Metaphysical subjects like this are mostly a matter of taste, but I can't resist pointing out there are bias and errors in this.
> the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths or magic.
Religion is excluded from all this "enchantment" talk. I don't know if it is because of the personal belief of the author, or because it would hurt most of the American readers. E.g. Christians generally believe in miracles and saints, or at least they believe that some kind of omnipotent spirit watches over them. Isn't that the most common form of magic?
> Chasing the domination of nature, humans began to dominate each other. [...] led toward the objectification of humanity; the concentration camps and Gulag followed.
This is absurd. When Tamerlan destroyed cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people, there was no desire of dominating Nature, nor "enchantment". Three thousand years ago, Assurbanipal organized large scale transfers of populations, and he claimed he tortured civilians routinely. Many "enlightened" religious wars led to huge atrocities, where the opposite side was treated worse than cattle. And of course, slavery and "sub-human races" are an old invention totally unrelated to the domination of Nature. Modern tools led to powerful acts, but "objectification of humanity" is nothing new.
The article hit on this exact point with a rather interesting quote: "I should note that disenchantment should not be confused with secularisation. The sociological evidence suggests that de-Christianisation, while usually equated with secularisation, often correlates with an increase in belief in spirits, ghosts and magic – not the reverse.".
The article is more about animism than magic. Personally I find the confident, sometimes bordering on militant, rejection of animism by some to be no less peculiar than the no less confident adoption of others in religions undoubtedly invented by men. Why? We know that our brains seem to drive most of our decisions through various complex interactions with the rest of our body. And when these actors are manipulated, our behaviors thus change. This seems like a clear enough argument for determinism that would clearly run contrary to animism, but there's one little problem.
"Me." I am standing here believing that I am the one choosing my words, formatting my text, conveying my thoughts. Why would I be observing this, imagining myself to be the one engaging in such actions? If you write a program to generate a pseudo-random number I think everybody would agree it's quite absurd to imagine some being briefly flickers into existence, imagines himself picking a number, and then flickers back out of existence. Yet how does this notion become any less absurd as the program becomes more complex? You have to engage in extensive hand-waving and appeals to unknown and untestable facts to argue against animism in this case. Quite ironic then that it is this same behavior that people use as a critique of animism.
Don't take this as an endorsement or condemnation of either side. If anything it's an an appeal against radicalism on either side: believe what you want, try to persuade interested others if it gives you satisfaction, don't escalate beyond that.
> When Tamerlan destroyed cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people, there was no desire of dominating Nature, nor "enchantment".
Perhaps this is the religious enchantment you point out being missing from the author. I don't know how you can claim that Tamerlane wasn't "enchanted" in exactly the same sense. Next, the author never claims that this drive is purely modern, in fact, he points out that Francis Bacon is only the patriarch of the modern incarnation of this "ancient human impulse". Adorno and Horkheimer weren't sloppy nor were they stupid enough to forget that mass killings happened before the historical stage of Enlightenment.
>And of course, slavery and "sub-human races" are an old invention totally unrelated to the domination of Nature.
This is taken into account with the idea that ideology tends to subsume such impulses to its own ends. The "objectification of humanity" takes on a particular social form, the author claims, in its reduction to a matter of scientific numerical quantity and as Marcuse elaborated, the use of technology in advanced industrial society leading to technological rationality.
This has relevance to the magic of AI and the disenchantment feeling when we understand it.
What we need is Feynman's enchantment at integrating scientific understanding with awe, where they aren't in opposition. Where learning the biology of a rose can enhance appreciation.
E.g., "Wow, such a simple algorithm can create intelligent outcomes"
In the tech industry it doesn't feel to me like we're erring toward disenchantment. If anything, it feels like we're imbuing enormous numbers of mundane things with magical properties and cult-like followings to go along with them.
There's a massive ecosystem of merkle trees which are purportedly going to completely transform humanity through how we transact payments.
There are multiple glamorous conferences, dedicated to banal things like process schedulers, that an outsider could easily mistake for Sunday Mass at a megachurch. Furnished with altars reserved for an evangelizing priesthood sermonizing the congregation. We sometimes even live stream them too!
Contrasted against being disenchanted, we're constantly generating enormous amounts of enthusiasm about what we do, why we do it, and even every nook & cranny of how we do it.
I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it does stand in sharp contrast to the idea that we're wallowing in disenchantment.
The central definition of magic at use here is that an act is magical to the extent that control is removed from causation. Something went my way, but I didn't directly do anything in order to make it happen, and there's no rational way to ascertain how. It's as if I waved my hands and my will just manifested.
The key is that behind every act of magic is a hidden jungle of complexity that the magical practitioner must master. A wizard masters arcane correspondences, which largely involve study of magical law, which is a rational domain divorced from human intention. If you mumble the words right and have just the right slice of frog lips, then your fireball goes boom. Or your code has to pass the syntax checker before it can get on with semantic evaluation.
A priest masters the domain of human emotion and feeling, learning how to harness these things to earn mastery over divine power. If enough people believe a thing to be true, the truth manifests, called by a higher power into physical expression in the world. Or your startup manages to find funding because YC gave you their stamp of orthodox approval.
You can't dispel magic because that means that there's no longer any complicated domain that we fail to understand but will pay dearly for a guide through it. Any time you have that, the emergent property of people willing to front-load time and effort for later riches and the dramatic flair for making it all look easy will manifest.
There are definitely elements of "magical properties and cult-like followings" in the tech/startup world. Apple products are a good example of theatrical presentation that imbues objects with style/status/charm.
I'd say successful marketing/sales, even human resources and company culture, have an aspect of "corporate enchantment".
It really is a genuine mystery why mystery creates a sense of awe and why learning for many people leads to cynicism.
Maybe we are driven toward learning via an emotional mechanism that draws us to the unknown and gives it a "sparkle" or "allure" similar to how sex drive works. Once we learn that mechanism turns off, again similar to how the sexual allure lessens after orgasm.
It offers a heady sense of power and control, even though you intuitively know there's always a catch. If you want to be powerful like a genie, you have to learn to live in a lamp and do the bidding of whatever random a-hole figures out they have to rub it.
The unknown is glamorous, and indeed an old word for magical spells was glamour. The disenchantment that results from actually learning how the spells work is the revelation that nothing truly offers infinite power, not even magic.
Wisdom is the discovery that a world without magic, as much disillusionment as that might save people, is also a world without wonder.
Children would stop getting impressed by dinosaurs once we start cloning them and putting them everywhere. Any wonder that's ubiquitous is by definition no longer wondrous
Evolutionary imperative would be a very simple explanation. The Sentinelese [1] are probably the best example here. They are a group of people that "we" have tried to make contact with numerous times, including with the offering of gifts. The Sentinelese have responded by, for the most part, trying to kill the visitors and occasionally succeeding. But the most interesting thing about this people is how incredibly primitive they are in other ways. They literally have not yet learned how to make fire. Instead when a lightning bolt catches something on fire, they have been observed guarding and trying to keep the fire going for as long as possible. And they have no knowledge of agriculture either.
The point of this is that if at some point people were sufficiently awed or contented by discovered technology your society would start to reach a point where it would simply freeze in time. Instead this instinct we have to assimilate, absorb, bore, and repeat - to no end, is something that seems likely a factor in our (as of yet) never ending drive to develop, expand, and grow.
In some areas, superstitions persist because scientific research isn't doing all that much to dispell them. The science is controversial and available evidence isn't straightforward. Consider how many people think about nutrition and diets. Often people choose what to eat based on invisible attributes associated with food (labelling) that we as consumers can't observe directly.
Opaque processes can do it too. With the rise of targeted advertising, coincidences can easily be interpreted as the result of someone watching you whether they are or not.
Science is not always available to repel superstition. Nutrition is the convenient thing to fixate on, but the body is far more complex and is essential to understand. Consider that the dangers of putting petrol in a diesel engine is not explained by understanding the fuel alone. It doesn't help that our bodies vary greatly compared to the number of engine models.
We should be free to dismiss magic as imaginative whimsy without hard science. "Not uh" is a valid counter argument.
I'm glad to know there's a name for this. The world has definitely become less enchannted in the last 30 years, and even the last 10. I imagine this process has been roughly continuous since ancient times, and that would be consistent with my understanding of history.
It's not as straightforward as the fraction of people who believe in magic, though that is certainly related and decreasing. It's also the importance of art, the importance of holidays, how easily we have sex, how much violence we tolerate...
