical, physical evidence for the worldview or metaphysics of many peoples and cultures outside of Europe/The Mediterranean Coast or within that region going back further than Socrates.
They were fairly early into discovering and beginning to translate and understand much of what we, nearly 100 years later, now have widespread access to. Archaeology was still a young field at this time.
The lecture you are quoting was given in 1935 in German, and not even translated into English until 1959!
Heidegger was trying to connect what were at his time, newly discovered dots, toward tracing out the development of various forms of human metaphysics.
Heidegger is not saying that our modern concept of metaphysics is identical to those of shamans thousands of years ago.
He is instead tracing... the history... of widely varying, changing and differing metaphysical theories and ideas, either provably held or postulated to be held by many different groups of people over large time scales.
The entire point is that metaphysical theories change over time.
'Metaphysics' is not a single theory, any more than 'Biology' or 'Astronomy' is a single theory.
Those are all container terms which describe bodies of knowledge and thought within specific parameters, and they've all developed over time and place.
Plato has his metaphysical theories, as does Aristotle, and Kant, Leibniz, Hume, and these Perennial Shamans are proposed to as well. They are not all the same ideas and they are often in conflict with one another.
Anyway...
If John Woo Woo shows up in shamanic garb and you find this more convincing that him not being in shamanic garb, I would take the post modernist approach and just tell you that you find this more convincing because you have been conditioned by modern media to associate ancient shamans with purity, innocence, righteousness, spirituality and wisdom.
Also thats basically the most textbook, case-closed instance of cultural appropriation I've ever heard: John Woo Woo is dressing up in another culture's dress and adopting their mannerisms despite not being from or substantially connected to that culture, and he is doing so purely as a marketing technique to sell you useless bullshit within his own internalized capitalist paradigm.
If the commercial on TV has an actor wearing a doctor's outfit, does this imply the untested supplement you are being sold has any actual medically beneficial effects whatsoever?
Or did you just fall for a marketing gimmick?
In closing: There's science, and psuedo-science, ie, charlatans adopting some of the garb or mannerisms or vocabulary of science, but which does not actually follow the core concepts of empirical testing, falsifiability, often directly contradicts actual known science, and generally acts as a wolf in sheeps clothing, for personal profit.
To close this with what I was originally going to open this with:
It is not that healing crystals might work because the LHC has yet to discover how they work.
It is that many, many empirical, scientific studies, published and peer reviewed, have repeatedly and unequivocally found that they do not work, that they have no effect beyond placebo.
So far as I know he didn’t - or to a large degree, couldn’t - go farther back than the Greeks. I wonder what he would have made of a shamanistic understanding of “I am”. It would have had to have fit in there somewhere, or else change his opinion.
Theories change, but metaphysics doesn’t. Biology changes, and not just the theories of biology. The field itself changes. Astronomy changes, because both of them are human inventions.
Metaphysics doesn’t change (even though the favorite theories do). Is metaphysics a human invention? Well that’s a metaphysical question, isn’t it. Do Shamans know the answer?
Yes, and unlike Biology or the hypotheses being developed at the LHC, none of them can be tested or proved. We will never “know” - know for sure - if even one part of any of them is true.
Isn’t it interesting, though, just to consider what the basis for any and all things to be might . . . be?
And in so doing, isn’t it the case that the impressive results of the LHC must be understood to explain only a minute part of the infinite reality that - so far as we know - exists? I would say yes.
materialism > metaphysics