The Summer Illusion (repost)
Aloha from Honolulu! I have vacation brain, so I'll do a summer-themed repost.
[Photo from the Bishop Museum malacology exhibit]
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Every spring I suffer the Summer Illusion. The following three incompatible propositions all seem to me, in the spring, to be true:
(1.) When summer arrives, I'll finally get a bunch of that research done which has been crowded out by my teaching and administrative commitments during the school year.
(2.) When summer arrives, I'll finally get a chance to do all of that non-academic stuff that I've been putting off during the school year -- big home maintenance projects, vacation travel to the four new places I want to visit, my plan to catch up on the whole history of golden-age science fiction.
(3.) When summer arrives, I'll finally have a chance to spend a lot more time just relaxing.
The Summer Illusion is surprisingly robust. Every spring, I suffer the Summer Illusion, building up big plans and hopes. Then, every summer, as those hopes fall apart, I scold my springtime self for having fallen, yet again, into the Summer Illusion. The pattern is so common and predictable I've given it a memorable name, The Summer Illusion, to help convince myself that it really is an illusion -- and hopefully not fall into it again. And yet I fall into it again.
You might think that the Summer Illusion depends on entertaining only one of the three propositions at a time. You might think that the way it works is that sometimes I entertain proposition 1 (I'll get my research done!), and at other, different times I entertain proposition 2 (I'll get all my other projects done!), and at still other times I entertain proposition 3 (I'll finally have lots of time to relax!). Largely this is so. And yet the Summer Illusion also survives simultaneous consideration of the three propositions. Even looking at the propositions side by side like this, I am tempted to believe them. Some part of me thinks of course all three can't be true, as I've seen time and time again -- and yet in my heart I continue to believe. Summer days expand so magnificently to fit my fantasies!
It's almost an inversion of busyness. If a period of time has the outward appearance of being a "relaxed", low-commitment period of time, it serves as a fantasy-and-procrastination magnet. I pile my future plans and hopes into that period of time, not noticing the impossibly mounting sum of expectations.
I am curious what you mean by ‘vacation brain’ because it seems familiar. When you go to vacation and stop engaging intellectually, you become dull and as soon as you start doing that again you can feel the sharpness coming in. I guess you are referring to this and I am curious if you have anything more to say about it.
> And yet the Summer Illusion also survives simultaneous consideration of the three propositions.
Yeah, I read The Intentional Stance in early 1991 --wrote a paper for my D.Phil at Sussex about it (I later that year moved to Birmingham). I think it's in that book that he talked about having contradictory beliefs, such as double-booking oneself for lunch. Dennett's broader point as I recall was not that people are perfectly rational, but rather that the intentional stance works because people are rational enough. When we predict someone's behavior by attributing beliefs and desires to them, we don't assume logical perfection. We assume a system whose beliefs are mostly coherent and whose actions generally make sense given those beliefs and desires.