飞机能带多少液体:《生猛的快感心理学》第七章：痛苦与安全感

第七章、痛苦与安全感

      Would you enjoy watching a movie of head surgery being performedon a young girl, starting with her face pulled away from her skull? I doubt it. When the psychologist  Jonathan                      Haidt        and      his    colleagues          showed   this   movie   to undergraduates, they rated it as disturbing and disgusting, and few watched it until the end. A film of a monkey being beaten unconscious and its brain scooped out andserved on plates got the same reaction.316 

　　请你看部电影吧，演的是给少女做开颅手术，第一个镜头就是把她的脸皮从头盖骨上扒下来……你会觉得好看吗？我想恐怕不至于。心理学家乔纳森·海特（Jonathan Haidt）与他的同事曾把这部电影放给一群本科生看，学生们纷纷评价此片令人“反感”、“反胃”，且鲜有人能坚持把片子看完。他们还实验了另一部电影，演的是把一只猴子活生生打晕，然后舀出生鲜猴脑，装盘上桌……观众反馈也是大同小异。【316】

The previous chapter explored a simple theory of imaginative pleasure: Our   minds are partially indifferent to whether an experience is real. If you would be arousedwatching real sex, you can be aroused watching actors have sex; if you are  interested in love and betrayal, you would be  interesting in a novel thatdescribes love and betrayal. The pleasures of the imagination are parasiticon the pleasuresofreal life. 

　　上一章，我们探讨了一个简单的理论：想象快感。也就是说，我们的思维并不介意某个体验是否真实：如果观看真实的性爱能唤起你的情欲，那么欣赏演员表演的性爱一样可以激发你的“性”趣；如果你对真实世界的爱恨情仇感兴趣，那么描写此类情节的小说自然也会合你口味。所以说，想象的快感寄生依附于真实生活的快感之上。

This can’t be a complete theory, however.Sometimes what is terrible or boring or depressing in  reality  is intensely enjoyablein imagination. We enjoy fictions that make us cry, haunt our dreams, and gross  us out. We do things invirtual worlds that would shock us in the real one, and our daydreamsare not always pleasant ones; even happy people obsess on their worst fears. Here I try to explain why.     

　　然而这并不是一个完备的理论。譬如有时候现实生活中令人感到恐怖、无聊、压抑或沉闷的东西，在想象的世界里却能给人带来极大的欢愉。小说可能令我们落泪、翻胃、夜不能寐，但我们照读不误；在虚拟世界里我们经常胆大妄为，可这些事一旦放到现实世界中来，恐怕我们连想都不敢想。我们的白日梦并不一定都是黄粱美梦；即便是最乐天的人，也会纠结于内心深处最阴暗的梦魇。这都是为什么呢？我现在就准备来分析一下。

THE BEST STORIES       

　　最棒的故事

Insofar as stories are surrogates for real events, the best are those where we forget they are stories.  Many  writers aspire toward this. Elmore Leonard warns story-tellers to avoid  hooptedoodle—anything  that calls  attention toward  the       writer and away from the story.317Richard Wright wrote that he wanted to “fasten the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only ofhisresponse.”318 

　　所有的故事都是真实事件的化身，就此而言，最棒的故事一定引人入胜，让人忘了是在听故事——这也是众多作家梦寐以求的境界。爱尔默·伦纳德（Elmore Leonard）就曾告诫人们讲故事的时候千万不要“胡贫嘚吧嘚”——就是说千万不要把听众的注意力从故事本身转移到讲故事的人身上。【317】理查德·怀特也曾写到他想要“把读者牢牢锁进字里行间，使其完全忘掉文字的存在，从而仅仅意识到自身对文字的反应。”【318】

Reading requires effort by the reader; it is easier to lose oneself in a movie. There are those who cringe in their seats during horror movies, peeking through fingers, and there is the old story of early filmgoers who screamed and dove for cover when the gun on the screen turned towards them and fired. A movie is the closest we have to virtual reality, and, as the philosopher Colin McGinn has stressed, it is experienced best on the  big screen.319  You lose the force of the experience  on a small  television  set, or, worse, in the  corner of  a computer display,nextto email and the webbrowser. 

　　阅读需要读者主动努力参与；而看电影则更容易被动忘我投入。所以有人看恐怖片吓得缩成一团，只敢从指缝里偷偷看。还有一桩关于电影的老生常谈，就是传说早期电影观众看到荧幕上有人拔枪对镜头开火，竟然吓得尖叫卧倒找掩护。电影是我们这个世界最接近虚拟现实的体验，而且正如哲学家科林·麦金（Colin McGinn）所强调：大荧幕能带给人最佳体验。【319】小小的电视机屏幕缺乏体验的力度；特别是如果你在电脑上看电影，播放器只开个小窗口，边看还边上上网、写写电子邮件什么的，那就更没劲了。

Technology mightultimately bring us to the point where the only difference between reality and fiction  is going to be our explicit knowledge of which is which. Perhaps one day we can do away even with this  explicit knowledge.People might pay for a virtual experience in which, like a dream, is thought to berealwhile they are having it. Maybe this is what’s happening to you right now. René Descartes worried that all of his experiences are sham, that he was being deceived by an evil demon. Perhaps we are brains in a vat, or living in the Matrix. The  philosopher  Robert Nozick turns  this worry  into a pleasure technology, imagining a virtual-reality machine t

　　科技不断发展，最终有一天现实与虚境将难分难解，那时我们只能依靠显性知识才能分清孰真孰假。或许有一天我们甚至连显性知识都会彻底抛弃，那时人类将会花钱购买虚拟体验，体验梦一般的虚拟现实，一面体验、一面认为那就是真实的生活。你现在的生活说不定就是虚拟的呢！笛卡尔就曾忧心忡忡地怀疑自己被一个邪恶的魔鬼欺骗了，认为自己所有的体验都是虚假的。我们或许只是一颗颗所谓“缸中之脑”，又或许真的只是生活在《黑客帝国》那样的矩阵世界里。而哲学家罗伯特·诺齐克就将这种忧虑转化为了一种快感技术，设想了一种虚境—现实机器……