Up until recently I had only known of most of max Max Weber's thoughts through the books written by other thinkers (I had only read his "Protestant Ethic" about 10 years ago) but as I'm about to finish his "Economy and Society" [1] I more and more realize that we live in a Max Weber world, we have been doing so since the advent of capitalism (I'd say since the early 1400s by which time the Italian city states had "invented" most of capitalism's basic tools).
I remember an interview from back in 2002 or 2003 with today's most wealthy man, that is Jeff Bezos, and I was stuck by his insistence even back then of measuring and counting almost everything that involved Amazon's business, there was no room for happenstance or of "we think of taking that business decision because [insert some intuition-based thing]", everything was rationalized, there was no room for "enchanted" solutions (the ones involving intuition, for example), disenchantment had already taken place.
Couple of years later (I think around 2005-2006) I also remember the partial furore caused by a Google designer who had decided to leave the company because he was unhappy with Marissa Mayer's decisions of using certain colors on the Google front-page based on A/B testing alone, there was no room for "artistic thinking" anymore (not his exact words, but the general idea of his post back then), a specific blue nuance had to be chosen only after A/B testing, there was nothing left to the designers' imagination. Again, a big step towards rationalization and a big step away from the "enchanted" artistic work.
If you're interested in Weber, you might find Erich Fromm interesting as well. He studied under Weber's brother in Germany, fled to America during the rise of Nazism, and wrote a monograph for the officials and State Department types who would later coalesce CIA about the conditions which lead a democratic people to turn to Fascism. The monograph was later expanded into a book called _Escape From Freedom_, which is widely regarded as the first work of political psychology.
> If you're interested in Weber, you might find Erich Fromm interesting as well
I did read his "Sane Society" just recently and he was almost like a revelation to me, I didn't know about "Escape From Freedom" and the story behind it, I'll sure be checking it out, thanks for the recommendation!
Bloody hell, that was one of the most uselessly long-winded essays I've ever read! Do you actually expect to find any fairies, gods, ghosts, successful sorcerers, etc, or not? Worse, the basic question is never even posed: why should we tie our conception of society and our meaning-making capacities, as applied to our own lives, to belief or disbelief in the supernatural?
After all, if the "supernatural" existed, it would just be more natural, more stuff with causal powers, which would therefore be intrinsically tied into the rest of the causal order of things.
You're right I think (about the "supernatural", not the "uselessly long-winded" bit, although I feel ya.)
Here's the thing that bother's me: both the superstitious people and the enlightened (in the sense of disenchanted) people are missing the point.
There is always a boundary between the known and the unknown.
(Just to pick a wacky one at random: there is no scientific evidence one way or another that "ghosts" are or are not made of "dark matter".)
I am not a scientist, but I am an amateur: I love science. Carl Sagan is a hero of mine. So one day I attended a Reiki session. What's Reiki? (Spoiler alert: NO ONE KNOWS! But I'm getting ahead of myself...) Reiki is the name given to a kind of healing energy (apologies to any physicists reading this) that can be channeled by people to engender healing effects.
So, I'm sitting in this chair, and this person is waving her arm at me from about a meter away, and damned if I don't feel something "filling me up" as it were.
Now I've felt e.g. high voltage fields, I'm no stranger to the Van de Graff generator and it's potential (no pun intended) to enable various party tricks.
This wasn't an electric field. For one thing I could feel it within the volume of my body and (somehow) extending into the space around me. For another it heals. I don't want to get into the personal details, but it accelerates or engenders healing on mental, emotional and physical planes simultaneously.
Now my first reaction, after the awe waned a little, was, "OMG let's do science to this!" But neither the Reiki practitioners nor the scientists that I have met are interested.
If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki "energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it is just "more natural, more stuff with causal powers". But in my experience the intersection on the Venn diagram of "Science People" and "Reiki People" is very sparsely populated.
>If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki "energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it is just "more natural, more stuff with causal powers". But in my experience the intersection on the Venn diagram of "Science People" and "Reiki People" is very sparsely populated.
Well dang. A priori, I'd jump to a psychosomatic explanation, since your body's interoceptive afferents are extremely noisy, and so using top-down beliefs to engender an illusion that a vast energy is filling your body ought to be easier than generating other sorts of hallucinations.
