[not yet well thought-out]
Story-Telling is fundamental to learning / understanding / investigating:
- Hypothesis formation
- Experimentation / Exploration / Categorization (Apples & Oranges!)
- Another way of explaining the world (along with religion and science)
Story-Telling is fundamental to communication / socialization / culture / civilization:
- The entire point of communication and language
- The one indispensible pre-requisite of society
- Perhaps the requirement for acceptance by others (cf. Rorty)
Story-Telling is fundamental to cognition:
- Categorization (A&O!)
- Stories are generated so easily and believed so readily:
- to explain the unexplainable
- conspiracy theories
- religion / cosmology / superstition
- under hypnosis
- mass hysteria
- dreams
- art and fiction
- false memory
- split brain experiments (As told by M. Gazzaniga: one half making up (false) explanations for the other's actions)
Story-Telling is part of (fundamental to?) the widespread, almost universal
- Hatred of the unexplained
- Antipathy for science (with its slowness, its unexplained parts, its complications, its denial of purpose / motive / point / plot / story, its amorality)
- Mania for religion and superstition and the supernatural
- Hatred of purposeless randomness (and hence, insistence on rationalizations, no matter how irrational, including gods)
Ways of explaining the world
Perhaps part of my lack of enthusiasm for most story-telling (novels, movies) is that Story-Telling, Religion, and Science are the three ways humanity has found to try to make sense of the world. And they compete. And I'm a scientist.
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