In Awe of Wonder

Sunday, December 3, 2023

What Is It

Descartes said that the purpose of wonderment is “to enable us to learn and retain in our memory things of which we were formerly unaware.” He also said that those who are not inclined to wonder are “ordinarily very ignorant.” So what exactly is wonder, and how is it different from awe? Is wonder at the core of what drives us to search for novel insights? And can we suffer from an excess of wonderment? Josh and Ray stand in awe of Helen De Cruz from St. Louis University, author of Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think (forthcoming).

Transcript

Transcript

Josh Landy  
Where does our sense of wonder come from?

Ray Briggs  
Does wonder have a purpose, or is it gloriously useless?

Josh Landy  
How can we pay more attention to marvelous things?

Comments (3)


Harold G. Neuman's picture

Harold G. Neuman

Thursday, November 30, 2023 -- 12:38 PM

I wonder. Should I be

I wonder. Should I be awestruck, or should I stand in awe of wonderment.? The Valley of Wonderment is one of seven mentioned in writings of the Baha'i faith. These are, it seems to me, abstractions. What someone finds awesome, or, awe-full may only be wonderful to someone else. Which is the deeper sense, or, is there one, or, does it matter? I never truly pondered over the Seven Valleys all that much. They seemed a charming abstraction---a means or pathway to discovery of peace and serenity.. I drifted away from the path for a variety of reasons, unconnected with my support of the fundamental tenants of the faith.. Hope the show clarifies some things for you.. I am puzzling over whether AI can *see*. Some say it can/does/will. *seeing* is a fundamental concept, if we don't abuse it...

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Harold G. Neuman's picture

Harold G. Neuman

Monday, December 11, 2023 -- 8:33 AM

Just a couple of remarks.

Just a couple of remarks. There was something about awesome in another entry. It puzzled me when I read about fear and dread. In a very many years I never heard those words connected to things described as awesome. Or, glorious. Or inspiring. So, I don't know where that negative comes from. I wonder if anyone else was confused? Is there some other contextual reality, from which I have been sheltered all my life? And, if so, where did that originate?

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Daniel's picture

Daniel

Wednesday, December 13, 2023 -- 5:52 PM

It originated from an area of

It originated extra-contextually. Reality defined by its context, e.g. "real gold" by economic arrangements or "real cold" by bodily warmth and temperature, makes a claim of status-designation the intelligibility for which requires standardized rules for the interpretation of diverse cases. In this, separate domains for the anticipation of object-kinds are established by and for each individual context. --Am I following you so far? This implies that the idea of the sum of objects to be understood precedes the members of which it stands to be composed. The question then is does it have to be? Couldn't one keep the context without having to anticipate what it stands to be of? The answer seems to be-- only if one has the time. Now since Time understood as limited and measurable by a biological clock furnishes a stable metaphysical context for an understanding of human life, one could make the claim that Death (understood as the outer boundary of duration of the biological individual) provides the fundamental context for, using your terminology, the/a Reality of Life.

Because the understanding of the limit (= finitude context) generates grounds-legitimacy of decisions for shorter paths over longer or more meandering ones, the answer to the question of whether or not one can dispense with object-kind anticipation for domains set out by context-categories, endangering steadfast bias-preclusion, is apparently issued in the negation. Yet such anticipatory bias exhibits a special care for what kinds of objects one expects to find. As some objects are chosen rather than found, context-based bias has on its flipside liberal-based context. And because the concept of freedom implies individual responsibility for chosen results, the context of this particular concept frequently inspires the fear and dread spoken of above, since responsibility for one's own freedom is characteristically underdetermined by its exercise. So if the context of human freedom is provided by its limited duration in each case, and yet responsibility for one's own is frequently dreaded because of the awesomeness of its scope, is there an escape hatch for the limited being which offers a way out of obligations the heaviness of which is feared? Is there a limitless duration beside the limited one wherein the grounds for summary deliberateness are not needed? Wouldn't that be what we call "Time" in the ordinary, linear sense? Does linear time, understood as infinitely continuous, constitute the first and most available shelter for the forgetfulness of limited time? If so, some fashion of wonder seems not an inappropriate response.

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