The baby and the bathwater...

[fajrdrako]

If the temperature in the bathtub is raised only one degree every ten minutes, how does the bather know when to start screaming? - Marshall McLuhan, 1911 - 1980

When it starts to hurt, of course. This is one of those statements which - it seems to me - confuses the theory of an event with the experience of an event. We don't scream because water burns us at a certain temperature, we scream because it hurts. Doesn't matter what the temperature is. Pain is pain.

Reality does not depend on our knowledge or understanding of it.

Comments

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I think you would realize that your skin was burning as soon as it actually started to get too hot to be comfortable. I see what you're saying - but a burn is a burn, a point at which the nerves can no longer stand the heat. Boil water slowly, or boil it fast, the effect will be the same.

Admittedly, you can acclimatize yourself to hot water by increasing the temperature slowly. But I don't believe this means I could tolerate hotter temperatures.

It's not something I am willing to experiment with to check out, however!

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

I too think so.

Another factor is that the hot water is *itself* cooling off. So the hot water temperature at the start of a shower is *much* hotter than that same source by the end of a (long enough) shower.

I think Marshall McLuhan was trying to express a conundrum or paradox in that saying. It only exists because the language supports it, but it isn't truly logical (and probably will not translate to other languages either).

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I think Marshall McLuhan was trying to express a conundrum or paradox in that saying.

I think so. And the specific example is false. I'm not sure if the generality of the statement is true - in fact, I'm arguing that it's false in general: that if, say, you decrease light so slowly that you can't notice the change from minute to minute or hour to hour - you may not notice at first that it's getting darker, but as soon as there is not enough light to see by, you will be well aware of it.

In other words, slowing the speed of something may change the rate of our perceptions of it (as it should), but it doesn't change the nature of our senses.