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Dreaded_Anomaly comments on Rationality Quotes: March 2011 - Less Wrong
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"If the wonder's gone when the truth is known, there never was any wonder." — Gregory House, M.D. ("House" Season 4, Episode 8 "You Don't Want to Know," written by Sara Hess)
That made me notice that the whole "persistent failure to understand some phenomenon makes it awesome" idea is baked directly into words like "wonder" and "wonderful". What do you do when you don't understand something? You wonder about it. And so if something is wonderful, then clearly you can't allow yourself to understand it, because then there'd be nothing to wonder about. (In that sense, of course "wonder" is gone when the truth is known!) I know the dictionary would likely consider those to be separate senses of the words, but the connotations probably leak over.
Why not?
The context of the quote is available here.
Thanks. I watched the episode and remember the context, but I still want to know why wonder that depends on ignorance is literally illusory.
Is this quote just a motivational tool designed to help us seek truth, or is there some true propositional content to it? If the latter, what are some situations where there was in fact some wonder? Also, what is or might be the causal mechanism by which dependence on ignorance leads to the no-wonder state?
I ask because when I am amazed by a magic trick or by a feat of practical engineering whose exact principles are unknown to me, and say "Wow!" and experience what I usually describe as "wonder," and then someone explains it and it seems relatively less wondrous, I do not usually retroactively downgrade my (temporary) experience of wonder -- rather, I note that at the time it seemed particularly wonderful and that now it seems less so.
For all that, I value truth much higher than wonder, and people are perfectly welcome to explain things to me -- but I doubt that House's quote is literally correct.
If "wonder" is being used to denote a reaction in an observer's mind, then you're of course right... there was wonder, and now there isn't, and House is simply wrong.
If "wonder" is being used metonomicly to refer to something in the world that merits being reacted to in that way -- the way people use it, for example, in phrases like "the seven wonders of the ancient world" -- then it's not so clearcut.
I like the quote because I interpret it as a weapon against the mind projection fallacy: If something is no longer intrinsically wondrous when the truth is known, then it wasn't intrinsically wondrous to begin with.
It would seem to me that even to think that being wondrous was an intrinsic property would be some sort of mind projection fallacy by itself.
That's probably what I meant.
Things should not seem more wonderful when you don't understand them. Rationalists take joy in the merely real.
So I went back and re-read that article, and I still think that House's claim is (a) much stronger, and (b) wrong.
It's certainly important to allow yourself to gape in wonder at things that follow orderly rules; most likely all things do that, and I agree that it's foolish to give up wonder just because we live in an orderly universe.
But, for me, the sense of wonder is not about worshiping ignorance; it's about humility and curiosity. Here, I say to myself when I see a rainbow, is something worth knowing about and yet I do not understand it at all. The wonder is the fuel that leads to curiosity, which leads to knowledge. Or, at the very least, the wonder helps me keep up a grateful, open attitude toward my environment.
If you explained exactly how the rainbow worked, it would be an object of somewhat less wonder -- I would still find it pretty, but I wouldn't get quite the same emotional high. I might be able to find a similar sense of wonder in, e.g., the composition of the atmosphere (this usually works for me), or the behavior of photons (this usually does not work for me), and so there might be no net loss of wonder, and yet, nevertheless, explaining how the rainbow works tends to diminish the wondrousness of the rainbow without thereby providing any support for the conclusion that there was never any wonder there in the first place.
Basically, I disagree with you and with House. I take joy in the merely real, and things seem more wonderful to me when I don't (yet) understand them.
If you look at the context of the quote, the magician's previous line is:
"People come to my show because they want a sense of wonder. They want to experience something that they can't explain." (emphasis added)
That doesn't seem to be the same sentiment as the one you're describing.
The mindset in which something only has wonder when you think it's unexplainable (not just unexplained) is not a rational or scientific one.
I'm quite uncomfortable with these sorts of statements. Rationalism and science are ways of approaching and analysing the world, not modes of aesthetic appreciation. This smacks a little to me of the idea that the scientifically aware realise that there is 'more beauty' in nature than in art.
If I met someone who was clear-minded, analytical and empirical I wouldn't call them irrational and unscientific just because they experience wonder at unexplained magic tricks rather than great scientific theories, or because they found the poetry of Eliot more beautiful than the structure of the universe (I know you haven't claimed the latter, just addressing a more widespread 'scientific people appreciate X' claim).
I didn't think this would fit into the top level of the quotes thread, but in this context it might actually serve pretty well:
-- Humphry Davy
I guess the question is whether this is perception of truth or 'truthiness'. On the one hand, people can have a deep sense that something is inevitably true that then turns out to be false. On the other, some individuals, such as Einstein, seem to be good at recognising the sort of aesthetic elegance that suggests a true theory
On the whole, I'm sceptical about the 'direct perception of truth' idea: it tends to suggest that all we need to do is clear away a certain level of obvious biases and then we can trust our gut. And that others who demand evidence for things we consider obvious are nit-pickers and nay-sayers. Not sure that's very good for rationality.