I can only conclude that if I took them to see Seurat’s painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” they would earnestly ask me what on earth the purpose of all the little dots was.
… which we might call the disappointment of explicability. “A rainbow is just light refracting.” “The aurora is only a bunch of protons hitting the earth’s magnetic field.” Rationalists are, sadly, not immune to this nasty little meme.
It occurred to me upon reading this, that perhaps your analogy about the painting is overlooking something important.
In the case of a beautiful painting, if you examine the chain of causality that led to its existence, you will find within that chain, a material system that is the mind and being of the painter. In the case of a rainbow, or an aurora, which, like the painting, is aesthetically pleasing for a human to look upon, the chain of causality that led to its existence does not contain anything resembling our definition of a mind.
In both cases, there exists a real thing, a thing with a reductionist explanation. In both cases a human is likely to be aesthetically pleased by looking at that thing. And, I suspect, in both cases a human’s social instincts create a positive emotional response to not just the perceived beauty but to the mind responsible for the existence of said beauty. A human’s Map would be marked by that emotional connection, but of course, only in the former case is there actually a mind anywhere in the Territory to correspond to that marking.
It seems possible, even likely, that most of the disappointment you describe, is not in the existence of an explanation, but that the explanation requires the severing of that emotional connection, the erasing from our Map that which is most important to us—other minds. We want to find/meet/see/understand/etc. the mind that caused our feeling of aesthetic pleasure, and hurt when we first understand that there is no mind to find.
Brilliant train of thought, there may very well be something to this idea.
I used the painting analogy myself in debating anti-materialists but could always see, how that analogy didn’t really satisfy them the way it satisfied me and you’ve possibly give a valuable clue why.
It occurred to me upon reading this, that perhaps your analogy about the painting is overlooking something important.
In the case of a beautiful painting, if you examine the chain of causality that led to its existence, you will find within that chain, a material system that is the mind and being of the painter. In the case of a rainbow, or an aurora, which, like the painting, is aesthetically pleasing for a human to look upon, the chain of causality that led to its existence does not contain anything resembling our definition of a mind.
In both cases, there exists a real thing, a thing with a reductionist explanation. In both cases a human is likely to be aesthetically pleased by looking at that thing. And, I suspect, in both cases a human’s social instincts create a positive emotional response to not just the perceived beauty but to the mind responsible for the existence of said beauty. A human’s Map would be marked by that emotional connection, but of course, only in the former case is there actually a mind anywhere in the Territory to correspond to that marking.
It seems possible, even likely, that most of the disappointment you describe, is not in the existence of an explanation, but that the explanation requires the severing of that emotional connection, the erasing from our Map that which is most important to us—other minds. We want to find/meet/see/understand/etc. the mind that caused our feeling of aesthetic pleasure, and hurt when we first understand that there is no mind to find.
That is what I suspect, at least.
Brilliant train of thought, there may very well be something to this idea.
I used the painting analogy myself in debating anti-materialists but could always see, how that analogy didn’t really satisfy them the way it satisfied me and you’ve possibly give a valuable clue why.