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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @11:11PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @11:11PM (#898314)

    Unless those stories involve steely-eyed muscular men with white hats shooting other steely-eyed muscular men with black hats, it is a complete waste of my time.

    The story of your life, just wasted time.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 25 2019, @02:10AM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 25 2019, @02:10AM (#898368) Journal

    The story of your life, just wasted time.

    If you don't know how to waste time, then you don't know how to live.

    • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Wednesday September 25 2019, @07:04AM (1 child)

      by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday September 25 2019, @07:04AM (#898408) Journal

      Yeah, but wasting a whole life on the fiction of libertarian fantasy economic theory! Oh, what a waist! No, really, khallow: what a waist.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 28 2019, @03:23AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 28 2019, @03:23AM (#899803) Journal

        Yeah, but wasting a whole life on the fiction of libertarian fantasy economic theory!

        Sounds like it's not my life that's getting wasted here. Good luck on that!