(Why yes, this is my research field. Why do you ask?)
But we should still be testing this sort of thing. Assuming it is psychosomatic and nothing more complicated than that (which is already pretty reasonably complicated), what is it about the Reiki session that allows engendering powerful psychosomatic effects?
> But we should still be testing this sort of thing.
Yes!
I did some informal experimentation in the years following my introduction to Reiki. Nothing you could write a paper about, but I ruled out (to my own satisfaction) simple psychosomatic or placebo effects.
> ...a psychosomatic explanation, since your body's interoceptive afferents are extremely noisy, and so using top-down beliefs to engender an illusion that a vast energy is filling your body ought to be easier than generating other sorts of hallucinations.
I agree, but that's what struck me about the incident I described: no one told me what was happening or what to expect. As a "sciency" kind of a person, I was astonished by the sensory impressions. I'm not prone to hallucinations generally (I used to work with self-hypnosis a lot and I'm pretty well-calibrated to my own "interoceptive afferents". It would have been very strange for my nervous system to have presented hallucinations to me without "telling me", so to speak.) The other astonishing thing was that at that time in my life I was suffering from severe depression and immediately as the Reiki treatment concluded the depression lifted and I felt (wonderfully!) normal for the rest of the evening. The effect wore off but the depression was never as severe again after that. I can offer no explanation why or how someone waving her arm at me for a few minutes could have done that.
> what is it about the Reiki session that allows engendering powerful psychosomatic effects?
Indeed.
Since then, I have sometimes demonstrated Reiki with people without telling them much about it beforehand. Some people feel nothing. One woman, a very spiritual Christian, jumped because she felt "a tingling clear up to my shoulder." Some feel warmth, others tingling or vibration, etc...
And Reiki seems to be effective on animals, even at a distance without physical contact or even motion. E.g. I can stand still and "beam" Reiki at a sick animal and it will get better. I would love to do this in a proper experimental set up. It has just never come together.
For what it's worth, from the viewpoint of rational materialism, that Reiki aids healing is one of its least astonishing properties.
I went looking for anyone who had "done science to" it. It turns out that something has been discovered, hyped, lost, and re-discovered in the West over and over again for about two centuries, going back to Mesmer[1] himself. E.g. Baron Von Reichenbach's "Odic" force[2]; "Theron Q. Dumont" wrote about "Vril"; Reich's infamous "Orgone"[3]; the modern burgeoning of "Energy medicine"[4], a term that usually includes Reiki. And of course, there's "Qi"[5], known since time immemorial in the East.
I couldn't find anything that looked like a scientific theory for the "energy". It seems to be impossible to scientifically test.
It seems vaguely related to light somehow.
All this stuff is on the Internet now, but it was not all easy to find in the late 90's I can tell you.
>Since then, I have sometimes demonstrated Reiki with people without telling them much about it beforehand. Some people feel nothing. One woman, a very spiritual Christian, jumped because she felt "a tingling clear up to my shoulder." Some feel warmth, others tingling or vibration, etc...
If you asked me at any time to list off what I'm feeling now, I'd probably list a bunch of things like those that I wouldn't have noticed before being asked to consider what I'm feeling. If you told me you had done something right before that could plausibly affect me, I'd be suspicious you had something to do with it, even though it's most likely coincidental.
The fact that you weren't told the full explanation doesn't mean it couldn't be psychosomatic. People respond to visible attention, especially if it's done in a unique way. A proper test would either have to show that the person still gets the effect without them noticing any attention on them, or show that the person doesn't get an effect when there is the same kind of visible attention on them but the practicer is secretly not beaming Reiki to them. The practicer might act or interpret the subject's responses differently when not actually beaming Reiki, so a double blind study would be necessary. You could have an interviewer explain to a subject that you (in another room where the subject and the interviewer can't see or hear you in any way) will beam Reiki into the subject, and the interviewer records how the subject says they feel. During the experiment, you flip a coin and only beam Reiki if it lands on heads. (It's important that the placebo sequence is random and not known to the interviewer. The easiest way to avoid accidentally communicating the sequence ahead of time to the interviewer is to only decide whether it's a placebo run or not during the individual experiment after you're split up from the subject and interviewer.)
