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
Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes - if we could - would not be as revelatory experience as many imagine. We might see a world inhabited by objects and people, a world infused with causation, agency, and morality - a world that would surprise us not by its freshness but by its familiarity.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that viewing the world through innocent eyes might not reveal anything new, but rather highlight its familiar complexities.
Paul Bloom's quote reflects on the idea that seeing the world with a fresh perspective, like that of a child, might not uncover novel insights about existence. Instead, it implies that our perception is often shaped by our experiences, revealing that while we may anticipate a sense of wonder, we often find a world that resonates with our prior knowledge and understanding, filled with moral and causal layers.
Themes
PerceptionInnocenceExperienceWorldviewAgencyMorality
In practice
Example use cases
In a philosophical discussion on perception, one might cite this quote to illustrate how experiential knowledge shapes our understanding of the world.
More from Paul Bloom
All quotes βMaybe 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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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.
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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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