August 27, 2006
On Pluto, planet or otherwise
This business of Pluto being “downgraded†from planet status provides an instructive look at the workings of the human animal, particularly when you consider the way people have reacted.
Pluto seems like a chunk of icy rock floating millions of miles away in space. No living human has been there or seems likely to in our lifetimes. Most people probably go through every day life with nary a thought for Pluto.
What we call it in no way changes what it is, out there in space.
What we call it only changes what it is in our heads.
(Of course, your head is in your head…)
Yet we argue about this, despite having little or no idea what a planet is, or why, beyond what we have been fed in the past 48 hours, or what we were told as children. (The astronomers in the audience probably excepted.)
We argue because we fall in love with our maps and models of reality. Those who have grown up thinking “There are 9 planets, Pluto is a planetâ€, want to keep that map. Gurdjieff calls this process identification. We become identified with our ideas about reality, and lose our ability to experience that reality. Robert Anton Wilson, following Korzybski, frames it as the tyranny of Aristitolean either/or logic; something either “is” or “is not” X, not allowing for any other possibility.
To see what I mean, surf some of the reactions.
If you yourself have exercised an opinion on this matter, ask yourself what you missed while doing so, and what else you could have used that time and energy to achieve. Then become aware this sort of thing is going on all the time. It does not matter a damn what we classify a big chunk of rock millions of miles away from us as. The peculiarity of our concern, and the illusions we spend energy on, seem clearer in this instance than with more earthly affairs, where equally we argue about words and conceptions which do not change what is; the phenomena in themselves remain the same. For example, people being killed can go by many names, but their deaths remain whether we call them collateral damage, innocent civilians, human shields, or whatever words du jour used to veil reality. The only change is in our head, in our belief, and reaction to the phenomena.
Language can be filter and a veil. We forget the word points at the thing, thinking the word the real part. We need know nothing of the reality of the phenomena once we have a word in place to assuage us. We need to become conscious of our mental processes and their effects on our experience. We need to get beyond words, beyond representation itself, and into direct experience of what is, without preconception, filters or veils.
This ain’t so easy, even once you know.
———
Huh. As a nice parallel to this post, here is an anecdote about Korzybski, copied from the link above:
One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he suddenly interrupted the lesson in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. “Nice biscuit, don’t you think”, said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog’s head and the words “Dog Cookies”. The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. “You see, ladies and gentlemen”, Korzybski remarked, “I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.” Apparently his prank aimed to illustrate how human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality and reality itself.
Filed by billy at 2:43 pm under consciousness,language
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Well said.
Though I expended considerably more energy reading this post than I did when I heard that Pluto had been downgraded:
“Pluto’s no longer a planet.”
“It used to be a moon, then it was a planet, now it’s something else. Who cares?”
I was more interested in finding out what and where the other dwarf planets were than I was in the fact that Pluto had been downgraded to one.
I didn’t see that anywhere in the news coverage though. Anyone know?
Try this
“Dwarf” is such a sizeist word though.
I propose that from this moment on we refer to them either as “little planets” or as “planets of diminished size”.
“Spherically challenged”, perhaps?
Wouldn’t that mean they were egg-shaped or something?
Possibly. Maybe they’re ‘radially challenged’.
What about the gas giants? “Gas giant” sounds insulting…
“Astronomers in the audience probably excepted”
I fit that definition in a very amateur way, thank you. I have been aware of this debate for years now. I find it interesting that it has finally come to a conclusion of sorts.
If ‘gas giant’ is insulting, try ‘Hot blue supergiant’. Or ‘White dwarf’
Ok, I’ve finally got my thoughts together enough to comment on this properly (enough).
Like you, I think the reactions to the news about our classification of Pluto is interesting, but I think for a range of slightly different reasons.
Part of this difference comes down to some of your comments about language, that “we need to get beyond words… and into direct experience” and that “language can be a filter…” This idea, to me, sounds like, say, learning to see without eyes. Actually, it might sound exactly like that to you too, but I guess what I mean is that the transcendence of perception holds no interest for me, and I see it as something of a distraction, much as at the same level of distractions to understanding that we’re already talking about.
Okay, now that that little piece of perceptual methodology (WONK) is out of the way, let’s get to Pluto. The most common thing I’ve heard people say about the Pluto thing is how it goes against what they learnt, and it spoils the mnemonics they were taught for remembering the order of planets.
Anyone who’d actually complain that this change has spoiled the mnemonics isn’t talking about Pluto as a planet, but Pluto as an item in a list. I think this point can be extrapolated to the general issue about learning: if the news surprised a person, that person hadn’t learned about Pluto as much more than an item in a list. In this case, you can think of it as a set where the content of the set is only words: the knowledge that justified the inclusion of the items in the set in the first place has been voided from that set.
