beccastareyes (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccastareyes) wrote2010-08-07 11:16 am
beccastareyes) wrote2010-08-07 11:16 am
Entry tags:
Alien Thought
I'm currently reading C J Cherryh's The Foreigner. In a nutshell, it's about a human colony ship that gets marooned somewhere far from Earth and where they are supposed to be. With their constructed space station failing, they are forced to land on a planet with an Industrial Age civilization -- which goes fine, until some years in, they nearly get wiped out because the aliens don't think like humans. The meat of the book is about the human ambassador to the aliens and both the internal politics that are looking to get him killed, and his own tendency to anthropomorphize alien thought processes*.
Cherryh and Octavia Butler, and probably others are authors I enjoy for playing with alien psychology. I mean, if you want a little alienness, a lot of people just go for the Planet of the Hats approach and have the Logical Ones, the Honorable Ones**, the Sneaky Bastards, etc. while some SF authors question a lot of universals of human psychology -- what if we weren't a hierarchical species, or if we were more of a hierarchical species? -- which gets a lot of weird aliens.
I mention this because something today made me realize that we don't always have to go into SF literature to find alien thought patterns. Basically, I found a blog critiquing an editorial in the Guardian. The column author, Harriet Baber, a philosopher says a couple of things that I just don't get.
The first is an opinion of Christianity similar to Pascal's Wager. Basically, Blaise Pascal tried to prove that you should convert to Christianity basically by 'Heaven is good, and Hell is bad. So it's better to believe in God and be wrong and end up in non-existence after you die, which will happen either way, then to not believe and end up in Hell'. Terry Pratchett answered that by pointing out that many gods didn't appreciate clever-dick philosophers who didn't respect their intelligence. Other have pointed out that it assumes that the choice is between theism and atheism, rather than Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc. and atheism. (In other words, if you put in effort to be a Christian solely to avoid Hell, and then find out God is peeved at you for ignoring the prophet Mohammad, not only will you be sitting next to the atheist in Hell, but you had to do a lot more work in your life.)
Baber says:
In other words, Baber admits the only reason she believes in Christianity is so she can go to Heaven. She doesn't care what is right or wrong, but only what keeps her in her comforting little bubble. And she admits it. At that point, you might as well follow the Flying Spaghetti Monster, with its afterlife with a Beer Volcano and Hooker Factory (or whatever -- I mean, my tailor-made heaven would be rather different than 'an eternity blissfully contemplating God', which sounds like I'd get bored fast). I suspect part of that is that, ignoring the afterlife, is that it's easiest to be some kind of Christian in Europe if one is picking among theistic religions. Judaism is a pain to convert to and not too big on the afterlife, if I understand it correctly, Islam isn't well tolerated, and reincarnation might not suit Baber.
She even seeks to generalize this approach. She doesn't want to know the truth, because she doesn't care. One of the examples she uses is that she doesn't care about the detailed state of her own teeth, which I note is very much a 'First World Problem'. In other words, because Baber has access to people who do care about teeth very much, she can afford to say 'truth is overrated' (yes, this is a direct quote) and
If Baber was poorer****, or living in a country without dental care, suddenly worrying about her teeth giving out, or how to get rid of the fleas in her flat become more pressing. It's not like cavities or cat fleas go away if you don't believe in them. She says, "People in any case overestimate the value of truth and underestimate the difficulty of arriving at it." Yes, it's hard, and it often means asking uncomfortable questions about your own biases and cross-checking. And I can see not trying to derive everything from first principles. But as Carl Sagan says, and I'm paraphrasing until I can search Demon Haunted World for this quote, 'it's as criminal to not care if an idea is true as long as it makes you feel good as it is to not care where your money comes from as long as you have it'.
It seems like a peculiar attitude for a philosopher, especially. I mean, if you pretty much say 'I don't give a damn about the big questions and pick out things that make my life happy', while being employed as a profession that, as a rule, tends to concern itself with the Big Questions... it's a bit like being a an astronomer who thinks that there is nothing in the skies worth studying. What else do you do, besides teaching college freshmen? And make confusing blog posts on the Internet.
--
* Doesn't help that he's the only human living off the island humans settled. Personally, I'd think that's a horrible setup and rife for trouble, but the aliens might not have agreed to multiple humans, and they probably wouldn't have gotten why humans would need a group.
** Actually read an interesting Star Trek: The Next Generation spinoff novel. One of the side plots advanced the idea that the Klingons were one of the few naturally-solitary species*** that achieved starflight without killing themselves, and the whole TNG-era strict honor code was essentially a cultural adaption to allow people who evolved from violent predators to get along without killing one another (too much). Not sure if I buy it, but it's at least an attempt to think about Klingon psychology other than Honorable Warrior Race or Those Guys that Shoot at Us.
*** Read: if humans are lions, Klingons would be tigers. Lions raise their young in groups, and even low-ranked males without a pride will sometimes form small groups. Tigers on the other hand, are rarely found in groups, outside of a mother and her cubs.
