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Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
W. H. Auden, "The More Loving One"
In response to
Rationality Quotes February 2013
The only interpretation I've been able to read into this is that the speaker wants to become more emotionally accepting of death. Am I missing something?
It's ugly, though. "They" is a plural. I just used it in my last post, but I didn't like doing it; now it is gender-sensitive, but ungrammatical.
I also used the phrase "a new man", because "a new person" doesn't have the history of use that invokes the noble/creepy feelings that I wanted to communicate. I couldn't think of any gender-neutral way around it.
If we took a vote, I'd vote for "it". It also has a nice, dehumanizing ring to it, which would probably be good, given our anthropic tendencies.
This is interesting, because I've never found 'they' particlulary ugly or awkward. I do like 'it', though I suspect that the 'dehumanizing ring' to it would disappear if it were regularly used to refer to humans. The main reason I use 'they' instead is because, as far as I'm aware, it's accepted by a reasonably large contingent of authorities on the language as grammatically correct. I also find it less awkward than 'he/she' (I never know whether to say "he-she" or "he or she"), and popular alternatives like 'zie' (of which there are too many variations, none of which is used often enough that a general audience will not require an explanation). I think the main problem we'd have no matter what we chose would be effectively encouraging widespread use, and I don't have any very good ideas on how to do this.
If you actually care about the influence on how you treat others, why don't use that as your test whether to hold a belief? Instead of focusing on whether the belief in likely to be true you could focus on whether it's likely to be harm other people.
A lot of Christian's don't believe in beheading people for mixed-sex dancing and victimizate homosexuals. For them the fact that other Christian's do those thing is no good reason to drop their beliefs.
If you actually care about the influence on how you treat others, why don't use that as your test whether to hold a belief? Instead of focusing on whether the belief in likely to be true you could focus on whether it's likely to be harm other people.
It can be difficult to know what will be harmful without knowing whether certain things are true.
Hypothetical example: A person kills their child in order to prevent them from committing some kind of sin and going to hell. If this person's beliefs about the existence of hell and how people get in and stay out of it are true, they have saved their child from a great deal of suffering. If their beliefs are not true, they have killed their child for nothing.
Well, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea that language shapes thought and/or culture, and Whorfianism is any school of thought based on this hypothesis. I assume pop-Whorfianism is just Whorfian speculation by people who aren't qualified in the field (and who tend to assume that the language/culture relationship is far more deterministic than it actually is).
Agreed. Pop-whorfianism is usually silly.
I'm not familiar with this term and your link did not clarify as much as I had hoped. Could you give a clearer definition?
It's not necessarily an advantageous habit. If a person tells you they like ice cream, and you've seen them eating ice cream regularly with every sign of enjoyment, you have as much evidence that they like ice cream as you have about countless other things that nobody bothers hanging qualifiers on even in Japanese. The sciences are full of things we can't experience directly but can still establish with high confidence.
Rather than teaching people to privilege other people's mental states as an unknowable quality, I think it makes more sense to encourage people to be aware of their degrees of certainty.
Rather than teaching people to privilege other people's mental states as an unknowable quality, I think it makes more sense to encourage people to be aware of their degrees of certainty.
Increased awareness of degrees of certainty is more or less what I was thinking of encouraging. It hadn't occurred to me to look for a deeper motive and try to address it directly. This was helpful, thank you.
Yes, my Japanese teacher was very insistent about it, and IIRC would even take points off for talking about someones mental state with out the proper qualifiers.
This is good to know, and makes me wonder whether there's a way to encourage this kind of thinking in other populations. My only thought so far has been "get yourself involved with the production of the most widely-used primary school language textbooks in your area."
Thoughts?
I am fascinated by all of the answers that are not "never," as this has never happened to me. If any of the answerers were atheists, could any of you briefly describe these experiences and what might have caused them? (I am expecting "psychedelic drugs," so I will be most surprised by experiences that are caused by anything else.)
I answered Sometimes. For me the 'foundational belief' in question is usually along the lines: "Goal (x) is worth the effort of subgoal/process (y)." These moods usually last less than 6 months, and I have a hunch that they're hormonal in nature. I've yet to systematically gather data on the factors that seem most likely to be causing them, mostly because it doesn't seem worth the effort right now. Hah. Seriously, though, I have in fact been convinced that I need to work out a consistent utility function, but when I think about the work involved, I just... blah.
Since this has got 22 upvotes I must ask: What makes this a rationality quote?
You could argue that the silence of the author and the woman behind the couple is an example of the bystander effect.
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That interpretation didn't even occur to me, possibly because I read the whole poem instead of the bit I quoted (and maybe I quoted the wrong bit). Here is the whole thing (it's short). I always feel a bit awkward arguing about how I interpreted a poem, so maybe this will resolve the issue?
(Incidentally, am I the only one mildly annoyed by how people seem to think of "rationality quotes" as "anti-deathism quotes"? The position may be rational, but it is not remotely related to rationality.)
Thank you, that was helpful. I don't see the deathist tones anymore. Now it reads a bit more like 'If I happened to find myself in a world without stars I think I'd adapt,' which reminds me a bit of the Litany of Gendlin and the importance of facing reality. It makes more sense to have it here now.
This is true, and now I have to go back and look at all the anti-deathist quotes I upvoted and examine them more closely for content directly related to rationality. Damn.