So I don’t think it’s a failure of the language we require to generate our knowledge of Pluto, rather a failure to connect that knowledge. You can know that Pluto is an item in a list, but to know *what it means* that Pluto is or is not a planet connects you to the knowledge that both led to the inclusion and exclusion of Pluto.
Knowledge is not static. I think that this is something that this issue has highlighted, along with people’s fear, disgust or discontent with that. There are people who want to have learnt that Pluto is a planet, that’s what we were taught, the end. But actually learning about Pluto being a planet meant learning what a planet was, and why Pluto was defined as a planet after its discovery – and learning that would mean learning that it was always possible that it might be redefined as something else. I learnt *all* that when I was five. Despite my tortuous explication of this, I don’t consider the knowledge I am talking about to be difficult itself. Knowledge is not static. Knowledge has history.
I totally agree with this:
“What we call it in no way changes what it is, out there in space.// What we call it only changes what it is in our heads.// (Of course, your head is in your head…)”
And because I think the issue is about what’s in our heads, as far as it goes, I think the Pluto thing has highlighted issues about epistemology, not ontology. I guess that’s what I’ve just been trying to describe. It shows (to me) that how people think about knowledge isn’t necessarily how knowledge behaves.
NB: I’d really recommend John Searle’s “The Construction of Social Reality”, which is available at the Wellington Public Library (central), if I haven’t already. I probably have.
Whew. Awesome comment. I will cogitate on this. Meantime, I’d recommend you check out David Bohm’s “Thought as a system” for, among other things, a really fascinating discussion of the murky meshing of epistemology and ontology.
(And yeah, don’t recall you recommending it, but I think I skimmed most of Searle a few years back…)
Andrew: I think this matter can be considered through the lens of epistemology or ontology. However, I regard ontology as primary/fundamental. Epistemology requires at least Knower and a Known – their ontological status is a prerequisite to epistemological questions, some ontological stance implicitly having to be taken before questions of knowledge can be asked.
It seems a nice analog with the difference between Russell and Wittgenstein you posted on off-black; epistemology speaking clearly with less certainty, ontology speaking of certainty with less clarity.
Maybe getting sidetracked here, but is this a matter of taste between clarity possibly based on illusion, or certainty based on inexpressible truth…? (My take here is heavily informed by my attitudes to the limits of language and all symbol systems and the nature of belief… and while I increasingly admire Taoist kinds of paradoxes and sayings, I can remember a time when they seemed frustrating as hell…)
Again, I would really recommend the Bohm. Wellington library has it, dunno about Auckland.
“Knowledge is not static. Knowledge has history.”
I love this whole post.
It makes me think about things like how history is not something that happened in the past, it is something that is continually changing: partly because as we gather new information our understanding of past events changes; partly because as our context changes we view the same information through different lenses; and partly because no event every truly ends. (There are two other reasons, but I forget them.)
It makes me think of Victorian physics and the ether, and the kerfluffle there must have been when they realised the ether as they thought of it doesn’t exist.
It makes me think of The Shining by J. Dilla.
It makes me think of that great quote from Zappa, which both Billy and Morgue claimed was stupid and nonsensical:
Information is not knowledge;
Knowledge is not wisdom;
Wisdom is not beauty;
Beauty is not truth;
Truth is not love;
Love is not music;
Music is THE BEST.
In this case, for me, “information” is Pluto on a list of planets with the “Mother very easily…” mnemonic; “knowledge” is understanding why Pluto was considered a planet and why it now is not; “wisdom” is refelecting on this and extrapolating on the nature of information and knowledge; “beauty” is the acceptance of this; “truth” is the objective viewpoint that forever escapes our subjective existences; “love” is when a boy loves his dog (in this case, Mickey Mouse loves Pluto); and “music” is The Shining by J. Dilla.
Pearce: If this blog prompts thought then it has achieved most of what it can.
The Day The Universe Changed by James Burke is a really wonderful coverage of the history of changes in knowledge and worldview. Gpod has a downloadable audiobook of it, too.
I have no recollection of the Zappa quote, but I think your analysis of it is about the most intelligent thing you’ve ever said
Auckland Uni has a couple of copies of the Bohm, among a range of his stuff.
The Bohm. He he he
Admin: As I remember it, you & Morgue both claimed that there was no appreciable difference between “information”, “knowledge”, and “wisdom”. This was when you were both doing Psych honours.
I remember it because at the time I was quite sick of being told “You’re wrong, and you don’t have the background to understand why you’re wrong.”