Another kind of experiment that can be done is to see if Reiki can be used to communicate information through timing. Put the subject in one room and you in another where the subject can't see or otherwise perceive you at all. The subject is told that you will beam Reiki to them at some point, and they need to write down the time as soon as they sense it. In the other room, you write down the time and set a fifteen minute timer. You roll a d10 and then wait that many minutes before beaming Reiki to the subject and writing down the time of that. You wait until the timer goes off before exiting the room and telling the subject that the experiment is over. (Subjects might be likely to think they feel Reiki when they hear you coming over to them to end the experiment, or they might think they feel Reiki randomly after a longer wait, so you wouldn't want the time you end the experiment to be linked at all to the random time you beamed it to them.) Then you collect all the written times and see if the times you beamed Reiki line up to when people received it. (I'm not sure if it's strictly necessary, but you could also add a control group by making it so after you leave the subject to your own room, before you roll the d10, you flip a coin to decide whether or not you'll actually beam Reiki to them. Imagine you ran the main experiment without controls, and the analysis on whether the individual times lined up was inconclusive and you didn't know what to make of it, but on average they said they felt Reiki after five minutes, and you knew you beamed it on average after five minutes, so you thought it was a success. But if had a control group and knew they also said it happened after five minutes on average, that would tell you that the main group's results had nothing to do with Reiki.)
If the social interaction between the Reiki beamer and the subject is important -- well, that would be a hint it's a psychosomatic effect -- there's still a further double-blind test that could be done. You could train a group of people to be Reiki practitioners, and then you could train a second group to be Reiki practitioners but change some detail that causes the Reiki beaming to not work, and then set both groups loose on some subjects and compare the results of both. It's not perfect because you might teach the two groups differently, you might accidentally teach the control group a different version of Reiki that still works, the control group might work out the missing detail, or the control group might notice the lack of results and act differently, but it's still something.
First of all, thank you for responding in the spirit of the thing. Cheers!
Experimental design for Reiki would be a big challenge. Without getting into a lot of details (that would sound outlandish anyway) much of these suggestions wouldn't work.
Whatever it is, Reiki is exquisitely sensitive to intention of the people involved. It only "cares" about healing. If your intention is to test Reiki, it won't work. Reiki doesn't care. If your intention is to heal people, it will work but you'll also heal the control group. There's no way to use Reiki not to heal some people, you see? You can't administer "placebo" Reiki.
> you could train a second group to be Reiki practitioners but change some detail that causes the Reiki beaming to not work
You couldn't though: if a student were worthy the "fake" training would work anyway; conversely a "real" training would not work for a student who wasn't worthy.
Like I said above, I don't think Reiki can be studied scientifically, although I'd like to try.
>Whatever it is, Reiki is exquisitely sensitive to intention of the people involved. It only "cares" about healing. If your intention is to test Reiki, it won't work. Reiki doesn't care. If your intention is to heal people, it will work but you'll also heal the control group. There's no way to use Reiki not to heal some people, you see? You can't administer "placebo" Reiki.
Ascribing emotion and intention to a hypothesized nonliving object is a step too far for me. Put up or shut up.
The most parsimonious hypothesis I have come up with is that Reiki is life. (That's a bit of a cop-out because both terms are somewhat loosely defined so there's enough wiggle room to simply equate them, and it doesn't really add much to a scientific conversation does it?)
Check out: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018"
Honestly, I'm just some weirdo on the internet. I'm in SF, if you're ever out this way hit me up and I'll demonstrate Reiki for you. There are Reiki practitioners in your city no doubt. If you're really interested you should go meet some of them. I'm willing to keep answering your questions but if you want to really see hard science doing some wild "supernatural" stuff, Levin's work (above) is much more worth your time.
Cheers! :-)
- - - -
edit: I was rereading my replies and it occurred to me that since, as I told AgentME, there is apparently no distance limit to Reiki, we could attempt a demonstration. To wit: if you reply within, say, 24 hours with a time (Pacific Standard if you would be so kind) I'll go ahead and do a distance treatment on you. The image from your Github account is enough to "dial it in". (For sake of parity I'll tell you that I'm "calroc" on that site. You can see what I look like. ;-) Maybe nothing happens, maybe something. YMMV
If Reiki isn't a psychosomatic effect, then there must be some possible test to differentiate them. I don't mean this just in some abstract definitional way, but in a pragmatic way too: if there's no imaginable test that could distinguish them, then Reiki can't be any more capable than a psychosomatic effect. That doesn't make it nothing. It would be useful to study a psychosomatic effect that can reliably make people feel good or energized. There doesn't need to be a mystery behind it. Solving the mystery would mean that people would know to make use of Reiki better and know exactly what problems to turn to Reiki for and what not to.
