Principe's book opens with an introduction explaining to the reader why he wrote it. In this text we find a rare example of something that should be of significant interest to both 'rationalists' and 'post-rationalists' alike. In my defense I'll say that the core themes in this wonderful history of alchemy: post-scarcity, the limitations of human industry versus nature, big secrets, the history of science, the pursuit of elusive technical goals, even the boundaries between map and territory, are all entirely on topic. First and foremost I can happily report it did.Īt this point you may be thinking that my bizarre decisions are my own, but that doesn't make them a suitable topic for LessWrong. But do you really understand the nuances of how our thinking is different, what changed between our eyes and the magicians? Realizing my vision was clouded, I hoped that reading this book would provide clarity. I think we all have some notion that our predecessors thought in a different way, our entire modern perspective takes this as a fundamental axiom. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Take for example the testimony of John Maynard Keynes, who purchased half of Newton's unpublished papers in 1936, and presumably read them quite closely: In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. Over time, I had developed a suspicion that I didn't really understand the ways in which our ancestors thought. Having increasingly become interested in the 'postrationalist' cluster of ideas, I decided maybe a scholarly history of alchemy would help me understand some of the obscure esoteric and occult traditions they seem to draw inspiration from. My interest was piqued again months later when another post mentioned a woo-less history of alchemy. It started when I saw a post on Hacker News describing Jung's work on alchemical diagrams, noting that premodern people thought very differently and the 'rabbit hole goes deep'. Like most decisions that seem bizarre to others, my choice to read Lawrence Principe's book took months to germinate.
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