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SarahC comments on Were atoms real? - Less Wrong
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Very small children understand "real" to be "what's inside" -- what's hidden, essential. Sometimes literally inside: ask toddlers "If you took a dog, and gave it the bones and insides of a cat, would it still be a dog?" they say "no," but "If you took a dog and made it look like a cat on the outside, would it still be a dog?" they say "yes." (I'm getting this from Paul Bloom's "How Pleasure Works.") Young children are essentialist about gender as well -- they assume more differences between the sexes than actually exist, not fewer.
What psychological evidence I've seen suggests that we're in some way wired to see categories as real. "Natural kinds." To think that there's a real difference "out there" between dog and not-dog, not just a useful bookkeeping convention. I'm inclined to believe that Anna's reasoning about "atoms are real" and Eliezer's reasoning about categories actually make more sense than essentialism -- but I suspect that this kind of question-dissolving is not the standard, evolution-provided brain pathway.
If the subject interests you, I recommend reading Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. It's somewhat slow going, but the author lays out a detailed story about the process of category formation in humans (that is, why we create the categories that we do) that does wonders for clarifying the issues involved.
I have no idea whether the specific story he tells is right or not, but sometimes it's useful to just have an example of what such a story might look like.
thanks!
Real-world example: The creationist science of baraminology takes assumption of kinds to its logical limits. Todd Charles Wood comes so close to admitting his baraminology work is excellent evidence for evolution. It's amazing how far people will take an obviously broken axiom without letting go of it.
Interesting. It's funny how the Bible really reinforces the idea of natural kinds -- a lot of the prohibitions can be interpreted, one way or another, as prohibitions against mixing things that are essentially different (wool and flax, men and women, fish and mammals.) It would make sense if essentialism was the way we "naturally" think, and it takes some scientific development to tease out where it doesn't make sense.
Though I'm just amazed at their trouble with grammar, first of all. Grrrr.
-- your local ex-rabbinical student :)
-men and women: men aren't supposed to dress like women and vice versa.
-fish and mammals: takes some unpacking and was probably the wrong way to phrase it. The fish you can eat should have scales and fins -- that sort of points to "good" fish being especially "fishy" fish. Fish that are kind of not like fish are not okay.
agreed, support your theory
yes, probably wrong way to phrase it, but I agree about the essentialism of "fish with scales" being "fishy fish" - that's a very sharp observation, actually.
I herded the RW article from silver to gold (in the front cover rotation) and it was quite difficult. It's one of those subjects where every single thing about it is blitheringly stupid, and putting the stupidities in an order that reads usefully as an essay is actually the hard part. The inferential distance problem here is getting across to people that other people really do believe things this stupid. Staying understated requires remarkable self-control. Project Blue Beam was another - saving the punchline for the end, where it doesn't belong logically but does belong narratively.
Heh. What are cooties anyway?
Another know how cross-cultural belief in cooties or the equivalent is?
Originally, they were lice.
What would it be, to not see categories as real?
All of our perceptions, from low-level physical sensation up to the highest abstractions, are experienced as real things existing outside of ourselves. This is an illusion in every case.
Look around you and it will seem to you that you see objects "out there". Listen, and you seem to hear things far off. Touch something and the sensation appears to be at your skin. Smells seem to be in the air around you, and tastes seem to belong to what you are eating. Watch someone in action and it will seem as if you can see their purposes, right out there in the other person. Think about abstractions like "justice" or "democracy", and these too will seem to be externally existing things.
But all of that experience is literally in your head. We are all of us shut up inside three pounds of porridge in a bone box, but it never feels like that. There is something outside you that gives rise to these sensations, but it takes a lot of work to get anywhere close to the real story.
We are wired to perceive categories -- and sensations, and sequences, and patterns, and various other sorts of perception. The perceptual illusion affects all of them.
I expect it would be noticing that I treat X as though it were importantly similar to Y, even though X is (it seems to me) nothing at all like Y.
This happened to me a lot while I was dealing with post-stroke PTSD... I would react to things in ways that made no sense to me at all, think about it for a while, and eventually conclude that I was treating those things as importantly equivalent to aspects of stroke-related trauma, even though they didn't seem to me to be importantly equivalent at all.
Our minds are not internally consistent.
Agreed about the rest of this, though. "Aaaa! I'm stuck inside this dark, damp skull!" just isn't the sort of thing brains are wired to experience.
Hawkins would agree.