**** Okay, poorer and living in the United States, where poor means uninsured or underinsured.
Cherryh and Octavia Butler, and probably others are authors I enjoy for playing with alien psychology. I mean, if you want a little alienness, a lot of people just go for the Planet of the Hats approach and have the Logical Ones, the Honorable Ones**, the Sneaky Bastards, etc. while some SF authors question a lot of universals of human psychology -- what if we weren't a hierarchical species, or if we were more of a hierarchical species? -- which gets a lot of weird aliens.
I mention this because something today made me realize that we don't always have to go into SF literature to find alien thought patterns. Basically, I found a blog critiquing an editorial in the Guardian. The column author, Harriet Baber, a philosopher says a couple of things that I just don't get.
The first is an opinion of Christianity similar to Pascal's Wager. Basically, Blaise Pascal tried to prove that you should convert to Christianity basically by 'Heaven is good, and Hell is bad. So it's better to believe in God and be wrong and end up in non-existence after you die, which will happen either way, then to not believe and end up in Hell'. Terry Pratchett answered that by pointing out that many gods didn't appreciate clever-dick philosophers who didn't respect their intelligence. Other have pointed out that it assumes that the choice is between theism and atheism, rather than Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc. and atheism. (In other words, if you put in effort to be a Christian solely to avoid Hell, and then find out God is peeved at you for ignoring the prophet Mohammad, not only will you be sitting next to the atheist in Hell, but you had to do a lot more work in your life.)
Baber says:
I'm a Pascalian Christian: the jumping off point for my leap of faith is the wager. I see no reason why I should believe that life is, as Tony Soprano's perfectly awful mother Livia put it, "a great big nothing" after which we are annihilated. That may very well be the way things are. But I see no benefit to believing it is so. If I believe that, then my life will not be as pleasant as it would otherwise be and, if I am correct, I will never even have the gratification of finding out that I was right all along because I will die dead. But if I believe in God and a blissful afterlife contemplating him, then even if I am wrong I will not be disappointed. I would rather live in a fool's paradise than no paradise at all.
In other words, Baber admits the only reason she believes in Christianity is so she can go to Heaven. She doesn't care what is right or wrong, but only what keeps her in her comforting little bubble. And she admits it. At that point, you might as well follow the Flying Spaghetti Monster, with its afterlife with a Beer Volcano and Hooker Factory (or whatever -- I mean, my tailor-made heaven would be rather different than 'an eternity blissfully contemplating God', which sounds like I'd get bored fast). I suspect part of that is that, ignoring the afterlife, is that it's easiest to be some kind of Christian in Europe if one is picking among theistic religions. Judaism is a pain to convert to and not too big on the afterlife, if I understand it correctly, Islam isn't well tolerated, and reincarnation might not suit Baber.
She even seeks to generalize this approach. She doesn't want to know the truth, because she doesn't care. One of the examples she uses is that she doesn't care about the detailed state of her own teeth, which I note is very much a 'First World Problem'. In other words, because Baber has access to people who do care about teeth very much, she can afford to say 'truth is overrated' (yes, this is a direct quote) and
There are a great many truths in which I have abolutely no interest – truths about the lifecycle of Ctenocephalides felis, (the common cat flea) or the extensive body of truths about the condition of my teeth that my dentist imposes on me. I see no reason why I should bother with these truths or make a point of believing them.(emphasis mine)
If Baber was poorer****, or living in a country without dental care, suddenly worrying about her teeth giving out, or how to get rid of the fleas in her flat become more pressing. It's not like cavities or cat fleas go away if you don't believe in them. She says, "People in any case overestimate the value of truth and underestimate the difficulty of arriving at it." Yes, it's hard, and it often means asking uncomfortable questions about your own biases and cross-checking. And I can see not trying to derive everything from first principles. But as Carl Sagan says, and I'm paraphrasing until I can search Demon Haunted World for this quote, 'it's as criminal to not care if an idea is true as long as it makes you feel good as it is to not care where your money comes from as long as you have it'.
It seems like a peculiar attitude for a philosopher, especially. I mean, if you pretty much say 'I don't give a damn about the big questions and pick out things that make my life happy', while being employed as a profession that, as a rule, tends to concern itself with the Big Questions... it's a bit like being a an astronomer who thinks that there is nothing in the skies worth studying. What else do you do, besides teaching college freshmen? And make confusing blog posts on the Internet.
--
* Doesn't help that he's the only human living off the island humans settled. Personally, I'd think that's a horrible setup and rife for trouble, but the aliens might not have agreed to multiple humans, and they probably wouldn't have gotten why humans would need a group.
** Actually read an interesting Star Trek: The Next Generation spinoff novel. One of the side plots advanced the idea that the Klingons were one of the few naturally-solitary species*** that achieved starflight without killing themselves, and the whole TNG-era strict honor code was essentially a cultural adaption to allow people who evolved from violent predators to get along without killing one another (too much). Not sure if I buy it, but it's at least an attempt to think about Klingon psychology other than Honorable Warrior Race or Those Guys that Shoot at Us.
*** Read: if humans are lions, Klingons would be tigers. Lions raise their young in groups, and even low-ranked males without a pride will sometimes form small groups. Tigers on the other hand, are rarely found in groups, outside of a mother and her cubs.
**** Okay, poorer and living in the United States, where poor means uninsured or underinsured.