This is the talk of Paul Bloom:
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You laid out this wonderful case that humans are fundamentally essentialists. Do you have a sense of why? Why is the origin of things so deeply important to us?
In Paul Bloom's TED Talk, The Origins of Pleasure, Bloom delved into the question of why pleasure and pain are what they are. He began with discussing a painting that was forged and sold to Herman Göring, Hitler's second in command. When Göring found that his most prized painting was forged, his biographer said, "He looked for as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world."
Why, Bloom asked, do origins matter? Because we're focused on status? Bloom argues that it's because we're natural born essentialists -we believe that certain things are certain ways without fault. For example, studies show that wine in that is said to be expensive, no matter how cheap it may really be, is almost always experienced with more pleasure. Sex is affected by this also. Our ideas of how sexually attractive a person may be will change depending on their gender, relationship to us, etc.
Motives are also important, in both the fields of pleasure and pain. A three-year-old girl's artwork was being sold for thousands of dollars until people found out that her father was coaching her. The art didn't change, simply the way it was made changed. In a study about pain, students who didn't know that the person causing the pain knew he was causing pain experienced less pain than students who knew that the perpetrator knew what the consequences of his actions were.
Bloom ended his talk with a John Milton quote that I think summed up his video perfectly. "The mind itself is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
