Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing, gurgling creature.
Paul BloomRead
We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn't be a democracy, but it shouldn't be a dictatorship, either.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of balancing different aspects of our personality and decision-making processes.
Paul Bloom suggests that individuals possess multiple 'selves' or aspects of their personality which can interact productively when they are in balance. Focusing too much on long-term contemplation can lead to paralysis, while giving in to short-term impulses can result in reckless decisions. Therefore, it's essential to find a harmonious interplay between these tendencies, ensuring that neither dominates our decision-making process and that we maintain a healthy direction in our lives.
Themes
BalanceSelfDecision-MakingContemplationImpulse
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about self-awareness and personal growth.
More from Paul Bloom
All quotes →Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there's more to looking good than your physical appearance. If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do.
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If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well - better, in many ways, than devout ones.
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I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them or feel them or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.
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Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.
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A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby's large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves.
Paul BloomRead
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