If Reiki isn't a psychosomatic effect, then it should feel surprising that they can't be differentiated. If you immediately predict every possible test to differentiate them will fail, then I wonder if your brain is modeling them as equivalent concepts and only "believes that it believes" they're different. This post on the subject is excellent: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-...
I guess it could be that Reiki is both a psychosomatic effect and a special "spiritual energy" working together: the psychosomatic effect causes the subject's mind to open up the body to be affected by the spiritual energy. You would rightly expect a negative result on all the experiments I proposed previously if this was the case because all of those experiments were based around eliminating the possibility of a psychosomatic effect being involved at all. Moving on from trying to rule out the psychosomatic component, there's still more possibilities for investigation:
* Is it possible to trigger the psychosomatic effect without the spiritual energy part, or vice versa, and get a result that's different from triggering both or neither?
* Does the spiritual energy cause the body to react in a way that wouldn't be possible for the psychosomatic effect to do alone? Say that the psychosomatic effect part is found to release a signalling chemical in the blood (a psychosomatic effect doesn't necessarily work like this, just as example), and we injected a person with the chemical continuously for a long period of time. If Reiki is purely a psychosomatic effect, then we'd expect that the chemical is telling the body to use energy it already has stored quicker, and the person will eventually become very exhausted. If the chemical is allowing the body to take in an outside "energy", then the person should stay energized. There could be downsides to taking in so much continuously, but it would be suspicious if the downside of that looked exactly like the downside of a chemical that made the body use energy it already had.
* If the spiritual energy gives someone more energy, then it's imaginable that we should be able to to track that. Imagine that we can very carefully track a person's weight, measure their caloric intake, and measure their caloric outtake (the amount of physical exertion the person does including muscle use and body heat, and the chemical contents of their sweat, exhalation, urine, and feces) to an accuracy level where there's no discrepancy between a normal person's intake and outtake. Now imagine we do that with someone using Reiki. If Reiki is purely a psychosomatic effect that causes the body to use the energy it has in a different way, then there should still be no discrepancy. If there is a spiritual energy component, then there should be a discrepancy, otherwise it's completely explainable by psychosomatic effect alone.
>Whatever it is, Reiki is exquisitely sensitive to intention of the people involved. It only "cares" about healing. If your intention is to test Reiki, it won't work. Reiki doesn't care. If your intention is to heal people, it will work but you'll also heal the control group. There's no way to use Reiki not to heal some people, you see? You can't administer "placebo" Reiki.
Most of the experiments I mentioned could be changed so that the person administering the Reiki doesn't know that there's an experiment going on. In the experiment I described in the previous post where you go into another room and flip a coin to decide whether or not you should beam Reiki, you could use the coin to decide whether to call up a Reiki practitioner to come do the beaming who doesn't know an experiment is going on. Sure, in this plain setup, the intention still isn't to (directly) heal people, but it's easy enough to reframe the experiment so it's in a context mainly about healing people. Imagine that this is done as part of a hospital's procedures during treatment of certain conditions. When a patient comes in with a certain condition, they always see a doctor, but there's a certain percent chance that additionally, a Reiki practitioner will be invited into the hospital to try to help them, but isn't allowed to enter the room with them and can only do it on the other side of a one-way mirror that the patient may think a doctor is behind. The intention is to heal, but the hospital is also keeping records and doing its own tests on procedures as it does in all of its processes. The concept of hospitals randomizing experimental treatments isn't anything new.
