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SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday September 24 2019, @06:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the is-that-right? dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday September 24 2019, @09:14AM (1 child)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday September 24 2019, @09:14AM (#898042) Journal

    So, magister, what have you done with your empathy?

      Oh, my dear c0lo, do not be so hard on me! The fall term has just begun, so I have not only to deal with the mentally challenged on SoylentNews! But, of course, this is the main point, many here are entrapped in fantasias. Take khallow, please, for example. For many years we have been trying to edumacate him, to no avail. And the Runaway, who is an old dog who forgot how to lick his own. . . But you see, it is not a matter of empathy, on the larger scale. It is how these idiots can infect the larger populace, sort of like how Trump saying blatant lies and incoherent word-salad seems to validate Republican talking points, even though they are still completely insane.

    So, in response, I have empathy for these idiots. I am sorry that they are so incapable of rational thought. But a part of their therapy is publicity. If only their attention span allowed them to realize that they are wrong. This is what makes me feel bad.

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 24 2019, @11:44AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 24 2019, @11:44AM (#898055) Journal

    Take khallow, please, for example.

    Oh no-no-no-no-no. In spite of the respect and all the other positive feeling I have for you, magister, and no matter how much you'd plead for it, it's not gonna happen.
    I could consider him; or use a long pole to prod him; at best, I might even deign to troll him.
    But, for the life of me, I'm definitely not going to take him. Not for example nor for indeed anything else at all.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford