Loving Subjects
Recently, I came across someone asking, “why do kids love dinosaurs?” www.philosophersplayground.blogspot.com
Of course, questions dripping with presupposition anger me. Do kids really love dinosaurs? I am sure plenty of kids have no interest in them. Also, lots of adults have interest in dinosaurs as well. Is the percentage of adults lower than kids? What are the data? Kids have interest in sports, robots, guns, fire, TV, dolls, video games, horses, knights, cowboys, Legos, the military, space ships, planes, bikes, pirates, aliens, pools, tree houses, throwing rocks, whipping sticks through the air and million other things. Where in the ranking do dinosaurs make it? Are kids really choosing to be interested in dinosaurs or do school, toy companies and entertainment push it on them? Do kids really love them or do we just perceive that they like them because we gave them a bunch of toys and took them to the museum? Is it more pleasant to think about children’s love for dinosaurs versus their love of Indian burns?
In my opinion, a more abstract question must be asked first. Why do people love subjects? We like things that are interesting and our interests define what we like. It is circular reasoning at its purest. It’s equivalent to Beavis and Butthead’s claim that they “like stuff that rules.”
Interest in a subject, at its root, seems to be more about avoiding boredom. Boredom comes from tedium and from non-recognition. Cognitive psychologists commonly do experiments with babies involving their attention span. Say, you want to know when a baby can separate the sound “ta” from “da”. One starts by repeating “ta”. At first, the baby is interested and then it bores and looks away. Now, one says “da.” If the baby regains interest, one knows the baby can recognize the new sound. If the baby remains bored, one know she cannot recognize the new sound.
One can do this same experiment with adult human beings. Repeat the same information over and over again and they will get bored. Enter new familiar information and they will be interested. Enter information that they cannot recognize (it is unrelated to their lives) and they will be bored.
Why do people love subjects? Because they have some knowledge of it and have the ability to absorb new information on it. In a pursuit of not being bored, their knowledge of something grows and grows by adding new familiar information. A schema in their mind grows like a snowball rolling downhill. The most boring things are things we know everything about and nothing about; merely “something” gives rise to fascination.
Why do kids love dinosaurs? If a kid does love a dinosaur, it can be assumed that someone introduced dinosaurs to him or her and allowed him to pursue knowledge on them. This first introduced knowledge allowed future knowledge to be unboring, making more and more dinosaur knowledge unboring.
In this question of chicken and egg, though, one must assume that society placed it on the child, in way or another, and not the other way around. Kids don’t love dinosaurs from nothing and people don’t love subjects from nothing. Society makes them interested by introducing a seed of knowledge in the first place.
Of course, questions dripping with presupposition anger me. Do kids really love dinosaurs? I am sure plenty of kids have no interest in them. Also, lots of adults have interest in dinosaurs as well. Is the percentage of adults lower than kids? What are the data? Kids have interest in sports, robots, guns, fire, TV, dolls, video games, horses, knights, cowboys, Legos, the military, space ships, planes, bikes, pirates, aliens, pools, tree houses, throwing rocks, whipping sticks through the air and million other things. Where in the ranking do dinosaurs make it? Are kids really choosing to be interested in dinosaurs or do school, toy companies and entertainment push it on them? Do kids really love them or do we just perceive that they like them because we gave them a bunch of toys and took them to the museum? Is it more pleasant to think about children’s love for dinosaurs versus their love of Indian burns?
In my opinion, a more abstract question must be asked first. Why do people love subjects? We like things that are interesting and our interests define what we like. It is circular reasoning at its purest. It’s equivalent to Beavis and Butthead’s claim that they “like stuff that rules.”
Interest in a subject, at its root, seems to be more about avoiding boredom. Boredom comes from tedium and from non-recognition. Cognitive psychologists commonly do experiments with babies involving their attention span. Say, you want to know when a baby can separate the sound “ta” from “da”. One starts by repeating “ta”. At first, the baby is interested and then it bores and looks away. Now, one says “da.” If the baby regains interest, one knows the baby can recognize the new sound. If the baby remains bored, one know she cannot recognize the new sound.
One can do this same experiment with adult human beings. Repeat the same information over and over again and they will get bored. Enter new familiar information and they will be interested. Enter information that they cannot recognize (it is unrelated to their lives) and they will be bored.
Why do people love subjects? Because they have some knowledge of it and have the ability to absorb new information on it. In a pursuit of not being bored, their knowledge of something grows and grows by adding new familiar information. A schema in their mind grows like a snowball rolling downhill. The most boring things are things we know everything about and nothing about; merely “something” gives rise to fascination.
Why do kids love dinosaurs? If a kid does love a dinosaur, it can be assumed that someone introduced dinosaurs to him or her and allowed him to pursue knowledge on them. This first introduced knowledge allowed future knowledge to be unboring, making more and more dinosaur knowledge unboring.
In this question of chicken and egg, though, one must assume that society placed it on the child, in way or another, and not the other way around. Kids don’t love dinosaurs from nothing and people don’t love subjects from nothing. Society makes them interested by introducing a seed of knowledge in the first place.
posted by American Dilettante at
3:16 PM
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