More on the elephant

[avevale_intelligencer]

Of course, the people who believe in the elephant aren't entirely blameless, because they often can't seem to leave it at that.

There are those who stoutly maintain that the elephant-shaped building is in fact a real live elephant, that the room in which they are is actually the elephant's stomach, and that everyone *must* believe all this in order to become part of the elephant when they die and not get squeezed out as elephant poo. The fact that the room is firmly established by observation and testing as an ordinary room, with a nice tiled floor and plaster walls and a door and everything, they either ignore or put down to the mysterious powers of the elephant. There are others who are just as insistent on a rather more rarefied belief, that the building, the real live elephant, and the hologram that sighted people can see are somehow three separate things but the same thing at the same time. There are those who see the hologram of the building, and draw up their own highly detailed conjectural maps of the interior, including the location of the room, and disagree violently with each other when their maps conflict. Some insist that it's actually a rhinoceros, or an antelope, or two men in an elephant costume.

And everyone has their own ideas on how other people should behave, which they handily ascribe to the will of the elephant when anyone asks why. And the ones who do not believe are eager to take all these extraneous beliefs and their unfortunate consequences, and use them to "prove" that there is no elephant. Some of them even go so far as to say that there are no sighted people, because if there were they would not see an elephant, because there is no elephant. It's a mess.

But none of that has any bearing on the question of whether or not there is an elephant. The elephant, or the building, certainly doesn't care one way or another about all the blood and the anger and the trouble we make for ourselves. There's no reason why it should.

Does anyone need to believe in the elephant? If they see it, then I would say it's not a question of belief for them, or of need. If it's there, but they don't see it, then I would say it's up to them, but they should know that they are ignoring something that is there simply because they haven't the requisite sense to perceive it, and that calling those who do see it liars or dupes is perhaps uncalled for. If they don't know if it's there or not, don't trust the people on either side enough to believe them, and say so, then that is their choice and certainly has the virtue of honesty, though I wouldn't say it was a principle worth fighting for.

Would we be better off simply to take the path of least resistance and believe there is no elephant even if there is? Well, the ones who can see it certainly wouldn't, because they would then have to believe that their senses were playing tricks on them. For the rest of us, life might be easier in some ways, because we would argue and fight and kill each other about other things...but there would still be an elephant, and it might become important to us at any time to acknowledge it.

Comments

[jahura.livejournal.com]

You are tempting me to ask a very loaded question.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Ask away.

[jahura.livejournal.com]

Okay...

Let's say now someone brings in an animal on a leash and hands that leash to the nearest blind man. He tells the man this is the offspring of the elephant, and that he has ten seconds to make his tactile assessment before passing it on to the next man. The animal is passed around the room, felt, petted, yanked, probed, etc by all but the one feeling the walls and ceiling with the stepladder. Then the man who brought the animal in takes the lead from them and quietly leaves the room. One man says yes, that's an elephant, they have the same pachydermous texture to them. One of them says are you daft, that was a shaved dog. The third says while it's possible that may be the offspring of the elephant there's not enough data to support the fact that it's actually an elephant much less related to an elephant. The fourth says just because it was on a leash and moved and was warm did not make it an animal but it doesn't really matter. The fifth says I don't care what you fellows say, that was a bleeding baby elephant. The sixth man who was feeling the walls and ceiling who missed out declares the rest of them fit for the asylum. Who is right?

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

That is indeed a good question, and I don't know the answer, any more than I do to any of the questions I put in the last post. :)

[jahura.livejournal.com]

Absoutely no one does. That's why it's a loaded question. We are all as blind as the six men in the room in this regard.

[batyatoon]

The elephant, or the building, certainly doesn't care one way or another about all the blood and the anger and the trouble we make for ourselves. There's no reason why it should.

Really? No reason why it should?

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Not if it's an elephant, or a building. Perhaps what I should have said was that it doesn't feel *threatened* by any of our arguments and wars.

[batyatoon]

Well, if people have ideas as to how other people (and they themselves, presumably) should behave and ascribe it to the will of the elephant, the question of whether the elephant cares what people do becomes a massively significant one.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

But why is it significant to the elephant (or building)? OK, if the people in its stomach (room) gave it indigestion with their fighting then perhaps it might care (and respond by throwing them all out), but otherwise I see no reason why it would be interested. I don't care whether the bacteria in my gut believe in me or not, nor whether they ascribe their wars on each other to me or to ancestral hatreds ("Your mother was an E.Coli!" "Your mother had cilia!"), all I care is that if I get a stomach ache I'll pour some antibiotics down and get rid of them.

[batyatoon]

There's any number of speculative reasons why the elephant might care what people do. Maybe it likes people and feels a sort of responsibility for their well-being. Maybe it's working on a form of art for which we have no referent. Maybe it's conducting a sociological experiment.

But to assume it doesn't care is to presuppose that every single person who thinks he knows what the elephant wants people to do is wrong -- because the elephant doesn't actually want people to do anything, for any reason at all.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

One can speculate why the elephant might care. I assume it doesn't because (as it turns out) every book that purports to tell me what the elephant wants us to do has been written not by the elephant, but by a bunch of people. Which makes it hard to offer it to the anti-elephantines as proof of the existence or desires of the elephant, or indeed of anything. From this one can deduce that if the elephant had any preferences for how we were to conduct ourselves, it would find an unmistakable way of saying so. (Did someone say something about two boats and a helicopter? or was that two Testaments and an Apocrypha?)

It may be that some of the people who write the books are sighted, and can see the hologram. It may be that they can tell what it wants us to do by watching its expression. But the only reason we have for believing that is that they say so, and that doesn't carry an awful lot of weight unless you want it to.