Words&Dirt

“‘Why are we fighting the buggers?’

‘I’ve heard all kinds of reasons,’ said Graff.  ‘Because they have an overcrowded system and they’ve got to colonize.  Because they can’t stand the thought of other intelligent life in the universe.  Because they don’t think we are intelligent life.  Because they have some weird religion.  Because they watched our old video broadcasts and decided we were hopelessly violent.  All kinds of reasons.’

‘What do you believe?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I believe.’

‘I want to know anyway.’

‘They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind.  What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also remember.  Why would they ever develop language?  Why would they ever learn to read and write?  How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them?  Or signals?  Or numbers?  Or anything that we use to communicate?  This isn’t just a matter of translating from one language to another.  They don’t have any language at all.  We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling.  And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.’

‘So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.’

‘If the other fellow can’t tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you.'”

––Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, pg. 252-3

“Given all the disconcerting things we have learned about how the brain largely works to rationalize our views of the world––in both its pathological and standard modes––was Aristotle wrong in thinking that the distinctive characteristic of humanity is rationality?  Not exactly.  The Greek philosopher was also one of the early students of human psychology, and he was very much aware of the constant failings of the human mind.  What he meant was that human beings, as far as we know, are the only animals capable of rational thinking, despite the fact that it doesn’t come easy.  That is why it is crucial to be aware of the many pitfalls of human reasoning, which we have begun to look at in this chapter and which, as we will see, affect even the quintessential application of reason to our understanding of the world: science itself.  Only through this awareness and constant vigilance can we hope to improve our ability to make reasonable decisions, both large and small, about everything that affects our lives.  Think of it as training your brain the same way you train your muscles at the gym: both efforts achieve better results the more we take advantage of the best knowledge available about how they work.”

––Answers for Aristotle, by Massimo Pigliucci, pg. 89-90