This is one of my favorite topics, more so than the usual topics of rationalism perhaps, and I’ve thought about it a lot. How can we best believe things we accept? The other day I was out running and the moon was large and visible in the daylight. I was looking up at it and thinking to myself, “If people really understood what the moon was, what the stars are, what Earth is, could they go on living the way they do? If I really, genuinely knew these were other places, could I go on living the way I do?” This is, perhaps, too romantic a view of things. But it illustrates my point: we really do accept very profound things without ever truly making them part of our person. It’s not just the absence of ghosts and other supernatural entities we have difficulty with but the presence of many phenomena outside our usual experience.
Paul Churchland’s early work, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, has a great illustration of this. Churchland’s mentor was the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars who developed a distinction between the “scientific image” of the world and its common sense “manifest image.” Churchland’s approach is to give the scientific image preeminence. He wants science to replace common sense. This larger project was the background to his more familiar eliminative materialism (which seeks to replace folk psychology with a peculiar connectionist account of the brain). While most of the work is quite technical there are some excellent passages on how we could achieve this replacement. He discusses the way we still talk of the sun rising and setting, for example, and uses a particular diagram to show how one can reorient oneself to really appreciate the fact that we’re a planet orbiting a star.
I don’t have the descriptive text at hand but for me what the diagrams illustrate is a particular approach to science that I think Eliezer shares, more or less, which is that we should try to incorporate science deeply into the way we inhabit the world. I suppose that, to me, is a major part of what rationality is or should be: How can we best live that which we have until now merely accepted as fact?
Nitpick: We talk of the sun rising and setting because we’re a planet rotating on its own axis, not because we’re orbiting the sun. The orbiting causes seasons.
However, you make an interesting point. Whenever I can remember, I try to do what someone taught me years ago: Sit down to watch the sunset (ideally on a beach) and think about the fact that it is the Earth ‘rising’ and not the Sun ‘setting’. It is a really fun exercise.
Even better: due to relativity, realize that if you’re only considering the earth/sun system and not paying attention to other planets, you can go ahead and choose either one as your reference frame (traditionally, you pick the one you’re in). So the sun really is quickly orbiting a stationary Earth.
“the sun goes around the Earth quickly while rotating slowly” and “the Earth is rotating quickly while orbiting the sun slowly” express the same sentiment.
EDIT: Okay, you got me—you can’t rotate an inertial frame, and ‘fictitious forces’ would be detectable differently in each of those examples. But I stand by my first point.
IANAPE, but it does seem hard to ‘relativise’ being torn assunder by centrifugal forces vs rotating slowly while the sun laughs in the face of the speed of light.
I’m thinking back to those Feynman lectures. I have an incling that he said rotation could be detected if you were stuck in one of those hypothetical transport containers. Failing that, just thinking of the relevant experiment is making my right hand turn blue for some reason.
I’ll throw those two together and surmise that “who is orbitting whom” is just a matter of “who cares? Just plug in the weights and give me relative positions and a direction” but that rotation you’ve got somewhat less flexibility with.
we have difficulty with but the presence of many phenomena outside our usual experience.
Everything is equally a phenomena, just some phenomena we have or haven’t evolved to be un-astounded by. Conversely, there are some phenomena we are more inclined to be astounded by, namely, waterfalls.
This is one of my favorite topics, more so than the usual topics of rationalism perhaps, and I’ve thought about it a lot. How can we best believe things we accept? The other day I was out running and the moon was large and visible in the daylight. I was looking up at it and thinking to myself, “If people really understood what the moon was, what the stars are, what Earth is, could they go on living the way they do? If I really, genuinely knew these were other places, could I go on living the way I do?” This is, perhaps, too romantic a view of things. But it illustrates my point: we really do accept very profound things without ever truly making them part of our person. It’s not just the absence of ghosts and other supernatural entities we have difficulty with but the presence of many phenomena outside our usual experience.
Paul Churchland’s early work, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, has a great illustration of this. Churchland’s mentor was the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars who developed a distinction between the “scientific image” of the world and its common sense “manifest image.” Churchland’s approach is to give the scientific image preeminence. He wants science to replace common sense. This larger project was the background to his more familiar eliminative materialism (which seeks to replace folk psychology with a peculiar connectionist account of the brain). While most of the work is quite technical there are some excellent passages on how we could achieve this replacement. He discusses the way we still talk of the sun rising and setting, for example, and uses a particular diagram to show how one can reorient oneself to really appreciate the fact that we’re a planet orbiting a star.
I’ve tried to post the diagram here:
http://s5.tinypic.com/zinh38.jpg (before we reorient ourselves)
http://s5.tinypic.com/2akfoll.jpg (after we reorient ourselves)
I don’t have the descriptive text at hand but for me what the diagrams illustrate is a particular approach to science that I think Eliezer shares, more or less, which is that we should try to incorporate science deeply into the way we inhabit the world. I suppose that, to me, is a major part of what rationality is or should be: How can we best live that which we have until now merely accepted as fact?
Nitpick: We talk of the sun rising and setting because we’re a planet rotating on its own axis, not because we’re orbiting the sun. The orbiting causes seasons.
However, you make an interesting point. Whenever I can remember, I try to do what someone taught me years ago: Sit down to watch the sunset (ideally on a beach) and think about the fact that it is the Earth ‘rising’ and not the Sun ‘setting’. It is a really fun exercise.
Even better: due to relativity, realize that if you’re only considering the earth/sun system and not paying attention to other planets, you can go ahead and choose either one as your reference frame (traditionally, you pick the one you’re in). So the sun really is quickly orbiting a stationary Earth.
“the sun goes around the Earth quickly while rotating slowly” and “the Earth is rotating quickly while orbiting the sun slowly” express the same sentiment.
EDIT: Okay, you got me—you can’t rotate an inertial frame, and ‘fictitious forces’ would be detectable differently in each of those examples. But I stand by my first point.
IANAP, but this sounds wrong to me. It would feel different to be on a slowly rotating Earth than to be on a quickly rotating Earth.
IANAPE, but it does seem hard to ‘relativise’ being torn assunder by centrifugal forces vs rotating slowly while the sun laughs in the face of the speed of light.
I’m thinking back to those Feynman lectures. I have an incling that he said rotation could be detected if you were stuck in one of those hypothetical transport containers. Failing that, just thinking of the relevant experiment is making my right hand turn blue for some reason.
I’ll throw those two together and surmise that “who is orbitting whom” is just a matter of “who cares? Just plug in the weights and give me relative positions and a direction” but that rotation you’ve got somewhat less flexibility with.
Don’t they both just move in straight lines through curved space-time, or is that just another way of percieving the math?
Like Camelot, “it’s only a model”.
Yes, that’s another way of looking at it. More or less intuitive depending on the application.
Everything is equally a phenomena, just some phenomena we have or haven’t evolved to be un-astounded by. Conversely, there are some phenomena we are more inclined to be astounded by, namely, waterfalls.