For the experiment about mis-teaching Reiki to practitioners, you could instead teach the control group to practice an invented energy/enthusiasm-boosting psychosomatic effect without telling them it's just a psychosomatic effect. (A super basic example would be to teach them to do an arbitrary ritual that involves giving someone attention and telling them a non-explanation like "Science confirms that this ritual gives people energy and enthusiasm. It's called Foo and has a long history in _ culture.".) Do the groups get different results? What if you tell the control group the invented thing is called Reiki? (Assuming that both groups are selected to be people who weren't previously knowledgeable enough about Reiki to spot any of the lies that are told to the control group.) What if you include one specific true minor detail about Reiki and a bunch of fake ones? Where is the line that will cause the control group to get results indistinguishable from Reiki? (And are any of the results unexplainable by placebo effect?)
If it works differently based on whether someone is testing it, that just means there should be even more ways to test for it. If you secretly installed a lot of measurement devices at the location where someone practiced Reiki and took notes on the people that did it there, would they start complaining that Reiki was no longer working, and possibly go seek out other places that Reiki worked? If so, then anyone who really wanted to get a building they knew didn't have any surveillance devices could decide to only buy buildings that previously had successful Reiki practitioners. What if someone funded opening a Reiki temple -- but had no other interaction with it -- with the hope that if Reiki is truly a supernatural phenomenon, then getting it more exposure would eventually attract people who would directly study it there? Would that Reiki temple automatically be less successful because of the intent than a Reiki temple in the same area created with funding from a similar hands-off person who just loved Reiki? What if both of those people helped fund the same Reiki temple opening together 50-50? The idea of something reacting differently to the intention of testing at a distance seems even more untenable than the base claim.
First let me say again that I am really grateful that you're coming at this in the same spirit as I am. And I'm sorry that I can't give you better answers.
From the very beginning of my experience with Reiki I assumed that part of the effect was psychosomatic, due to the simple natural reaction to sitting calmly for ~20 minutes while someone peacefully and attentively did the hand motions. For a lot of people that's enough to be seriously mind-altering (because of our stressful and sleep-encouraging daily grind, etc...)
But there's something else, something that seems perceptually a little bit like electromagnetism, but different.
When I was first learning I would go up to friends and stand in front of them and have them put their hands up perpendicular to the ground. Then I would put my hands in front of theirs about 1-2 cm away (airgap) and "charge" or "power up" my Reiki field. Most people felt something, and many of them would jump as if from a sort of "joy buzzer" or something.
There were also times when I used Reiki without making any visible motions. My experience lead me to believe that the physical hand motions and rituals are pretty much window-dressing. It also works on animals and plants. So, yeah, not entirely psychosomatic.
> Does the spiritual energy cause the body to react in a way that wouldn't be possible for the psychosomatic effect to do alone?
It seems to me that the fact that Reiki engenders general healing, and not just physical but mental and emotional too, is very significant. The people who trained and initiated me straight out said that Reiki was intelligent. (Although, perhaps oddly, it's not a person or a god. But it's not not a person either, if you feel me...)
Are there any factors known to be universally healing? (I imagine you could mainline ATP[1] directly to your bloodstream but even that would presumably just power you up, eh?)
> If the spiritual energy gives someone more energy, then it's imaginable that we should be able to to track that. Imagine that we can very carefully track a person's weight, measure their caloric intake, and measure their caloric outtake (the amount of physical exertion the person does including muscle use and body heat, and the chemical contents of their sweat, exhalation, urine, and feces) to an accuracy level where there's no discrepancy between a normal person's intake and outtake. Now imagine we do that with someone using Reiki. If Reiki is purely a psychosomatic effect that causes the body to use the energy it has in a different way, then there should still be no discrepancy. If there is a spiritual energy component, then there should be a discrepancy, otherwise it's completely explainable by psychosomatic effect alone.
Yes, this might (I think) be pretty effective. Some of the dramatic healings I've seen would have to have been accompanied by significant caloric uptake (sorry if my terminology sounds stupid) yet no one ever feels tired afterward. You always feel refreshed and revived, both parties.
> Most of the experiments I mentioned could be changed so that the person administering the Reiki doesn't know that there's an experiment going on.
I think that would work well, provided the experimenter has "pure" or "good" intentions. I don't think there's any way to isolate or shield Reiki, so if the experimenter were working out of some sort of selfish or impure motive then that would affect the results.
