Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [191]
CHAPTER 12 HEARTBREAK
Unless otherwise noted, the quotes from Raoul Felder, Irna Gadd, and Harville Hendrix are from my interviews with them.
Pity poor Charles Swann. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, Lydia Davis, trans., Charles Prendergast, ed. (Viking, 2002).
“always prepared to believe what he hoped for.” Proust, 32.
“To think that I wasted years of my life.” Proust, 396.
“hybrids of plants and of ghosts.” I first came across this quotation in Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Harvest Books, 2000), 143.
(as Locke argued). See Chapter One of this book, p. 22, and Keeler, 214–221.
we can make inferences about other people’s internal states based on familiarity with our own. Taken to an extreme—that is, to the claim that this is the only way we make sense of other people’s minds—this idea is known as simulation theory. Like theory of mind, simulation theory attempts to explain how we understand each other, but the explanation it proposes is markedly different: rather than claiming that we make use of “naïve psychology”—a theory of how other people’s minds work—in order to understand one another, simulation theory claims that we simply draw conclusions about other minds based on the workings of our own. This theory has recently gotten some support from neuroscience, with the discovery of “mirror neurons”: nerve cells in the brain that fire both when, say, you perform an action yourself and when you see someone else perform it; or when you either experience a given emotion directly (for example, fear or disgust), or witness someone else experiencing it. In highlighting the utility of extrapolation, I am not trying to make a strong claim for simulation theory, partly because I’m not convinced by it but mainly because I am not qualified to weigh in. For an explanation of simulation theory and an argument against it by someone who is qualified to weigh in (and for an argument that is predicated, interestingly, on the kinds of mistakes people make about each other), see Rebecca Saxe, “Against Simulation: The Argument from Error,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 4 (April 2005): 174–179.
“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, David J. Chalmers, ed. (Oxford University Press, 2002), 219–226.
“a fundamentally alien form of life.” Nagel, 220. The “what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves” line appears on the same page.
a study conducted by Emily Pronin. Pronin et al., 2001. The word-completion chart (“Table 2” in the original paper) appears on p. 649.
J. M. Coetzee. Coetzee’s interest in Robinson Crusoe is clear; he wrote a short novel called Foe, about the fate of a second, female castaway on Crusoe’s island and her subsequent relationship with Daniel Defoe (born Daniel Foe), and he spoke about Crusoe in his 2003 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But I have not been able to verify this particular remark.
hoping to keep the wolves at bay. Kierkegaard’s comment is cited in May, 72.
What happens in Plato’s Symposium. Plato, The Symposium, Walter Hamilton, trans. (Penguin Classics, 1967).
“desire and pursuit of the whole.” Plato, The Symposium, 64.
“whatever our souls are made of.” Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Oxford University Press, 2008), 71.
“two hearts living in just one mind.” The song is called “Two Hearts.” Written and produced by Collins and Lamont Dozier, it won a Golden Globe for best original song and was the #1 song on the “U.S. Hot 100” list for two weeks. The line quoted a few paragraphs below is from the same song.
Let me not to the marriage