Probably should have included a smiley in my comment, but I do want to point out that it’s reasonable to model people (and animals and maybe rocks) as having highly variant and opaque “inner lives” that bear only a middling correlation to their observable behaviors, and especially to their public behaviors.
For the article on the woman who doesn’t experience pain, I have pretty high credence that there is some truth to her statements, but much lower credence that it maps as simply as presented to “natural stoicism” as presented in the article. And really no clue on “what it’s like” to live that experience, whether it’s less intense and interesting in all dimensions, or just mutes the worst of it, or is … alien.
And since I have no clue how to view or measure an inner life, I have even less understanding of how or whether to manipulate it. I strongly suspect we could make many people have an outer life (which includes talking about one’s inner life) more like the one given, with the right mix of drugs, genetic meddling, and repeated early reinforcement of expectations.
Probably should have included a smiley in my comment, but I do want to point out that it’s reasonable to model people (and animals and maybe rocks) as having highly variant and opaque “inner lives” that bear only a middling correlation to their observable behaviors, and especially to their public behaviors.
For the article on the woman who doesn’t experience pain, I have pretty high credence that there is some truth to her statements, but much lower credence that it maps as simply as presented to “natural stoicism” as presented in the article. And really no clue on “what it’s like” to live that experience, whether it’s less intense and interesting in all dimensions, or just mutes the worst of it, or is … alien.
And since I have no clue how to view or measure an inner life, I have even less understanding of how or whether to manipulate it. I strongly suspect we could make many people have an outer life (which includes talking about one’s inner life) more like the one given, with the right mix of drugs, genetic meddling, and repeated early reinforcement of expectations.
Agreed, basically. That’s part of why we need the theory!