There is also the problem of (what I call) "conceptual leverage". What I mean is, let's imagine that you could produce scientifically incontrovertible proof that there was a "fifth fundamental force"[2] and that it healed people. There would be a massive clashes and upheaval in world belief systems, because the meaning or significance of such a discovery would be deep and profound to so many people but it would also be different for different people. The Catholic Church has already grappled with this[3]. Now some scientists are going to tell them that God lives in Japan?
If I may be forgiven for anthropomorphizing Reiki again, it doesn't care. Reiki can heal people without scientific recognition. Therefore it is at least consistent logically that it would not "sit still" to be scientifically incontrovertibly proven. In fact the ambiguity serves Reiki's deeper purpose.
Cheers! I really appreciate the time and thought you put into this.
> What if someone funded opening a Reiki temple -- but had no other interaction with it -- with the hope that if Reiki is truly a supernatural phenomenon, then getting it more exposure would eventually attract people who would directly study it there? Would that Reiki temple automatically be less successful because of the intent than a Reiki temple in the same area created with funding from a similar hands-off person who just loved Reiki?
My prediction based on my experience is, yes, that temple would be less successful. Remember that this subthread started with questioning the distinction between supernatural and natural. Reiki could well be the effect of some kind of natural biological EM communication. (But then the implication is that there are no hard boundaries between our unconscious minds, which of course is standard Jungian doctrine, eh?)
> The idea of something reacting differently to the intention of testing at a distance seems even more untenable than the base claim.
I know. I did warn you. This is the Rabbithole of Rabbitholes.
I haven't been able to determine a distance limit for the sensitivity of the phenomenon.
As I told the other fellow, you might be better off reading up on Micheal Levin's work on thought and communication "Outside the Nervous System" than talking to me. Although I'm happy to answer any questions as best I can.
This is something the situationalists addressed with the theory of derive. There are plenty of people carrying on in that tradition, including my own project.
> Furthermore, the widely repeated claim that modern science necessarily produces disenchantment is equally a mistake. It fails on a philosophical level because it has been impossible to successfully and fully demarcate ‘science’ from other domains. As Larry Laudan, the greatest living philosopher of science, has shown, ‘there are no epistemic features which all and only the disciplines we accept as “scientific” share in common’ and, moreover there is no unitary scientific method.
There is, however, a result they share in common:
> The rise of the natural sciences is credited with a demonstrable, ever-quickening increase in human knowledge and power; shortly before the modern age European mankind knew less than Archimedes in the third century B.C., while the first fifty years of our century have witnessed more important discoveries than all the centuries of recorded history together. Yet the same phenomenon is blamed with equal right for the hardly less demonstrable increase in human despair or the specifically modern nihilism which has spread to ever larger sections of the population, their most significant aspect perhaps being that they no longer spare the scientists themselves, whose well-founded optimism could still, in the nineteenth century, stand up against the equally justifiable pessimism of thinkers and poets. The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself.
-- Hannah Arent
You might say that's being blind and alone, and knowing it. I still don't agree that this necessarily needs to lead to pessimism or nihilism or disenchantment, I am joyful because I want to be, not because I have reasons for it I couldn't dissect and disappear with "rational thought".
But what I observe is that, we seem to have regressed from that, we love to pretend objectivity is even available to us, and think science is somehow the opposite of "mere subjective experience". It's still just subjective experience, on a larger scale by more people, but that doesn't make it fundamentally different. Heisenberg knew this, we no longer, and I wonder why that is.
> How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Parable of the Madman" (1882)
> the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths or magic.
Religion is excluded from all this "enchantment" talk. I don't know if it is because of the personal belief of the author, or because it would hurt most of the American readers. E.g. Christians generally believe in miracles and saints, or at least they believe that some kind of omnipotent spirit watches over them. Isn't that the most common form of magic?
> Chasing the domination of nature, humans began to dominate each other. [...] led toward the objectification of humanity; the concentration camps and Gulag followed.
This is absurd. When Tamerlan destroyed cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people, there was no desire of dominating Nature, nor "enchantment". Three thousand years ago, Assurbanipal organized large scale transfers of populations, and he claimed he tortured civilians routinely. Many "enlightened" religious wars led to huge atrocities, where the opposite side was treated worse than cattle. And of course, slavery and "sub-human races" are an old invention totally unrelated to the domination of Nature. Modern tools led to powerful acts, but "objectification of humanity" is nothing new.
[edit: typos]