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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fiction allows us to escape our own identity and empathize with others' experiences.
This quote by Paul Bloom emphasizes the transformative nature of engaging with fiction. It suggests that immersing ourselves in fictional narratives allows us to leave behind our personal identities and adopt those of the characters, enabling us to explore a vast array of emotions and experiences that we might not encounter in our everyday lives. By doing so, we can appreciate complex narratives and events that, if they occurred in reality, may be too distressing to process.
Themes
FictionIdentityEmpathyExperiencePerspective
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a literature class to discuss the power of storytelling.
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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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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.
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