Paul Bloom Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

“One way to make a baby cry is to expose it to cries of other babies. There's sort of contagiousness to the crying. It's not just crying. We also know that if a baby sees another human in silent pain, it will distress the baby. It seems part of our very nature is to suffer at the suffering of others.”

“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.”

“Families survive the Terrible Twos because toddlers aren't strong enough to kill with their hands and aren't capable of using lethal weapons. A 2-year-old with the physical capacities of an adult would be terrifying.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I don't doubt that the explanation for consciousness will arise from the mercilessly scientific account of psychology and neuroscience, but, still, isn't it neat that the universe is such that it gave rise to conscious beings like you and me?”

“I have my own difficulty with movies in which the suffering of the characters is too real, and many find it difficult to watch comedies that rely too heavily on embarrassment; the vicarious reaction to this is too unpleasant.”

“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.”

“If Inigo Montoya were around now, he wouldn't need to storm the castle to bring his father's murderer to justice; the police would do it for him, and fewer people would have to die.”

“In politics and in society, we can use our reason to rise above our parochial natures. Too bad that our elected officials don't choose to do so more often.”