Magick/Occultism/Esotericism

No 

Helena Blavatsky? Died 1891 

So, that's the glib answers out of the way. How much effort do I need to put into providing more considered answers? As some will note, in all my replies on subjects that confront head-on any alternative view of "science" I strive to be polite and respectful while presenting forceful arguments to why the proposed theories and ideas are perhaps not as correct as the person believes them to be. It's not always easy (being polite that is, refuting most of these ideas is trivial).

Before I start I want to go back to a word I've used twice already: extrapolation. The extrapolation of ideas is a useful tool for stepping beyond what we know but it has to be backed-up by evidence before that extrapolated idea can itself be used to extrapolate the next idea. Similarly, an extrapolation should not over-reach itself because small errors in the point of origin are dramatically magnified the further the extrapolation is from that point. This is exacerbated when one of the points used to extrapolate the new idea is totally wrong or completely unrelated. Take all these into consideration and you have the recipe for a slippery slope argument. The problem with much alternative thinking is that it extrapolates ideas from points that are themselves unproven extrapolations, the logic and reasoning that creates this new idea may appear sound but the root ideas are extrapolations built upon extrapolations built upon extrapolations (yep, it's turtles all the way down) and many of those extrapolations are created from two unconnected and unrelated ideas or pieces of information. Small errors rapidly become very large errors even though the baby-step reasoning that these ideas derive from appears logical and even perhaps rational. The other ingredient to the slippery slope is Interpolation, and that suffers all the same pitfalls as extrapolation. Interpolation is "connecting the dots", interpolated ideas are produced by identifying commonality in two separate points and drawing a line (conclusion) between them - Steve's tarot reading example on the previous page is an example of interpolation rather than the similar sounding 'interpretation' (but I've no inclination to critique his post beyond that).

Ignoring the observation that Helena Blavatsky died before anyone had formulated any of the laws of quantum mechanics, and being generous with the notion, the other thing to take into consideration is that pre-Vedic refers to bronze age and stone age cultures on the Indian subcontinent (we cannot regard "India" of that time as being a unified civilisation because it wasn't). 

Vedic culture is named after the Vedas, which are written knowledge texts, so pre-Vedic essentially means "before written text" because (and here's the rub) there are no written texts from pre-Vedic times. This means we actually know very little about the cultures and civilisations that existed then, we have no examples of their writing and we don't even know the languages they spoke so we certainly don't know what they believed or what they knew. All we can do is extrapolate back from Vedic times and make guesses. The Vedic period is from 1500BCE to 500BCE though some claim the Vedas go back over 20,000 years even though there is no evidence to back this up. So basically the Vedic era is some 200 years after the Egyptians abandoned building pyramids (probably because they didn't work) and 500 years after the neolithic tribes of England abandoned placing huge stones in pretty circles (probably because they didn't work either) and the pre-Vedic is everything before then. Observation that the Vedas reveal what Vedic cultures knew (by our interpretation) has lead people to extrapolate the notion that the seeds of that knowledge must have come from pre-Vedic times.

Now, we all admire these ancient cultures because they appeared to be able to do stuff that we would find a challenge. Mostly because we have different skill-sets to them and aren't as adept in the skills they needed to survive yet we continue to apply our modern perspective on ancient vistas and make wildly extrapolated claims as a result. We are slowly eroding the conceit with which we once viewed these ancient cultures so no longer regard them as primitive (by our modern estimation) but some have extrapolated that reassessment further than necessary - they were as smart as us, and by the same virtue they were just as dumb as we have a perpetual habit to be.

Whoever came up with the idea that pre-Vedic "Indians" knew the laws of quantum mechanics (and I doubt that was Blavatsky), has interpolated a connection between an unproven extrapolated idea and an unrelated observation that evidently they didn't understand too well.

So... seeing how these ancient cultures extrapolated and interpolated time (and the accuracy problems associated with that), it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to see that the same can be applied to measurement of volume. Observing that rock can be split from the earth and then be further divided and subdivided easily leads to the extrapolation that the universe is infinite and all matter can be interpolated into increasingly smaller parts, beyond what can be physically measured (and it's still turtles all the way down). This is not quantum mechanics.

