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Stories, fiction included, act as a kind of surrogate life. You can learn from them so seamlessly that you might believe you knew something—about ancient Greece, say—before having gleaned it from Mary Renault's novel The Last of the Wine. You'll also retain false information even if you didn't mean to. That seems like a liability: Philosophers have long concerned themselves with what they call "the paradox of fiction"—why would we find imagined stories emotionally arousing at all? The answer is that most of our mind does not even realize that fiction is fiction, so we react to it almost as though it were real.
At the same time, very young children "can rationally deal with the make-believe aspects of stories," distinguishing the actual, the possible, and the fantastical with sophistication, as Denis Dutton has written in The Art Instinct. "Not only does the artistic structure of stories speak to Darwinian sources: so does the intense pleasure taken in their universal themes of love, death, adventure, family conflict, justice, and overcoming adversity." That may help explain why, when stories are done well, we love them so much. Just as artificial sweeteners fool our minds into thinking we're eating sugar, stories—even weird ones like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—take advantage of our natural tendency to want to learn about real people, and how to treat them.
Our brains can't help but believe.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @08:15AM (2 children)
Wow, if you keep this up you'll earn yourself a whole *box* of Oreos!
Good show!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by aristarchus on Tuesday September 24 2019, @09:02AM (1 child)
Not before another AC bites the dust. What is your name, AC? What Unit did you serve with? What were the dates of your deployment? You see, actual vets can ferret out "stolen valor" guys (and gals) like Runaway1956 with only a few questions. You willing to go up against that, the collective knowledge of all Solentil Veterans? Possibly including janrinok? Back down now, to save your face. Otherwise, we may have blow it off you. And if you are at all acquainted with war in the age of the Internets, you know of which I refer to. If not, a whole box of "inside-out Oreos" are what you become. Until we can ship your ass to your ancestral homeland of Alsace-Lorraine, where you are either French, or German, but in any case not fricking white.
Maybe we need an actual group of Soylentil vets, not just Americans, of course. Che? Alguinaldo? Crazy Horse. John Kerry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @10:49PM
What does reading fiction have to do with serving in the US armed forces?