Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

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This makes me think of this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/435/

And also of the strange and wonderful epiphany I got when I started considering the ancient Greeks again. On the purity scale given by the xkcd, math is just applied philosophy.

The Greeks invented philosophy. Nobody thought philosophically before the Greeks invented it. People thought rigorously before the Greeks, but the rigor took a different form. That form is so different from philosophy that we have a different name for it. That word is theology.

When the people of the world tried to think rigorously before the Greeks invented a way to take the theology out of it, they could not stop themselves from invoking deities or moral importunings and all of that alongside their attempts at rigor. Theological rigor is different than philosophical rigor. In a very real way, philosophy is just applied theology.

Patterns for the sake of patterns is a hallmark of ancient theology. The ancient Hebrews believed they needed to sacrifice dozens to hundreds of animals daily at their great temple in order to stay in God's good graces. The Aztecs did one further and sacrificed humans. The patterns, the rituals, calmed the mind and served as a bulwark against the chaos and insanity that would surely reign and did reign whenever war or famine tore them away from them.

Philosophy, the love of wisdom, saved people from that. Without those amazing men who dared to think differently, often at the cost of their lives, Socrates was made to drink poison for his heresy, we wouldn't have the modern world. Ancient Greece wasn't a philosophical wonder island of reason and logic. Philosophy had to coexist with their existing mystery pantheistic sacrifice-demanding religion. Those thought processes that they invented had to catch fire and spread the same way any idea needs to.

It seems so strange, so weird, so crazy to consider, kind of like the idea that all current humans descended from a common ancestor. But before the Greeks, people didn't really consider the true nature of things. They just accepted whatever ideas sounded good and soothing.

> before the Greeks, people didn't really consider the true nature of things

This is a very bold statement, and it's most likely incorrect - given that the Greeks were relative newcomers to the world of civilizations to begin with, and also the fact that the modern humans have been in existence for many dozens of millennia.

I don't think it's all that bold. If earlier people had invented philosophy, then those are the people we'd be celebrating. The Greeks would have celebrated them.

Before the Greeks, there was this giant wall at which you had to stop, we call them 'mystery religions' because that's what they all had at the heart of them, this immense wonder about 'what it's all for', that they couldn't help but attribute to whatever god they had concocted up.

After the Greeks, humanity had tools to investigate that mystery rationally. Today we call those tools philosophy.

If you go look at the culture of the ancient Egyptians, long in the tooth by the time the Greeks came around, you don't see anything like Greek rationalism. Their thoughts are circular, their reasoning hung up around their mystery religion, never to escape it. The Egyptians had 5000 years to invent philosophy but they never did.

[...] math is just applied philosophy.

I don't think that this would be a good characterization of the relationship between mathematics and philosophy. Philosophy uses quite a bit of math, especially to make arguments rigorous, making philosophy more like physics in this regard. On the other hand philosophy of course also tries to investigate and explain the nature of mathematics, so in some sense this puts mathematics on top of philosophy but I am not sure that this justifies calling it applied philosophy.

Greeks didnt invent philosophy, technically. The western tradition, maybe, but not the whole itself. And most of them, Socrates included, talked about thw gods a lot of the time. In fact, socrates's way of living a good life is, more or less, the same idea behind the christian heaven and hell concept. the only thing that really changes is, once most philosophers become theologians, they develop advanced theories in trying to explain away the Trinity or the Eucharist.

If you go look at Eastern philosophy, to this day it looks similar to how you're describing Socrates. Philosophy couldn't completely separate from theology back in Socrates' day but in later Greek writings you see the split fully manifest.

In one relatively small collection of nations, a mode of thought that was completely novel to the rest of the world was dreamed up. That way of thinking completely changed the world, so much that that way of thinking seems totally normal today.

When modern theological philosophers try to explain the Trinity, they use Greek ideas. In fact, the whole idea of the Trinity just falls out of a philosophical way of looking at it. The Eastern Christian Church doesn't use the doctrine.

Any time we talk about "the West," we're talking about a way of looking at things that originated with ancient Greece.

Xkcd's cartoon is, of course, a gently sardonic poke at a reductionist point of view that is a lot less profound than it appears. It would not be useful, for example, to try to reduce the theory of evolution to physics.

On the other hand, I completely take your point that the ancient Greek philosophers showed us an alternative to the tyranny of doctrinaire and theological rule.

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