Seeing patterns where no patterns exist (apophenia). That's all I warn against. How, why, where, when, what and who is of interest to me because enquiry has to be testable and that requires the mechanisms that produce the answers (meaning) have to be understood, traceable and most importantly, repeatable. That list of interrogatives are used to test the answer because if the mechanism that produced it cannot be explained then the answer cannot be explained. Arriving at the "right" answer without knowing how it was produced has no value because if you cannot explain or understand that then you have no way of knowing when the same rote produces "wrong" answers - a mechanism that is only right some of the time is useless. 

Psychology terms that appear often in discussions such as this are confirmation bias, cognitive bias and selection bias (these are inter-related and not mutually exclusive) because these, together with many other logical biases and fallacies, result in skewing of the observation that the mechanism has produced a favourable (or desired) outcome. The problem therein is that while one side of the argument uses these psychological effects to show that the mechanism fails (whether it produces the "right" answer or not), the other side uses them to justify that it works (when it works).

My previous post (for all it's verbosity) only dealt with the quantisation of matter from which quantum mechanics gets its name. Seeing the laws of quantum mechanics, such as quantisation, superposition, entanglement, uncertainty, wave-particle duality etc., in ancient writings is an example of seeing patterns where no patterns exist using cognitive bias and selection bias to arrive at a fallacious conclusion.

Presenting a circular argument such as this doesn't do much for me I'm afraid (what you've done here is an example of begging the question).

If they had written the complete works of Shakespeare then we could also say they knew the works of Shakespeare and if they had invented jet airliners some of them would have holidayed in Australia. The problem there is if they had just one word wrong in only one of the 37 plays and 154 sonnets then they wouldn't be the complete works of Shakespeare, and one equation wrong in the occult divination of how to be Frank Whittle, Boeing and Qantus, and those airline passenger's bodies would be scattered over the slopes of the nearest hillside rather than catching a few rays on Bondi beach. 

One tiny error in just one of their equations governing quantum mechanics and their entire knowledge of quantum mechanics would be false, so it would have no value or application. Furthermore, because those equations were not derived by mathematical/scientific methods then they would have no way of identifying where the error was, why it occurred or how to fix it.

Science is not about the end result - in fact the end result is for all practical purposes irrelevant, the mechanism of how that result is computed is more important than the solution because we use the mechanism to test the veracity of the answer - and you cannot do that by some occult method. Knowing the laws of quantum mechanics without understanding how they were derived renders them useless. 

Now, we can actually estimate the probability of coming up with the laws of quantum mechanics by occult means because experimental observation of occult methods has repeatedly shown that they have very similar statistical probabilities to random chance. This does not mean that they are random chance btw, but I'll not dwell on that - the observations merely show they are not dissimilar. Therefore divining the laws of quantum mechanics by occult means can be simulated by randomly pulling letters out of a Scrabble™ bag for example.

So in the Scrabble™ realm of infinite possibilities where all things are possible by occult means, then there would be a single set of occult-divined laws of quantum mechanics that were identical to our own in every way, and there would be infinite sets of quantum mechanics laws that differed by some detail (small or large) that we would say are 'broken' if only we knew how to recognise law-sets that didn't work from those that did (but as we generated these by the occult we have know way of knowing which is which). And for good measure there would be an even larger infinite number of sets of laws that were not related to quantum mechanics at all, and because this is being simulated by random chance, there would also be the complete works of William Shakespeare and of every other author that ever lived, including that of whoever wrote the route timetable for the No.65 bus that runs between Guildford and Winchester. However even in a realm of infinite possibilities each text takes a finite length of time to formulate and you only have a finite number of occult practitioners to come up with them, so the infinite sets of laws and texts cannot be in existence simultaneously so it would take an infinite length of time to come up with all of them. This means that the probability of deducing the correct set of laws of quantum mechanics by occult means on the first attempt is 1/infinity, which isn't zero but it's close enough. Obviously the more time we allow for this the better our chances become, but as you have set a finite bound on this (in the distant past would equate to 20,000 years tops) which is statistically a small number so our probability remains best buddies with the number zero. 

Vompatti wrote: Also, doesn't it seem that science is currently moving towards territories that in the past would have been considered occult?

No.