Saturday, 21 September 2024
Inconceivable
Then a strange fit of brooding came over him. Escaping from the influences of personality, his imagination wrought back through eras of geologic time, held him in a vision of the infinitely remote, shrivelled into insignificance all but the one fact of inconceivable duration.
George Gissing - Born in Exile (1892)
It’s part of the fascination of trying to cope with even a casual grasp of geological periods where a million years is the smallest unit of time and even this is both inconceivably long and too short to be useful. The perspective problem is not dissimilar to the inconceivable distances we have to cope with in the universe, or within our own galaxy or even our own solar system.
We could take it further. The propagation of light is inconceivably fast, atoms are inconceivably small, gravity is inconceivably weird and human activity and even our technology are becoming inconceivably complex.
Sometimes it is worth dwelling on these things, the pitfalls of trying to approximate the inconceivable within language, within generalisations, hypotheses and theories.
Yet as we know, with care and much trial and error, we often manage to approximate the inconceivable within language. It could be said that this is one of our greatest achievement. Degrading the achievement is the great moral crime of charlatans - and one of their tools.
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7 comments:
But we can end up with an oversimplification such as climate change being exclusively driven by man-made carbon dioxide.
Activists like single causes because it makes their beliefs impregnable to debate.
DJ - it's interesting to read online comments about Starmer's expenses. As we'd expect, there are some who only want to point the finger at the Tories and thereby excuse Starmer without saying so.
“ Activists like single causes because it makes their beliefs impregnable to debate.”
That’s an interesting point in itself.
James - yes it is, all part of the simple minds approach.
I think it does make their beliefs a lot less pregnable to debate since they don't consider nuances, opposing phenomena, misconceptions etc
@Tammly
As you probably already know there is a cognitive quirk called 'Confirmation Bias'. Your thinking is 'biased' in that you are prone to pay no attention to facts and opinions that do not agree with your own beliefs, and that you also treat facts and opinions with less criticism if they agree with yours.
It follows that if you hold very strong beliefs about a single thing (whether it is about climate change, an ideology, or a cult) then there is little else to pay any attention to. I suspect that some activists deliberately rely on their own confirmation biases to *actively avoid* 'nuances, opposing phenomena, misconceptions etc'.
Tammly and DJ - confirmation bias feels like something acolytes could learn as a condition for belonging to a belief system. Once learned it is reinforced by other believers either in person or remotely by the media until it seems to be internal.
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